22. This General Had Many Weird and Crazy Beliefs
Another of Blucher’s crazy convictions was his paranoia that his servants, bribed by the French, had heated the floor of his room to lava levels, in order to scorch his feet. So when he sat in a chair, Blucher kept his feet raised from the floor. If he had to get up, he would skip around swiftly, and hop gingerly on tiptoe. Another of Blucher’s strange episodes occurred when the house he was in was roused by the sounds of a ferocious struggle in the general’s bedroom. When servants and aides rushed in, they discovered that Blucher was fighting thin air.
The general claimed that he was in a life and death struggle with the vindictive ghost of a dead officer, whom Blucher had dismissed from the Prussian Army. To his credit, Blucher realized in those times when he was lucid that there was something wrong with his head. However, the problem as he saw it was that his head was made of stone. He did not mean that as a figure of speech: he literally thought that his cranium was made of stone, and routinely asked people to hit him in the head with a hammer.
