Rastatt Residential Palace, southern staircase

EERY LEGENDSPALACE GHOSTS?

Baden-Württemberg is full of ghosts. The palaces and castles hide plenty of ghost stories. At Rastatt Palace, some even reach into the not-so-distant past.

Children at Rastatt Residential Palace

Looking for ghosts?

THE WOMAN IN WHITE

According to an old legend, a woman in a snow-white gown and diaphanous veil sometimes appears in Rastatt Palace at night, lit by a faint aura of light. The stony and grim gaze of her black eyes is said to haunt anyone who meets her. Her quiet appearance in rooms and hallways, in the chapel and the garden, heralds the impending death of a member of the royal family, or so the legend goes.

WOMEN IN WHITE AND GRAY

What's unusual about this story is that the White Lady didn't first appear in Rastatt, rather she is said to have roamed through Baden-Baden, the margraves' ancestral seat, and supposedly moved with them to the new residence in 1705. The story of the lady in gray, who haunts Hohenbaden Castle, is still told in Baden-Baden today. Legends of women in white exist in other regions as well, for example, on Turmberg hill in the Durlach district of Karlsruhe.

Aerial view of Old Hohenbaden Castle in Baden-Baden
The Gothic gate at Old Hohenbaden Castle in Baden-Baden

Old Hohenbaden Castle in Baden-Baden.

GHOST HUNTERS AT THE PALACE?

In November, 2011, the GhostHunters Agency explored the palace in search of the White Lady and other ghosts. They were hoping to find out more about palace visitors' unusual observations. Perhaps there was something that couldn't be explained... With night vision cameras, motion sensors and meters, the ghost hunters searched the residence for signs of the supernatural.

View of Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm's antechamber

Is the margrave's antechamber haunted?

A WOMAN'S VOICE?

Readings were analyzed for days. The result: According to GhostHunters, there were a few anomalies: a strange effect of the light in the ancestral hall, an activated motion sensor and some static in which a woman's voice is believed to faintly be screaming, "Get out!" Whether this was actually a ghost remains unclear. But something else spooky took place: While they were in the margrave's antechamber, two members of the team were supposedly touched by a hand!