Terry Castle's Contagious Folly: An Adventure

Ghosts either exist or they don’t exist. In Terry Castle’s, “Contagious Folly: ‘An Adventure’ and Its Skeptics,” we are introduced to the minds of Charlotte A. Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who are the principal and vice-principal of St. Hugh's College, Oxford. In 1901, Moberly and Jourdain decided to meet up at Versailles. They did not think much about the palace, so they decided to take a stroll through the gardens to Petit Trianon. As the two women made their way through the property, they got lost and suddenly felt overwhelmed with a feeling of weariness and oppression as they went through what they believed to be a paranormal encounter when they came across the apparitions of Marie Antoinette at Petit Trianon, near Versailles. Everything and everyone seemed to be from the late 18th century. They had gone back in time, or had they?

After the paranormal

Castle reports that Iremonger coined the term “Adventure-manie” to describe how critics of An Adventure tended to become as wrapped up in research as Moberly and Jourdain had been. According to Castle, the most incriminating response on the book was Iremonger’s, The Ghosts of Versailles: Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain and Their Adventure. Joan Evans, Jourdain's literary executor and holder of the copyright to An Adventure, had known both Moberly and Jourdain since childhood and had been loyal to them since. In 1976, Evans included her input to the Trianon apparitions in an essay called "An End to An Adventure: Solving the Mystery of the Trianon" in Encounter to help in defending Moberly and Jourdain. According to Castle, Evans forbade any further editions to An Adventure. 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.