UNCOVERING THE STORY THAT INSPIRED THE ORIGINAL NOVEL OF THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE. TWO WOMEN, AN INSEPARABLE PAIR WHO BREAK BARRIERS IN THE ACADEMIC BASTION OF OXFORD, GRAPPLE WITH THE LONG AFTEREFFECTS OF A PARANORMAL EXPERIENCE THAT THEY INSIST SENT THEM BACK IN TIME.
NOVEMBER 1901
The two women huddled inside England’s academic bastion of Oxford University. They knew they’d waded into dangerous territory. They needed to find a way to prove what they witnessed when in France. The fact was their mysterious experience was something they could hardly explain to themselves. How would anyone else believe them?
The pressure they felt to find proof was balanced out by excitement.
Eleanor Jourdain, 37, and Annie Moberly, 54, supervised a division of Oxford set up to educate young women. Out the windows of their brick building, those pupils passed through the campus made up mostly of men; these young women had been underestimated and dismissed their entire lives. All of those slights could be changed if Eleanor and Annie could prove what they’d seen.
In addition to fending off the institutional naysayers, the duo were also subject to persistent rumors that their relationship went beyond that of colleagues. The magnetic pair indeed had an intense private bond nobody on the outside could understand.
Now, their credibility, their positions at Oxford, and the future of their relationship with each other all hinged on a seemingly incredible task: to prove they’d stepped through time, into the past.
THREE MONTHS EARLIER: FRANCE
It started with a mid-career change. Eleanor, a British scholar with a round face and willowy frame, was running a finishing school in Paris, frustrated to be teaching young women most concerned with social status. Eleanor was one of the first women to sit in the Final Honours School in Modern History at Oxford, and the first to take an oral exam at the university. But Eleanor had not been allowed to graduate with a degree. Now her sights were set on the post of vice principal at a women's division of Oxford University called St. Hugh’s. She found the chance to impress the principal of St. Hugh's, Annie, by inviting her to stay at her Paris flat in the summer of 1901.
Annie’s silvered hair with prominent widow’s peak above small, round, spectacles gave her a strong air of confidence. Colleagues often said that had Annie been a man, there was no position she would not have held.
The two women spent time getting acquainted and sussing out whether they might effectively work and live together in Oxford. That second Saturday in August was warm and humid in the bustling streets of Paris. It was the perfect day for a getaway to the open air of the countryside. Eleanor and her houseguest boarded the train for the gardens of Versailles, 12 miles from the city.
The palace and gardens of Versailles were home to the French monarchy up until the ill-fated reign of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the young queen infamous for her steely resolve, lavish tastes and rumored promiscuity. Historians considered Versailles the site where the end of the royal regime really began. During the French Revolution, the palace fell under the control of the new republic and much of the former royal couple’s finery was sold to finance the government.
Long ago repurposed as a tourist site, Versailles was now open to visitors nearly every day of the year, drawing countless sightseers. Guests were permitted to tour the gardens and estates unguided, but with nearly 2,000 acres of gardens alone most visitors preferred following a tour guide’s lead.
While that tour concentrated on the main palace, Annie and Eleanor were more interested in seeing Marie Antoinette’s personal estate, the Petit Trianon. The women hung back and made their way on their own into the gardens toward the Petit Trianon. Neither woman was particularly well-versed in Versailles’ history, but the appeal of Marie Antoinette, an unapologetically powerful woman in her era, was magnetic. For Annie and Eleanor, who were in their own ways disrupting the male citadel of academia, Antoinette’s legacy of tragic audacity was far more intriguing than the decor of the palace.
So they consulted their maps and set off on an excursion of their own. If the size of the gardens alone wasn’t daunting enough, the 400 sculptures and 1,400 fountains turned the grounds into a veritable labyrinth. When they lost their bearings, the maps’ various landmarks had become more confusing than helpful. Is this statue Artemis? Or Juno? Is that over there “Faun with Child,” or “Faun and the Deer”? As the pair wandered, both began to feel a bit uneasy.
Time seemed to slow. Apprehension built. Even standing out in the open, they had the sudden and distinct feeling of being trapped.
Annie watched a woman shaking clean some kind of table cloth or tapestry out the window of a nearby building. The woman did not seem to notice them. Before Annie could call to the woman to point them in the right direction, Eleanor turned down a small lane, so Annie followed. There they passed some peculiar farming equipment--a kind of cross between plow and wheelbarrow--and saw two men in long, gray-green coats and three-cornered hats. The visitors assumed these outdated uniforms were assigned to the groundskeepers. When Eleanor asked them for directions, they pointed down a nearby path.
As they walked, Eleanor noticed a woman and young girl standing outside a cottage to the right of the path. This pair, too, was dressed oddly: both had white kerchiefs tucked into the bodices of their dresses. Eleanor watched as the woman handed the girl a jug of water and then both seemed to pause, or more accurately freeze, like living statues. Eleanor and Annie were unnerved. They hurried on.
The two women next came upon a kiosk of some sort, shaded with trees, with a man sitting nearby. The instant she saw the man, Annie was hit with a cloud of dread so heavy the scenery around her changed. Light didn’t seem to behave like it should, there were no shadows; no wind moved the trees; everything looked static and unnatural, as if rendered two-dimensional. Running footsteps were heard getting closer--but no runners were seen. The atmosphere seemed to possess what Annie called a “deathly stillness.”
Eleanor felt it, too.
Things got worse when the man locked eyes with the women. There was something deeply disturbing about the expression on his scarred face; it was distinct and sinister in its aura. Before any of the three could speak, another man, red-faced and wearing buckled shoes, called to them--in oddly accented French, they thought--and told them to turn around and go another way.
Grateful even for brusque guidance at this point, Annie and Eleanor started in that direction. When Annie turned to thank the man, he had vanished. They followed the path across a “small rustic bridge” over a ravine. There a “thread-like cascade fell from a height, down a green bank, where ferns grew between stones,” but the rippling water did not seem to lead anywhere beyond that. Ahead was the Petit Trianon, the queen’s sanctuary. Annie glimpsed a woman sitting nearby on a stool, sketching. She, too, was dressed in peculiar fashion in a big, white summer hat and a dress with a small, triangular shawl tossed over her shoulders and covering her chest. She seemed to be studying the trees, then turned to face them. She had light hair. Annie locked eyes with her. Annie thought the woman pretty, but she also found something in her face that repelled her.
Annie’s sensation of gloom--of a “dreamy unnatural oppression”--returned, and she was thankful when a man dressed as a footman emerged from another nearby building, clanging the door behind him. He seemed perturbed at their presence, but then smiled and told the women that the main entrance was around the other side of the house.
Eleanor and Annie followed his instructions and found a French wedding party waiting to tour the rooms of the estate. The abnormal aura that had surrounded them up to that point dissipated; gravity seemed to be restored. The English women joined the group, toured the rooms, and spent the rest of the day in ordinary sight-seeing until they returned to Paris.
Over the next week, Annie and Eleanor fell into easy company with one another, free to walk the city and visit the famous cafes of Boulevard du Montparnasse. Annie extended an official offer for Eleanor to join her as vice principal of St. Hugh’s. With their relationship--professional and social--cemented, Annie could see no harm in asking Eleanor whether she, too, had felt that something had been not quite right during their visit to Versailles.
“Do you think,” Annie began, “the Petit Trianon is haunted?”
Eleanor replied immediately: “Oh, yes. Yes I do.”
It was a transportive, thrilling answer. Suddenly, neither one had to feel alone.
It may have ended there. But on a return stop at Versailles, one shock compounded another. Not only did no one there remember anyone who fit the descriptions of the people they saw during their walk, but many of the structures and landmarks they had observed on their excursion were nowhere to be found. They were filled with questions even as they had to rush back to England to kick off the new term.
Arriving in Oxford as the new leadership team for St. Hugh’s, the two new friends hardly had time to concentrate on sublime mysteries when the mundane demanded their energy. The halls of St. Hugh’s filled with hurried footsteps and excited chatter as the young women came to and from their classes.
Women were new features in English academia in the late 19th century, with their dispositions and capacity for intellectualism still considered highly suspect. When the very first series of lectures and classes had opened to women at Oxford years earlier, conventional wisdom did not recognize the need for women to be educated. Women’s ignorance, so the logic ran, would better motivate men to work. Highly educated women, meanwhile, were feared, in part because they may never need or want a husband.
Female scholars were sneered at for being too masculine and possibly “deviant,” gesturing at a perceived link between transgressing women’s natural intellectual boundaries and homoerotic love. And nothing threatened male dominance like the specter of unashamed lesbianism.
Oxford’s St. Hugh’s College was an advanced school for women without traditional means to pursue an education. Founded 15 years earlier by Elizabeth Wordsworth, great-niece of the famous English poet William Wordsworth, St. Hugh’s had originally offered higher learning to the daughters of clergymen, who possessed societal status but not wealth.
Wordsworth needed a prominent woman to helm her new venture, one who would be approved by pious Christian parents. Annie Moberly had fit the bill. Annie was the daughter of a bishop. In her youth, the dark-haired girl had to remain inconspicuous--all but invisible--in order to receive her own education, sitting in the back row of the schoolrooms her brothers attended.
Annie’s position at St. Hugh’s has been described as a “housekeeper-cum-chaperone of impeccable respectability for a handful of girls,” with the added duty of “definite religious instruction.” Her lively, animated, and precise Sunday evening religious discourses became a highlight of the weekend. Her new second-in-command, Eleanor, was direct and charming, even slightly aggressively so, while Annie was much more reserved. Some thought the pairing odd, wondering how women with such opposing personalities got along.
Their differences in temperament combined with the amount of time spent in each other’s company quickly spawned whispers amongst the students that Annie had come home with much more than a vice principal. That the spark for their partnership began in Paris spoke volumes. The fierce economic expansion around turn of the century France cemented Paris as the erotic, bohemian capital of the West. Tourism guides included descriptions of lesbian bars and cafes. In England, meanwhile, “romantic friendships” between women were merely tolerated, and only then as long as both parties continued to adhere to socially prescribed gender roles.
With this charged context, observers pointed to Annie and Eleanor being not simply colleagues but quite possibly in love.
Some described Eleanor and Annie as husband and wife, with Annie in the role of older and authoritative husband and Eleanor playing the happily subservient wife. The two women lived together not purely out of occupational convenience, and students at the time reported “a lot of kissing going on.” There was no question they were a power couple--sweeping through the halls of St. Hugh’s, Annie in her swirling black skirts and Eleanor in her high-collared white blouse. This was their domain.
Now Annie and Eleanor had to determine whether they had been through something together that was merely odd, or downright supernatural.
Both women could look back on still-unexplained experiences from their childhoods that shaped their perspectives on the mystical and unexplained. Annie recalled her mother’s stories of premonitions and accounts of “strange occurrences,” such as an angel saving one of her children from being trampled by a horse. Annie herself once had a clear vision of rose bushes and wisteria die that coincided with the respective deaths of the plant’s owners.
Eleanor’s family had taken note of what they called her “second sight” and peculiar abilities. As a child, she had a recurring dream about being in an ornate room in what seemed to be the distant past, and finding a lady in period dress playing a piano. Every time she dreamed this, the lady was playing the same song before being interrupted--again, every time--by a servant, who said something to her before she got up and left the room.
Since Eleanor heard the song so many times in her dreams, one day she went to the piano and began to play it. Her family thought it was beautiful but nobody knew what it was. Her mother took down the chords of the song. Only much later did they discover Eleanor had played “Les Barricades Mysterieuses” by the French composer Couperin, who had composed it in 1716. At the time in England when Eleanor recreated it, the song was obscure and young Eleanor had never been exposed to it.
Family members were amazed. Eleanor’s dreams, it seemed, had actually whisked her to another place and time.
The strange happenings at Versailles could have simply been another of Eleanor’s daydreams, except this time she was not alone in her experience: Annie had seen--and felt--the shifts and changes in the gardens and Petit Trianon as well. To be certain, the two women methodically re-examined their strange experience at Versailles, finding more questions than answers.
They compared what and whom they saw and heard, taking a kind of inventory of their encounters.
“And sketching lady,” Annie said, “just before that man came out and showed us the way.” The look on Eleanor’s face stopped her.
“What sketching lady?” Eleanor asked.
“What do you mean? The woman with the white hat…”
Eleanor paused before answering. “I never saw a woman with a white hat.”
“That’s impossible, you were standing next to me. We walked right past her.”
Both were stunned. But Eleanor had remembered a peculiar thought she had at the very time Annie would have seen the sketching woman. I remembered my impression at the moment, she later wrote, of there being more people than I could see.
“Let’s not talk anymore,” Eleanor said, ramping up their scholarly methodology. “Write down what you remember seeing, and I’ll do the same.”
Each compiled an account of her experience at Versailles. When they exchanged missives and compared notes, both fluttered with an anxious energy. The sketching lady wasn’t the only discrepancy. Not only had they both experienced a bizarre series of encounters and sights, they had each experienced a somewhat different series of them.
While both recalled the various male figures and a sense of overwhelming dread throughout their walk, Eleanor had not seen the “Sketching Lady” while Annie never glimpsed the woman and young girl with the jug of water outside a cottage or the odd-looking plow Eleanor described.
Their analysis may have stalled there if not for a French history lesson Eleanor taught the following day at St. Hugh’s.
On August 10, 1792, the castle at Tuileries in Paris was sacked--with the royal family held captive inside--by an armed and angry mob. Over 1,000 guards and noblemen were killed, and Louis XVI, 37, Marie Antoinette, 36, and their children fled on foot. (This was just over a year before the king and queen were convicted of high treason and beheaded in the public square in Paris.)
While teaching her lesson, Eleanor was struck by the date--August 10th--the same day she and Annie had gotten lost in Versailles in the shadow of the Petit Trianon. But Marie Antoinette’s flight was in Paris, she mused--not Versailles.
With the strange coincidence still turning in the back of her mind, Eleanor contacted a friend from Paris. Had she ever heard anything about the Petit Trianon being haunted?
“Yes,” her friend replied. “On a certain day in August people often see Marie Antoinette in a large hat and pink dress on the grounds, along with servants and courtiers.”
Eleanor held her breath.
That’s it, it has to be, she thought.
Eleanor raced back to Annie.
“I think I’ve found your Sketching Lady,” Eleanor said. “I think you saw Marie Antoinette.”
Why was Marie Antoinette haunting her Petit Trainon at Versailles on August 10th, when she’d fled for her life from the castle at Tuileries, in Paris, on that date? Annie and Eleanor began to form a hypothesis about what they had seen. Theirs was no mere ghost story, but rather something far more holistic and complex.
On August 10, 1792, an armed militia of thousands of French civilians seethed outside Tuileries Palace, each after the same thing: The heads of the king and queen on pikes. It would make perfect sense that, during her flight from the palace and the subsequent hours spent in hiding, Marie Antoinette thought back with vivid longing and piercing regret--If only I hadn’t...maybe I should have…-- back to happy moments spent at her beloved Petit Trianon. The intensity of her yearning to go back to that time, to once again be safe and free, Eleanor and Annie suspected, cast her mind back to relive that final day at Versailles. Now, each August 10th, Marie Antoinette’s spirit seemed to do just that. The women entertained the idea that they could have slipped into these memories of Versailles. A memory that existed inside Marie Antoinette’s mind, an Inception-like notion of occupying another person’s intellectual simulation of reality.
In its own way, it was a markedly modern theory--more 21st than 20th century--positing a matrix of multiple dimensions and alternate realities that contained portals between settings and time periods. The French Revolution, in a sense, was a kind of a pivotal point in history. It showcased a movement that contained both unspeakable violence and welcome political change, pain and progress. All of which radiated and resonated with Eleanor and Annie’s era, a world on the verge of the first world war.
Armed with these concrete--if admittedly extraordinary and fantastical--theories of loops in time and realities, the women could now apply their rigorous training to searching for evidence. Correspondence began with French historians, biographers, architects, and artists. Just as they had identified Antoinette as the Sketching Lady, they wanted to understand the other people and things they had seen. They made multiple research trips back to France. They cross-referenced each figure, building, style of dress, and accent they originally encountered with multiple sources and historical documents.
Examining the question of the peculiar plow Eleanor had seen, they learned from Versailles staff that no farm equipment meeting that description had been on the grounds any time in recent history. There was no need for one since the French government only required the flowers, lawns, walks and trees to be maintained. Frustrating their hopes of finding a historical reference point, the National Archives of 1878 also did not list a plow amongst the tools purchased by the gardening staff from 1780 to 1789.
Louis XVI, however, was said to have kept a plow from the reign of his predecessor on the grounds until it was sold with a majority of the king’s belongings after the Revolution. Moreover, images of this plow design matched perfectly with what Eleanor saw in 1901.
Another item on their inventory to identify were the men in long green coats and three-cornered hats seen by both Eleanor and Annie. Multiple times, the determined researchers inquired with Versailles authorities about the uniforms of staff members. They were told it was “impossible” that they had seen anyone in that sort of outfit unless they were intentionally dressed up to masquerade from Revolutionary times because the color green was royal livery. They also confirmed that there were no costume parties or other such gatherings of any kind on the grounds the day of their visit.
But Annie and Eleanor learned that during the 18th century the gate to the gardens of the Petit Trianon were watched over by a pair of guards, who would have worn royal livery, and that at times two brothers held that post.
Then there had been the cottage Eleanor had seen to the right side of their path, with a woman and young girl standing outside. The woman was handing something, perhaps a jug of water, to the girl. Both figures wore white caps and ankle-length skirts.
This cottage, however, did not exist on the Versailles grounds in the early twentieth century. As they continued to accumulate research, Eleanor came across a picture of what looked like the same cottage in the Album de Trianon at the French National Library.
During the same research trip, Annie and Eleanor located a map of the grounds from 1793 which showed a building to be precisely where Eleanor had insisted she saw the cottage in 1901.
On a return visit, the two women inspected the area meticulously and discovered marks that indicated a small house of some kind had once stood there. A photograph confirmed this to their satisfaction. Over time, the women also identified several possible structures from Versailles’ past that could have been the kiosk they had come across.
As for the man near that kiosk who was wearing a dark cloak and slouch hat with a face they described as scarred, the intelligence they gathered indicated no one like that was on the grounds the day of their visit. But they did find a story of a man from the history of the downfall of the queen who matched that description with eerie precision.
The Count of Vaudreuil, whose full name was Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, was a member of Marie Antoinette’s inner circle and suspected lover of one of her close friends. Born in what is now Haiti and stricken with smallpox in his youth, his complexion would match what Eleanor and Annie described as “dark and scarred.” The feelings of dread and fear they both felt during their encounter with him also matched with history.
Vaudreuil used his high favor with the queen to persuade her for a number of things. Most of the favors were small and for personal gain but others of a grander and potentially more sinister scale.
In the summer of 1783 he persuaded Marie Antoinette to allow a public performance of the play “The Marriage of Figaro” by Pierre Beaumarchais (later the basis of an opera by Amadeus Mozart) which was wildly controversial for its jabs at the monarchy and royal divination. Louis XVI ordered the play shut down, and many historians call “The Marriage of Figaro” the first act of the French Revolution.
The Bastille fell six years after its performance.
If, as Eleanor and Annie suspected, each August 10th the Petit Trianon and surrounding gardens opened a time warp to Marie Antoinette’s final day at Versailles before she and Louis were taken prisoner and held in Paris, the man whom the queen felt helped set the wheels in motion for her downfall would most certainly be nearby.
Through tireless study, Eleanor and Annie unveiled a fuller narrative. The process also evoked those earlier times in each woman’s life during which they believed they had undergone unexplained phenomena, when they seemed to be transported through dreams or visions into a past or future moment. The best documented of these--complete with witnesses--was young Eleanor’s dream of the piano-playing woman that led to her playing a song, Couperin’s “Les Barricades Mysterieuses,” she had no way to have learned.
The mysterious woman dreamed by young Eleanor--the woman playing the piano--may well have been Marie Antoinette herself. Antoinette, an adept harpsichord player, spent more and more time playing piano during her time as queen. And Francois Couperin, had been part of the royal family’s court, so his music would have been familiar to her. (The association between Antoinette and “Les Barricades Mysterieuses” would be bolstered when the song was included in the 2006 Sofia Coppola biopic Marie Antoinette.)
Marie Antoinette may well have had another connection to Eleanor and Annie. She was said to have had a lesbian love affair of her own.
Biographers have long struggled with the particulars of Marie Antoinette’s sexuality. The lack of sexual relations between her and the king was well documented. It reportedly took the couple seven years to consummate their relationship, a detail to which the entire country was privy. Speculation about Marie Antoinette’s role in their lack of coupling was nearly as widespread: Cartoons and pamphlets with stories and images of the queen playing with sex toys and going to bed with other young women circulated throughout the major cities.
With so much gossip directed at her, the queen retreated from the public eye and socialized more with her ladies-in-waiting. There were rumors of a relationship with Princesse de Lambelle, a young widow, because the queen promoted her to superintendent of the house. Also Marie Antoinette and Princesse de Lambelle exchanged letters that were addressed “my dear heart.” When Marie Antoinette was imprisoned at Tuileries, she sent the princess a ring set engraved “bleached by sorrow” with a lock of her white hair.
It wasn’t unusual for women in the court to have relationships with one another, largely because the concept of a gay woman had yet to be fully realized: Sexual relationships between women were viewed as “passionate friendships,” regardless of the level of intimacy, because it was thought impossible for women to have ‘real sex’ with one another.
Marie Antoinette’s interest in women made her one of the first modern lesbian icons: Her name and image were so coded into discussions of same sex love in the 18th and 19th centuries that lesbians could safely reveal themselves to one another by asking: “Have you heard the rumors about Marie Antoinette?”
As for Antoinette’s alleged lover, Princess de Lambelle was taken before a tribunal and ordered to renounce the queen. She refused, saying “it is not in my heart.” As a result, the princess was killed.
As they recreated the stories of the past that they believed they had crossed through, Eleanor and Annie’s own relationship was about to be strained to the breaking point.
By the time the women began to share their story, Nora Sidgwick had served a stretch as president of the Society for Psychic Research, the first woman in that position, as well as continuing her role as principal for Newnham College. For the SPR, in which she remained a council member after her presidency, she was aided in many of her tasks by her eager secretary, Alice Johnson, 51, an accomplished biologist. If Nora’s late husband and two-time SPR president Henry had balanced skepticism with belief, Nora could be said to slant heavily toward the side of skepticism. Another female writer who had what she considered evidence of an unexplained phenomenon, approached Nora and Alice and came out of her meeting deflated. “These two white-headed old weevils would bore a hole in anything.”
Still, the Oxford pair had reason to consider Nora their ideal audience. Nora had helped compile a book called Phantasms of the Living, considered to be the first scientific undertaking of apparitions, hauntings and visions. Analyzing more than 700 reported experiences of telepathy, clairvoyance and hauntings, many of these were classified as “crisis apparitions”: Visions of people who were, it was later determined, dying or in life-threatening situations somewhere else at the time.
Nora’s research gave weight and shape to what many still today consider a basic tenet of hauntings and ghostly appearances. Figures haunt a place of emotional or physical significance, often a place they enjoyed being while alive or, more often, the place their lives ended. According to the Phantasms, ghosts are seen in those places on the same day or anniversary of the death. It could fit quite nicely with Eleanor and Annie’s understanding of their own experience.
But Nora was always suspicious, and perhaps even more wary of two women who were such mirror images of her, holding similar positions at Oxford as her post at Cambridge. Eleanor and Annie were also rather open about their independence from men, highlighted by the fact that neither ever married. Nora was known to be hard on other women, especially those who took radical positions, at one point lambasting some fellow suffragists for their methods. And motives were easy to question for anyone coming forward with claims of unexplained experiences--even though in Eleanor and Annie’s case, they were using pseudonyms in publishing reports of their experience, forgoing potential for fame.
Eleanor and Annie sat down with Nora and her colleague Alice multiple times, coming away with the impression that the SPR supported their accounts and viewed them as convincing. With Nora’s vast family wealth and her position of influence at the Society and at Cambridge, she could readily marshal allies and resources.
Eleanor and Annie even lent some of their private papers to Nora and her team.
Then Nora tore into the two women’s accounts in a published article in the Society’s journal. She did not just question their conclusions--an area expected to provoke debate--but essentially accused them of making up details. She also scoffed at their ability to understand what they saw, pointing to their attempts to locate nonexistent landmarks of Versailles they claimed to observe, such as the rustic bridge, in 18th century records.
Nora snidely remarked that “the ladies… at best do not seem to be very good at topography.” The potential ally had become their most formidable adversary.
The feeling of being betrayed by the Society shook Eleanor and Annie, and it added to the stress of their day-to-day supervision of the busy St. Hugh’s. Vivacious Eleanor could be volatile, and after the SPR’s review was even more likely to be so. Annie, for her part, was capable of treating Eleanor harshly when under pressure. Their relationship was tested. At times, observers at school noticed, Annie “gave [Eleanor] hell” and Eleanor gave it right back.
The mental and emotional exhaustion took a toll. Annie stepped down from her post, clearing the way for Eleanor to be principal. Whatever personal ups and downs, the two women continued to share on-campus quarters, with Annie a stone’s throw away for advice and guidance on running St. Hugh’s.
Students at the time found St. Hugh’s a “happy mean between the carefully-guarded gentility” of finishing schools and the more rigorous training of places such as Nora Sidgwick’s Newnham College in Cambridge. They called Eleanor “Princ,” short for principal. That new principal firmed up the hall’s routines and boarding house atmosphere. Not unlike Marie Antoinette herself, Eleanor made the school her own kingdom.
Although Eleanor and Annie had tried to remain anonymous when it came to their supernatural experience, increasingly, as time passed, there were those who found out about their stories, and in turn learned about Nora’s takedown. Without Annie always at her side at the school, Eleanor was put further on edge and on the defensive. Eleanor doubled down on the validity of their experience and, more broadly, her own psychic “gifts.” Students became familiar with Eleanor’s supposed clairvoyance, and some claimed to witness it. Eleanor was terrified of cats. If one was anywhere near the St. Hugh’s campus, Eleanor seemed to sense it, much to the bafflement of the students. There were times Eleanor was instantly aware of details of conversations and events in college meetings where she was not present.
As much as they had felt they had walked into some kind of haunting at Versailles, they were equally haunted by the aftershocks, the strain on them and on their relationship from gawkers and naysayers, the relentless pressure to process and explain their own experiences.
Annie warily observed that “strange and unaccountable things” were continuing to happen to the two of them. According to them, the ability to access a portal or rift in time seemed to have followed them out of France. At one point, Eleanor was standing in a hotel in Italy when the scene seemed to melt away and was replaced with a darkly lit vision of robed figures--later they discovered the hotel used to be a monastery. Back at Oxford, crossing through the ancient campus, Eleanor suddenly witnessed a procession of medieval-style-clothed people walking along the road in front of St. Hugh’s. A nun walked the grounds--grounds that used to include a nunnery. Then, a chilling vision of a man hanged from the gallows behind one of the college’s main halls, with a crowd of aggressive people watching. “She was so stunned that she could not move at first,” recounted a contemporary to whom Eleanor told the story, “but finally managed to push through the crowd and fled back to College. She said she had still not recovered from the shock and could not forget the ghastly sight.”
When Eleanor sighted that face of death, it would have been hard not to recall the ominous stare of the Count of Vaudreuil at Versailles, the man who filled Eleanor and Annie with dread and helped facilitate Antoinette’s downfall. The count had fled Versailles on horseback when the Revolution began, and the Oxford women’s ominous encounter with him had always seemed to signal some potential danger looming--perhaps, so it increasingly seemed, in their own lives.
Most of the students supported Eleanor’s “strange powers.” But then Eleanor refused to acknowledge the winner of an election for class president, insisting that the young woman had a “red aura” surrounding her and could have a malicious effect on the students. The vague danger Eleanor felt, however, may well have been about the principal’s own future. Soon after this, rumors flowed throughout St. Hugh’s that Eleanor was spying on her students, listening at doors at night and reading the girls’ mail. Paranoia set in on all sides.
It was as though Eleanor was losing control over her behavior, unmoored by her own power or--as believers would argue--by some external spirit. Eleanor fired one of the college’s tutors, Cecilia Ady, a distinguished historian, for murky personal reasons, citing Ady’s capacity for “disloyalty.” Then Edith Wardale, a lecturer, quit her post at St. Hugh’s in protest for Ady’s dismissal, after which half the members of the college council also resigned. Students from St. Hugh’s were boycotted by other local women’s institutions from pursuing jobs and degrees.
In the time since St. Hugh’s leadership duo had felt Nora Sidgwick’s metaphorical stab in the back, Eleanor’s obsession with loyalty could be seen in her letters to the college council and to Annie at the time. They run through with phrases including concerted attacks, vicious hostility, defection and, injecting a supernatural motif, moved by a relentless spirit of evil. To Eleanor, a malicious presence had slipped into St. Hugh’s. A coup against her had seemingly begun.
Oxford’s chancellor launched an investigation into the staff upheaval of St. Hugh’s before ordering Eleanor to resign. Less than a week after the chancellor’s announcement, on April 6th, 1924, Eleanor died of a heart attack. No doubt the stress of St. Hugh’s internal scandals were overwhelming, as was the prospect of losing everything that had started with that summer in France shared by two women who were then still strangers.
Annie was left to mourn the untimely death of Eleanor, her personal and professional partner. She likened Eleanor’s sudden heart failure while harangued by enemies to the death of persecuted maidens in classical Greek tragedy.
Over the years, Nora, from her perch at Cambridge University, seemed to open her mind toward supernatural claims. “She herself,” Nora’s brother assured the SPR, “is a firm believer both in the survival and in the reality of communication between the living and the dead.” Perhaps the softer stance came because of alleged communication with a particular ghost supposedly haunting Cambridge University who purportedly shared details few others would have known--that of Nora’s late husband, Henry Sidgwick.
The account Eleanor and Annie wrote and published of their French experience, An Adventure, captivated many in their own circles and beyond. While crafting her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson read An Adventure, and deemed it “one of the greatest ghost stories of all time.” In addition to influencing its overall conception, a few specific if fleeting moments in Jackson’s iconic novel appear to be inspired by the Oxford women’s encounters, as does the name of one of the main characters, Eleanor. The story’s influence on Jackson in turn means it indirectly influenced horror literature for generations. The real women’s story, however, remains completely their own and unique in the annals of supernatural tales: A quintessentially modern account of multilayered reality centered around the bond of two brilliant women who were simultaneously public and intensely private, bearing the burden that came with both roles.
From those who have closely studied Eleanor and Annie’s experience and research in France, a range of theories have accumulated, including that the pair had suffered a mutual hallucination intensified by feelings of isolation due to their sexual orientations. Critics have accused the two women of being obsessed with their Versailles experience, while the critics themselves have proven obsession cuts both ways, exhausting themselves in order to refute every detail.
Other materials surfaced that buoy true believers. The year after Nora tried to disprove Eleanor and Annie’s claims, an interesting artifact emerged in an unexpected place. An original map of the Petit Trianon gardens of Versailles was found hidden inside an old chimney and signed by Marie Antoinette’s architect Richard Mique. The newly discovered map showed the rustic bridge that Eleanor and Annie had seen, just where they had reported it, one of the details specifically mocked by Sidgwick. There was no apparent way for Eleanor and Annie to have known about it.
Perhaps what haunted Eleanor and Annie the most, and motivated them to publish their experience despite the risks that came with the possible exposure of their identities, was the feeling that ultimately they depended on the future to understand what they went through. Eleanor and Annie believed they had come to understand the past in a new light, and could hope that open minds and hearts could do the same for their own mysteries. In An Adventure the women wrote: “we record these things in order that they may be considered whenever the time shall come when a true explanation of our story may become possible.”
HALEY HAMILTON is an award-winning columnist and writer based in Boston. You can read more of her writing in Catapult Magazine, EATER, MELMagazine, Greatist, Bustle, the Boston Globe and Boston’s alt-weekly, DigBoston.