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Odd Historic Moments that Are Almost too Weird to Handle

Khalid Elhassan May 31, 2021 34 min

Filipinos protesting the Marcos regime. Canadian Inquirer

An 1890s photocrom print of Schloss Neuschwanstein. Library of Congress

19. A Bizarre Spending Spree on Fairy Tale Castles

In addition to his passion for Wagner, Ludwig II also developed a mania for extravagant building projects in the Bavarian mountains. He started with the Linderhof Palace, patterned on the Trianon Palace and built between 1869 to 1878. Simultaneously, he started construction of his most famous project, Neuschwanstein, a fairy tale castle precariously situated on a crag and decorated with scenes from Wagner’s operas. It was built from 1869 to 1886, and inspired Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle. As that one was being built, he started an even more ambitious project in 1878, the Herrenchiemsee Palace, a copy of Versailles.

Schloss Neuschwanstein, left, and Disney’s castle. Lady Boss

Herrenchiemsee was never completed because the Fairy Tale King’s bizarre obsession with building fairy tale castles drove him into bankruptcy. Between the abandonment of his official duties, profligate spending, and withdrawal into the life of a recluse among other odd behavior, Ludwig’s ministers finally had enough. In 1886, they convened a panel of doctors that declared the King insane, and sent him to a remote palace with a psychiatrist. Three days later, he drowned himself in a lake and took the psychiatrist with him. Today, the Fairy Tale King’s architectural legacy is among Bavaria’s biggest tourist attractions.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.