Weiße Frauen

Also Known As: singular Weiße Frau, “White Women”; regionally witte Jüffer in Low German, Dame blanche in French, White Lady in English
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Germanic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: They know a death in the household days or weeks before it happens, pass locked doors and posted sentries without being stopped, and hold the location of buried treasure they cannot dig up themselves.
Role in Mythos: The Weiße Frau is the resident ghost of a castle or noble house, appearing as a warning before deaths and disasters in the family and waiting, usually in vain, to be released from her own penance.
Relation to Humans: She is not hostile to the family she attends and is generally reckoned harmless so long as she is left alone, though her arrival terrifies everyone who understands what it means. People who insult her or try to seize her have been thrown down stairs and, in one account, throttled.

Every seven years the ghost in the Baden woods sneezes. Three times, precisely, and anyone standing near enough is meant to answer each sneeze with the old blessing, Gott helf. The first two answers she gets often enough. The third almost never comes, because everybody in that country knows the price of finishing it: the man who releases her will himself be dead within the year. So she sneezes into the silence, waits, and goes out with a long sigh, and the money she buried stays where she put it.

That is one Weiße Frau. There are hundreds. Nineteenth-century collectors found a white, grey or black woman attached to very nearly every castle in the German-speaking lands, and the costume stays remarkably steady across four centuries of reports. A white gown cut in the fashion of some earlier reign. A white widow’s cap, sometimes a veil instead. At the hip a ring of keys, which she does not use for anything and which is the closest thing she has to a voice. Around her hangs a thin mist or a dull unsourced light, and she is usually seen at noon or at midnight, on a stair, in a gallery, or coming up out of a vault.

The most famous of them belongs to the Hohenzollerns, and she starts at the Plassenburg above Kulmbach. Kunigunde, widowed countess of Orlamünde, wanted to marry Albrecht the Handsome, son of the burgrave of Nuremberg. Word came back to her that he would have her if four eyes were not in the way. He meant his parents, who disliked the match. She understood him to mean her two small children, a girl of two and a boy of three, and she went to their beds with a needle. Johann Löer, the parson of Melkendorf, put the scene into a rhymed chronicle in 1559 and did not soften it: she drove the needle through the skull, which is tender and soft all over. Albrecht broke with her. She walked to Rome, got absolution on condition that she found a house and enter it, and crawled on her knees from the Plassenburg down into the valley at Berneck, and died an abbess at Himmelkron.

None of it happened. The historical Kunigunde of Orlamünde died childless.

Julius von Minutoli, who in 1850 worked through every chronicle he could lay hands on, dated the ghost’s first appearance at the Plassenburg to 1486, and passed on a suspicion that the courtiers staged that first appearance themselves to frighten a margrave into shifting his household to Neustadt an der Aisch. A ghost is a useful thing for a household to own. Later Hohenzollerns did not find her useful at all. She was first seen in the Berlin palace on 1 January 1598, and the elector Johann Georg was dead eight days later; that time the court decided she was Anna Sydow, his father’s mistress, whom he had dispossessed and shut in the Juliusturm at Spandau against a sealed promise, and who died there in 1575. A newsletter of 1651 reported her showing herself very often in the palace, even in broad daylight, at the electoral burial place and on the altar, and noted that everyone was extremely frightened, the only heir having died at eighteen months and the electress not being pregnant again.

Not everyone was frightened. Konrad von Burgsdorff, a confidant of the Great Elector and a cold-blooded man, came down a small stair towards the garden one night after putting his master to bed and found her on the steps. Once the first shock passed he swore at her and asked whether she had not drunk enough princely blood yet. She took him by the collar and threw him down the stairs hard enough that his bones cracked. Under Friedrich Wilhelm I she was twice arrested: once a kitchen boy, who was flogged in her dress, and once a soldier.

Where she came from depends on who is asking. The common view is the plainest one: she is a penitent spirit, a woman with something on her conscience, kept walking by guilt and hoping for release. Where a family owns her, she is usually taken for an ancestress. Antiquarians from the seventeenth century onward hunted for the real woman behind her and kept producing candidates, among them Bertha of Rosenberg in Bohemia, whose historical person was gradually buried under older Perchta traditions, and a Hungarian princess, Kunigunde of Halych.

Jacob Grimm wanted her much older than any of that. Writing in 1835, he set the white women beside the Ljósálfar, the light elves of Norse tradition, and beside Holda, and beside Berhta, white by her very name. In his account they sit in the sun on a bank, comb out their hair, bathe in a brook, guard treasure, and beg passing mortals to break the spell on them, which never works. The enchantment itself he read as a figure for the ban Christianity laid on the older gods. It is an elegant argument and it belongs to Grimm rather than to the tradition. The castle ghost is not a survival of anything. Her oldest reports are fifteenth century, her great age was the seventeenth, and the appetite for wonders in the Counter-Reformation turned a house spectre into an attribute of rank, kept and displayed like a coat of arms or a descent legend.

Her powers are all of a piece with that. She knows what is coming to the house and gives the family a few days of warning; she passes a posted sentry without being challenged, because the sentry has no challenge that would work; she can be in a locked gallery and in a sealed vault; and she knows where the gold is. Her limits are the same shape. She is fixed to one house or one stretch of ground and cannot go elsewhere. She cannot release herself, and the release has to come from a living person who will pay for it. She has no interest in harming the family and turns violent only when someone lays hands on her or insults her outright. And she is trivially easy to counterfeit, which is why there was a boy in her dress under one Hohenzollern king, and why Theodor Fontane took the trouble to point out that the darkened portrait of her at Bayreuth, the one Napoleon supposedly saw her step out of on a bad night in May 1812, hung on a papered door with a staircase from the cellar behind it.

She is still working. In German and Swiss road legend since the 1980s a woman in white waits at the mouth of the Belchen tunnel or on the forest road through the Ebersberger Forst, accepts a lift, says something ominous or nothing at all, and is gone from the passenger seat before the next bend.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Weiße Frauen?

The Weiße Frauen, or White Women, are ghostly women in white who haunt castles and noble houses in German folklore. A single one, a Weiße Frau, is usually attached to one family and appears before deaths and disasters in it. The oldest reports date from the fifteenth century and the belief was at its strongest in the seventeenth.

What does a Weiße Frau look like?

She wears a white gown in an outdated style with a white widow’s cap or veil, and carries a ring of keys at her hip. A haze of mist or dull light surrounds her, so she is never seen with full solidity. When the news she brings is especially bad she is sometimes reported in black instead.

Why does the White Lady appear to the Hohenzollern family?

The Hohenzollern White Lady is said to warn the family of coming deaths, and she was recorded before the deaths of Johann Georg in 1598, Johann Sigismund in 1619, Friedrich I in 1713 and Friedrich III in 1888. Legend identifies her either as Kunigunde of Orlamünde, who supposedly murdered her two children at the Plassenburg, or as Anna Sydow, a dispossessed mistress who died imprisoned at Spandau in 1575. She is generally treated as an omen rather than a threat.

Is the story of Kunigunde of Orlamünde true?

No. The story says she killed her two young children with a needle after misunderstanding a suitor’s remark about “four eyes” standing in the way, then did penance and founded the convent at Himmelkron. The historical Countess Kunigunde of Orlamünde died childless, so the murder cannot have taken place, though chroniclers repeated the tale from the sixteenth century onward.

Are the Weiße Frauen ghosts or elves?

In the recorded legends they are ghosts, the restless dead of specific women. The connection to elves comes from Jacob Grimm, who in 1835 linked them to the Norse light elves, to Holda and to Berhta, and read their unbreakable enchantment as an image of Christianity’s ban on the old gods. That reading is Grimm’s interpretation rather than something the tradition itself says.