After her public death in the tower of the Munich Frauenkirche, many have claimed to have seen the ghost of Fanny appearing at her death anniversary wearing white.
The Frauenkirche officially the Cathedral of Our Lady, also known as Munich Cathedral is a late Gothic church building in Munich’s Old Town and is one of the landmarks of the Bavarian capital , Munich. It is also said to be full of fantastical legends and ghosts.
Read More: Check out all ghostly legends from Germany
One of these is the story about Fanny, said to appear on her death anniversary, on Valentines day, after she threw herself from one of the tower because of a broken heart.
The Life and Tragedy of Fanny
Maria Franzisca was born in Ingolstadt, but after her father’s early death, she moved with her mother to Munich, where her mother remarried. Fanny received an excellent education from her mother and showed remarkable talents even as a young girl. She wrote poetry, sang, played the piano, and composed music. The girl had a particular affinity for dramatic subjects. It is said that she had already written a plan for a tragedy at the age of nine, which was published posthumously.
Contemporaries reported that she could laugh and cry in the same minute. She often mentioned that she would die an unusual death.
During a stay in Ingolstadt, Fanny met the young officer Franz von Vincenti at a ball. They fell passionately in love, and Franz requested a transfer to the Leibregiment (Life Regiment) in Munich. However, his mother, Maria Franzisca von Heppenstein, had higher ambitions for Fanny and opposed the couple’s marriage. When the rumors grew increasingly intense, Franzisca finally declared that marriage was out of the question. Tumultuous scenes ensued in the house, which in turn became the subject of whispers throughout the town.
Because of the preceding events, Fanny’s mother planned to remove her daughter from Munich for the time being. On January 14, 1785, at around 2 p.m., Fanny, accompanied by her maid, climbed the north tower of the Frauenkirche (Cathedral of Our Lady), as arranged with the tower keeper the previous day.
She had the keeper open a grille for a better view and then jumped from it. She crashed headfirst through the roof of the benefice house and died on impact.
For weeks, this event shocked the city, yet not a single newspaper reported on it. The tower keeper and the chambermaid confirmed the suicide: Fanny had jumped from the tower room with a farewell. Nevertheless, the bishop, as well as the police and the electoral authorities, concluded it was a tragic accident. For years it was a debate. Was she severely depressed? Could the Goethes novel on her bedside chamber of unrequited love be to blame? Some have even hinted that her mother ended up falling for the same man. Today, there is no definite answer to the tragedy.
The Haunting of Fanny in the Tower
Some of the young woman’s surviving works were printed after her death in 1785/1786 in the Palatinate-Bavarian Museum, along with letters from her mother, as part of a defense by the editor against the widely held view that Fanny von Klein had committed suicide and that her mother was to blame. Ickstatt’s sudden and highly visible suicide shocked the public and led to a short-lived media sensation.
Now, she is mostly remembered in local lore as the lady in white that haunts the tower of the Frauenkirche. People say you can spot her in the windows, every Valentines day, the day she ended her life. But if we are to believe local legends, it is far from the only supernatural thing that is haunting the church.
The Devil’s Footprint in Frauenkirche
Another story from the Frauenkirche is about the strange footprint inside of the cathedral. The cathedral’s master builder had promised him a church without windows when he made a pact with him to build it. But when the devil inspected the work and stood where the imprint was, he saw not a single ray of light. He laughed and stamped his foot in glee until he took another step – and suddenly discovered windows hidden behind the pillars. Enraged by the master builder’s deception, he unleashed a storm to destroy the building. The storm subsided, but the devil’s wrath remains – even today, a cold wind always blows around the cathedral.
Read the whole story: The Devil’s Footprint in Frauenkirche in Munich
Also, at the “Frauenfreihof,” as the cemetery by the cathedral was still called at the beginning of the 19th century, a ghost was said to haunt, wearing a white nightcap.
The Tragedy of the Church
So what of the tragic tale of Fanny and her following ghost story, now largely forgotten? News of Ickstatt’s started a debate about the cultural anxiety of how printed descriptions of suicide might glamorize the act and contribute to a suicide epidemic, leading us back to the German author Goethe. At the beginning of his Italian Journey, on September 6 , 1786, during his only visit to Munich, Goethe stayed overnight at the Gasthaus Schwarzer Adler near the cathedral. That evening, the then 37-year-old Goethe climbed the north tower of the Frauenkirche, from which Fanny von Ickstatt had thrown herself the previous year. Goethe knew that Fanny had thoroughly read Werther and underlined passages, and therefore wanted to see the original location for himself. He wrote in his letters: “I climbed the tower from which the young lady threw herself and looked around at the Tyrolean mountains.”
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References:
Fanny von Ickstatt – Wikipedia
München Bücher – Der Fall Fanny von Ickstatt – Leonhard Maria Magdalena
Historischer München-Roman: Fannys Sturz von der Frauenkirche