In 1901, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain—both academics at St. Hugh’s College in Oxford—were spending a day at Versailles. As they searched for the Petit Trianon, they became lost. They began to feel strange, like something was oppressing their spirits. Two men in long green coats and three-cornered hats directed them across a bridge, where Moberly saw a woman in 18th-century clothing sitting on a stool, sketching.

 

Back in England, the women investigated the mystery. Neither of them knew anything about 18th-century France, so imagine their astonishment when they discovered a picture of Marie Antoinette and saw that it was she whomMoberly had seen sketching. The queen had been sitting outside the Petit Trianon at the very moment she’d learned a Parisian mob was marching toward Versailles.

 

The women were convinced they’d experienced a ghost trace of Marie Antoinette’s memories. Under the pseudonyms Miss Morison and Miss Lamont, they published an account of their experience called An Adventure, which became a best-seller. It wasn’t until 1950—by which time Jourdain and Moberly were both long dead—that an examination of their correspondence with the Society for Psychical Research proved that the women had added numerous details to their account only after they had done their research.