Moberly–Jourdain incident
Their book describes a visit they made to the Petit Trianon, a small château in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, where they claimed to have seen the gardens as they had been in the late eighteenth century, as well as ghosts, including Marie Antoinette and others.
[6] They recollected travelling with a Baedeker guidebook, but said they became lost after missing the turn for the main avenue, Allée des Deux Trianons, and entered a lane, where they bypassed their destination.
[13] Jourdain recalled that she noticed a cottage with a woman holding out a jug to a girl in the doorway,[11] describing it as a "tableau vivant", a living picture, much like Madame Tussauds waxworks.
"[14] They reported reaching the edge of a wood, close to the Temple de l'Amour, and coming across a man seated beside a garden kiosk, wearing a cloak and large shady hat.
They thought they might have seen events that took place on 10 August 1792, only six weeks before the abolition of the French monarchy, when the Tuileries palace in Paris was besieged and the king's Swiss guards were massacred.
[20] Through their research, they thought they recognised the man they reportedly saw by the kiosk as the Comte de Vaudreuil, a friend of Marie Antoinette, who herself Moberly had claimed to see.
A review of the book by Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research suggested that the women had misinterpreted normal events that they had experienced.
[24] In one of them, Moberly claimed to have seen in the Louvre in 1914 an apparition of the Roman emperor Constantine, a man of unusual height wearing a gold crown and a toga; he was not observed by anybody else.
[25] During the First World War, Jourdain, the dominant personality of the pair who had succeeded as Principal of St. Hugh's, became convinced that a German spy was hiding in the college.
[32] In a review of the history of the Moberly-Jourdain adventure and the extensive public reaction to it, Terry Castle noted with skepticism the claim that a shared delusion may have arisen out of a lesbian folie à deux between the two women.
[33] Castle concludes that, when all proposed explanations have been considered, a core of mystery remains as much in relation to the psychological dynamics of the pair as to any aspects of the paranormal associated with their story.
Coleman concluded that the more widely available texts, as published in the 1911 and later editions, had been considerably aggrandized well after the events described and after the ladies had begun their investigations, while the original accounts had little or nothing to suggest a supernatural experience.
He also questioned the rigour and reliability of the ladies' subsequent research, pointing out that few, if any, of their informants are named and that most of their literary and historical references were taken from unreliable sources.
"It was only after much discussion, note-sharing, and historical research that Moberly and Jourdain came up with the time period as 1789 and assigned identities to a few of the characters they saw, including Marie Antoinette herself as the lady sketching on the lawn."
As Moberly and Jourdain admitted they had been lost on the vast grounds of Versailles, Dunning notes that their descriptions of footbridges and kiosks could fit any number of existing structures.
However, after the work came out of copyright, it was republished in 1988 as The Ghosts of Trianon: The Complete 'An Adventure' by Thoth Publication and again in 2008 by CreateSpace, both times crediting Moberly and Jourdain as the authors.
