Cards/Ladies in White

The Lady in White is a ghost who is said to have haunted several castles of European noble families. The earliest accounts of the apparition date back to the fifteenth century, and the greatest popularity of belief in the spirit was in the seventeenth. Although similarities exist to other female ghosts of European folk belief -- for example, the Irish and Celtic banshee -- the Ladies in White are a phenomenon that emerged and was typical of the kind of highly noble early-modern culture. The miraculous belief in the age of the Counter-Reformation made the ghost a kind of status attribute, which, like coats of arms and lineage legends, could underline the importance of sex. Particularly well known is the White Lady of the Hohenzollern.
In general, unless challenged, it is not considered malicious or dangerous. Their appearance, however, often causes horror, as it announces family disasters, especially the deaths of members of the family. In such cases she sometimes appears dressed in black. The legends about Ladies in White are still spread today as folklore and processed in modern media. The most well-known German legend about the Ladies in White has its origin on the Plassenburg ob Kulmback and is linked with the family Hohenzollern. Lord Mayor Kunigunde, widow of Count Otto von Orlamünde, had fallen in love with Albrecht the Beautiful, son of the Nuremberg burgrave Friedrich IV. He let it spread that he would marry her, if not four eyes stood in the way. This meant his parents, who rejected such a connection. However, Kunigunde misunderstood the news and thought it referred to her two children, a girl of two and a boy of three. She stabbed the children with a needle and killed them.
In the rhymed monastic chronicle of Melkendorfer pastor Johann Löer from 1559, it sounds like this:
And think, the little ones I have will certainly be the eyes that rob me of my beloved!
And was the wife so bothered that she murdered her own children,
And pitifully deprived of her life,
That she thrust it with needles into her sting into her brain-sound,
The tender and soft everywhere.

 Albrecht then told of her. Kunigunde made a pilgrimage to Rome and obtained from the Pope the forgiveness of her sin, with the order to donate to a monastery and to enter there. To repent she slipped on her knees from the Plassenburg in the valley of Berneck and founded the monastery Himmelkron, where she died as abbess. In a local version of the legend from HImmelkron, the monastery already existed at the time of the murder and the two children were buried there. Kunigunde, slipping on her knees, saw the monastery on a hill between Trebgast and Himmelkron and died there of exhaustion.
Julius von Minutoli finds this story as told by the chroniclers Kaspar Brusch, Enoch Widmann, Martin Hofmann, Lazarus Carl von Wölkern and Gotthilf Friedemann Löber in substantial agreement. Nevertheless, the legend, at least as far as the Countess Kunigunde is concerned, can have no historical basis, since it has demonstrably died childless
[Cinnamon's Note: I have no idea what the last post-comma thingy means, or if the Countess is also Lord Mayor. I also literally just wrote Lord Maybe. Help.]
At any rate, the White Woman appeared at Plassenburg for the first time in order to report to the Hohenzollern coming deaths and other impending misfortune -- a questionable, but not usually violent, phenomenon. According to the legend, however, she is said to have behaved differently when the Margrave Georg Friedrich I, also a Hohenzollern, wanted to take possession of the Plassenburg after its destruction during the Second Margrave War and subsequent reconstruction. Then the White Lady let herself go so far as to rattle with chains, to run around, to frighten court ladies, and finally to strangle the Margrave's cook and Fourier, which caused the latter to leave the Plassenberg.
[Cinnamon's Second Note: Sounds like fun. Also, cook, fourier, or Margrave?]

 In the Berlin City Palace, she was first seen on January 1, 1598. There she is said to have appeared to Johann Georg, the electoral Prince Elector of Mark Brandenburg, eight days before his death. In this case, one saw in the ghost the spirit of Anna Sydow, the elector's father Joachim's mistress, who had died in 1575 in the July tower [Cinnamon's Note: Juliusturm. Also I basically rewrote this part.] of the citadel of Spandau. Johann Georg had dispossessed and imprisoned her, contrary to his documented promise to his father. In the Berlin City Palace, the white lady began appearing more often. In 1619, the was there before the death of Johann Sigismund. 1651 held the Frankfurt relations:
[Cinnamon's Note: I think this next part was put through Google Translate, which I can't blame Vila for, as I would've done the same myself. I've changed Spectrum to specter, but I'm leaving the rest alone.]
The White Woman (which is a specter or ghost, as one always sees before the death of someone from the Kurhaus Brandenburg and always announces a dead person from a thoughtful house), was often allowed to visit Berlin even on a bright day see on the altar and in other places of the castle again, which is why you there very scared and this the more because the only heir of the Elector electoral funeral, Prince William Henry, died 1½jährig a year ago, and the electoral wife was not pregnant again.

 It also aims at Neuhaus in Bohemia, Bentheim Castle, as "de witte Jüffer" in which Castle Rötteln, Cleveland, Coburg, Halle (Saale), Darmstadt, Tonndorf (Thuringia) Altenburg, Füchtorf in Castle Harkotten, Leuchtenberg, Castle Neuchâtel (Freyburg), Ludwigsburg, Castle Eberstadt (Buchen), Castle Krems, Trier, Böddeken near Paderborn on the Duburgarea of Flensburg, at Hackhausen and elsewhere. Around the Haapsalu Cathedral is the legend of the White Lady of Haapsalu. Thereafter, in the full moon nights in August, the image of a white woman on the inner walls of a particular chapel to be seen. The story is based on the following folk legend: During the reign of the Bishop of Osel-Wiek, every canon was a chaste and virtuous one, committed to life. Women were forbidden access to the bishop's castle on death penalty. Legend has it that a minister of the episcopal see was in love with an Estonian girl, whom he secretly smuggled into the bishop's castle. She disguised herself there as a choirboy and lived together for a long time with her lover. During a visit of the bishop, however, the true gender of the "boy" came to light.The canon had to starve to death in prison. The girl was immured alive in the walls of the chapel. She left the masons a piece of bread and a pitcher of water. For a while, the girl's cries for help were still audible, before they fell silent. But her soul found no peace, and so it's appeared for centuries, annually, at the middle window of the church chapel.

The music festival "White Lady's Time" (Valge Daami Aeg) is held every year in August during the full moon in the castle.

 The White Lady of Levoča is by far the most well-known tradition of white women in the Slovak saga. For the Old Town of Bratislava and the castle Bojnice legends about white women are handed down. Of castles in Switzerland hardly such phenomena are handed down, however in rural legends from the Urschweitz, z. [Cinnamon's Transcriber's Note: Huh?] From Uri and Lucerne as well as modern street ghosts like the white woman from the Belchentunnel and (according to the journal Swiss folklore) in the Toggenburger valley. In the UK, the equivalent of thw White Woman is the White Lady. Although it often appears in an aristocratic environment, quite often but also in a bourgeois context, especially in the border area of legend and urban legend. Some examples of these white ladies are:

White Lady of Castle Huntly at Dundee in Scotland, the spirit of a sacrifice of unbecoming love.

White Lady of Samlesbury Hall near Preston: Lady Dorothy Southworth, also a victim of unfortunate love, was murdered by her brother, along with her lover. In Darwen's cemetery in Lancashire, there is a tomb named a White Lady, which apparently became the focal point of a rape-infested, child-borne urban legend. In fact, it is the tomb of Martha Jane Bury (1850-1913), a women's rights campaigner, which has since been restored to honor her name.

In France, too, there are numerous castles and palaces with ominous, white-robed women's apparel, known in France as Lady Blanche. The local accounts of white, black, and gray women and Misses compiled by 19th-century saga collectors are almost unmanageable, and such a legend can be found in almost every significant castle. But also in the nineteenth century the legend was shaped many times, first in the works of popular literature. In the motif-related drama, the ancestor of Franz Grillparzer has the eponymous figure references to the White Woman on and in the Staufer drama Emperor Henry the Sixth of Christian Dietrich Grabbe appears the White Lady at the castle of Henry the Lion in Brunswick.

 Dorothea had a reputation for a wicked stepmother who, for the sake of her own children, did not shy away from poisoning the princes of her first marriage. But then, regretful, she ordered her mistress to remove an already-deposited poisoned fruit from the bed of the hereditary prince. But as she hurried down the halls wrapped in light white robes, the lady let herself be stopped by a cavalier, just long enough to deliver her to the hereditary prince. Therefore, she now was to catch up as Warnerin from the beyond, what she missed in this world. Why the poisoner Dorothea was not sentenced to this otherworldly punishment, the legend keeps silent. And in a fragmentary poem "Wangeline of Burgsdorf, or the White Woman," Fontane sums up the legend of the White Lady of the Hohenzollern once again in lyrical shortage: This is the legend: and wants to ensnare danger the Hohenzollern, Since alive an old curse, The white woman in the veil shows itself to warn. She comes three times, goes around three times, hesitant always and sadly, the guard no longer calls her Halt-Werda, you know, the guest does not scare a gun; - The shadow passes by. In the 1860 novel, The Woman in White (The Woman in Whit) by Wilkie Collins, the titular mysterious figure ultimately proves ghost. Even the appearance of a white-clad figure of the dead opera singer La Stilla on the bastion of the eponymous Carpathian Castle of Jules Verne does not turn out to be a real specter, but rather an application of (then) futuristic technique: a combination of playing a sound recording with the simultaneous projection of an image giving the impression of a ghostly appearance. In urban legend and modern sagas, the White Woman has undergone a transformation, especially in terms of her appearance, as she no longer appears in white clothes in urban legends. The term "White Woman" today links some accounts to the mysterious appearance and disappearance of a female -- but not immediately threatening -- figure. If a background is known or suspected, it is the area of bourgeois tragedy (infanticide, rape, other crimes, or traffic accidents). Typical in this context are today's legends of the "phantom hitchhiker:" an at first seemingly normal car-stopper is taken along, behaves conspicuously or inconspicuously, and disappears without a trace while driving. The most well-known example is the white woman from the Belchentunnel (in the southern Basel area) from the 1980s. In the popular press and on the internet, sometimes dubious ghost reports about white women appear. With appropriate films on YouTube, a post-processing by computer cannot be excluded. An example is rumors and videos about the urban legend of the White Woman in the Ebersberg Forest near Munich, which allegedly appears as a hitchhiker near the Hubertuskapelle.