White Lady

Also Known As: German Weiße Frau; Czech Bílá paní
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: European Mythology, Germanic Mythology, Slavic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: She walks the residences of one noble house in silence and shows herself before the births, marriages and above all the deaths of its members.
Role in Mythos: She is the ancestral house-ghost of the Hohenzollern and Rožmberk castles, identified in turn with several real noblewomen of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Relation to Humans: She appears to the family she belongs to and to the servants who keep its rooms, and her visit is read as an announcement rather than a threat. She watches over the children of the house, but servants who shirk and men who mock her have been struck, stoned or thrown down the stairs.

The keys come first. A dry iron chatter somewhere along a stone corridor, moving at the pace of a woman who is in no hurry, and then the pale shape at the far end of the passage: a lady in white, a veil falling back from her head, a bunch of keys hanging at her side. She does not speak. If she has come about a death, the gloves on her hands are black.

The Germans call her the Weiße Frau, the Czechs the Bílá paní, and by the 1880s the Meyers Konversations-Lexikon could list the castles she walked: Berlin, Bayreuth, Ansbach, Kleve, Darmstadt, Altenburg and Neuhaus in Bohemia, and further afield London, Copenhagen and Stockholm. The encyclopedia called her the ancestress of a noble house, dressed in white with her lower face bound, appearing at night or even at noon to announce the joys and sorrows of the ruling family, and most of all its deaths. She is less a single ghost than a post in the household, and several dead women have been appointed to it.

The Hohenzollerns had her longest. She is placed at the Plassenburg above Kulmbach around 1486, and she followed the family north to Berlin. Wilhelm Schwartz, who collected the legends of the Mark Brandenburg in 1871, describes her crossing the palace corridors at night with slow, solemn steps, in a long white gown and headdress, the widow’s veil thrown back. Greet her and she nods. She never answers. On the night before a court festivity the doors of the state rooms open and close and the locks rattle, and in the morning everything stands ready though no servant has touched it. She keeps watch over the royal children in their cradles. Idle servants and blasphemers get blows and flung stones.

Her record at court reads like a mortality table. Schwartz has her appearing eight days before the Elector Johann Georg died in 1598, and in 1667 Louise Henriette, wife of the Great Elector, saw her seated at a writing desk; the electress died that same year. The Gartenlaube, retelling the family ghost for its readers in 1856, adds a sighting beside the young margrave Erdmann Philipp in 1678. A master of the horse named Burgsdorf, who thought her a joke and said so, was thrown down a staircase for it. The Hohenzollerns kept her the way other families keep a portrait, and with rather less say over when she came out.

Who she had been in life was argued over for centuries. The oldest answer is Kunigunde, widowed countess of Orlamünde, who fell in love with Albrecht the Fair, son of the burgrave of Nuremberg. He told her that four eyes stood between them. He meant his parents, who would not have the match. She took him to mean her two small children, and killed them; a chronicle of 1559 has her driving needles into their soft skulls. In penance, the legend says, she founded the convent at Himmelkron, and the Gartenlaube reported that the bones of two children had been found under an Orlamünde gravestone there. The historical countess, according to the record, died childless. The storytellers were not persuaded, and the names in their versions slide between Kunigunde, Agnes, Beatrix and Bertha.

Schwartz gives two rivals. One is Anna Sydow, the favourite of the Elector Joachim II, whom his successor locked up in Spandau. The other is a Hohenzollern princess married into the Rosenberg family of Bohemia, and that thread runs south to the ghost with the best paperwork of all.

Perchta of Rožmberk was born around 1429 into the greatest house in southern Bohemia, and in 1449 her father, Oldřich II, married her to Jan of Liechtenstein, a rich Moravian lord. Twenty-five of her letters, written between 1450 and 1470, are kept in the State Regional Archive in Třeboň. They are addressed home and they are desperate: a bleak place in her husband’s family, poor treatment, and at one point a fear that someone meant to poison her. Jan died in 1473. The tradition says that on his deathbed he asked her to forgive him, and that she refused, and that he cursed her with his last strength. She outlived him by three years and died in Vienna in 1476.

Nearly two centuries later the Jesuit historian Bohuslav Balbín read those letters in the Třeboň archive and decided that the unhappy Perchta was the White Lady of the Rožmberk castles. It suited her. From then on the woman in white at Český Krumlov, Rožmberk, Třeboň and Jindřichův Hradec had a name and a grievance. In the Bohemian telling the gloves carry the message: white gloves for good news in the family, black for a death.

Jindřichův Hradec, the German Neuhaus, complicates the story in a smell of honey. The Gartenlaube credits Perchta with building the castle there as a guardian of the family’s heirs, feasting the workmen when the walls were done, and endowing a yearly meal for the poor, the sweet porridge. Czech historians answer that Perchta had nothing to do with Hradec. The likelier original is Markéta of Hardeg, widow of Jindřich II of Hradec, who died in 1363. She entered the Poor Clares at Český Krumlov, came back to visit her descendants in the white habit of the order, and began handing out sweet porridge to the poor on Maundy Thursday, which is why the town called her the White Lady. The porridge was wheat groats with honey and poppy oil, the crowds ran to thousands by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the custom lasted until Joseph II abolished it in 1783.

Behind all of them Jacob Grimm, writing his Deutsche Mythologie in 1835, heard something older. He tied the white women of German belief to Holda, to Berhta, white by her very name, and to the bright light elves. That was his argument, not an inherited belief, and it should be read as one. It does leave an odd coincidence standing in a Bohemian corridor, where the ghost’s best-known name is Perchta.

What she can do follows from what she is. She knows a death before it arrives. She passes through locked rooms, opens and shuts doors and sets a palace in order overnight. She guards the children of her house and punishes the people who serve it badly or laugh at her.

What she cannot do is just as fixed. She cannot speak, so everything goes through a nod, a pair of gloves and the timing of a visit. She cannot leave the family she is bound to. And she cannot stop the death she has come to announce, which is the one thing everyone who saw her would have asked of her.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the White Lady?

The White Lady (Weiße Frau in German, Bílá paní in Czech) is the house-ghost of several European noble families, a woman in white who appears in their castles before deaths and other family events. She is best known from the Hohenzollern palaces at Berlin, Bayreuth and the Plassenburg and from the Rožmberk castles of southern Bohemia.

What do the White Lady’s gloves mean?

The White Lady wears black gloves when she comes to announce a death. In the Bohemian telling she wears white gloves when the news for the family is good.

Who was the White Lady in life?

Several real women have been named. The German tradition favours Kunigunde of Orlamünde, a widowed countess said to have killed her two children, and also names Anna Sydow and a Hohenzollern princess married into the Rosenbergs. In Bohemia the Jesuit historian Bohuslav Balbín identified her with Perchta of Rožmberk, whose unhappy letters survive at Třeboň, while the White Lady of Jindřichův Hradec is also traced to Markéta of Hardeg.

Is the White Lady dangerous?

The White Lady mostly announces rather than harms, and she watches over the children of the family she belongs to. In the Brandenburg legends she does strike lazy servants and blasphemers, and she threw a mocking master of the horse named Burgsdorf down a staircase.

What is the White Lady’s sweet porridge?

The sweet porridge was a yearly meal of wheat groats, honey and poppy oil given to the poor at Jindřichův Hradec on Maundy Thursday. The White Lady is credited with founding it, either as Perchta of Rožmberk or, more likely, as Markéta of Hardeg. The custom lasted until Emperor Joseph II abolished it in 1783.