It's the witching month. Let's have some spooky historical fun.

I imagine a lot of people were frightened of Napoleon Bonaparte, even decades after his death. The man was a force to be reckoned with. But did you realise that Napoleon himself believed in ghosts? That's what his biographers said.

Sometimes, in a small circle, he [Napoleon] would amuse himself by relating stories of presentiments and apparitions. For this he always chose the twilight of evening, and he would prepare his hearers for what was coming by some solemn remark. On one occasion of this kind he said, in a very grave tone of voice, "When death strikes a person whom we love, and who is distant from us, a foreboding almost always denotes the event, and the dying person appears to us at the moment of his dissolution." He then immediately related the following anecdote: "A gentleman of the Court of Louis XIV. was in the gallery of Versailles at the time that the King was reading to his courtiers the bulletin of the battle of Friedlingen gained by Villars. Suddenly the gentleman saw, at the farther end of the gallery, the ghost of his son, who served under Villars. He exclaimed, 'My son is no more!' and next moment the King named him among the dead."
Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, by Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, 1891.

Was the great dictator just saying that to entertain his audience? We think not, since he admitted to Josephine that he believed in ghosts:

Moustache brings me your letter of 31st December. I see from it, dear, that you are sad and have very gloomy disquietudes. Austria will not make war on me; if she does, I have 150,000 men in Germany and as many on the Rhine, and 400,000 Germans to reply to her. Russia will not separate herself from me. They are foolish in Paris; all goes well.


I shall be at Paris the moment I think it worth while. I advise you to beware of ghosts; one fine day, at two o'clock in the morning.


But adieu, dear; I am well, and am yours ever,


Napoleon.

January 9, 1809.
Napoleon's Letters to Josephine, 1901.

I guess the ghosts appreciated Napoleon, too, since he appeared as one himself. Well, possibly. Well…almost. The Black Watch Castle and Museum has a fascinating Napoleon ghost story preserved in a letter in their archives, which they shared in their blog. Here goes:

It seems that when Napoleon died, an honour guard made up of French and British military had to escort the emperor's body down more than 300 stone steps to the harbour on the island of St Helena. The French were no doubt sad, and the British relieved, especially since they wouldn't be stuck on St Helena doing guard duty any longer. The ceremony was conducted in silence, and was all very solemn.

What didn't get into the official report was what happened before that – when the Highland regiment thought they heard something moving around in the shed where the emperor's coffin lay. This was about four o'clock in the morning, and the Highlanders got spooked. What happened next was described in a letter by their commanding officer's son:

The noise stopped soon so they held a consultation and made up their minds that it was Bonaparte trying to break out of the coffin. Father asked if any of them could speak French. One of them spoke up and said he could speak some curse words. Dad said that was fine that all he would have to do would be to go in there and mix his bad French with the bad Gallic and English and Bonaparte would think he was talking Russian, for Bonaparte would be scared stiff if he thought you were Russian… But just then the goat that had jumped from the ledge on the tin roof of the shed lost its footing, slid down and landed on the back of the highlander who was going to talk French and knocked him down flat.

We can imagine the French emperor's ghost, laughing.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

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