folklore AU Blanchette

I loved how this one turned out ! She is, of course, a ghost from the late 1700s- hence the square-cut décolletage of the chemise and Fragonard flower crowns. The veil was taken from the costume of the wilis from the National Dutch Ballet's production of Giselle. I think most ballet-savvy people on this site are well aware that I make far too many allusions to that ballet [HACKLoysAlbrechtCOUGHING FIT]

As always, here it is on tumblr, and here is the description:

Legends of white, ghostly women linger on both sides of the English channel. In Scotland, she is the banshee or bean sídhe who heralds death. In France, she is called the night-washerwoman, the woman of plagues, the milloraine.  In Normandy, where these myths are most common, she is known simply as the dame blanche (lit. “White Lady”).

The dame blanche is a semi-corporeal spirit, either solitary or in flocks of six to ten or more. She haunts standing stones, pools, ravines, bridges, graveyards and highways, often accompanied by mist or fog. Here, she will invite passerby to dance with her. If they agree, she will let them pass on their merry way after one or two rounds. If they refuse, she will send them to be ripped apart by lutins, led into a bog by ghost-lights, or otherwise disoriented by stray sod.

Men are especially prone to this fate, as dames blanches distrust them. They are too-often the villains in a white lady’s human life—whether their murderer, abusive father, rapist, or other engineer of their downfall. While the dame blanche will not remember their life on earth (and quickly becomes distressed if questioned about it), they often have vivid memories of their deaths. The negative feelings carry beyond the grave, which leads to accounts of men being danced to exhaustion by groups of dames blanches. Sometimes the man is innocent; other times, the man is found to be an offending party, or— stranger still— a direct male descendant of the wrongdoer in question.

They are said to be soft on young children, regardless of gender. Lost children often return with stories of meeting a mysterious woman in white, who gently leads them back to civilization where their parents wait. When the child turns around to thank the woman, or point her out to their parents, she has already vanished. Similar accounts exist of women being assaulted in isolated areas, only for the attacker to be torn apart in front of their eyes (or set on fire, or carried off)— seemingly by the wind or the eerie, otherworldly mist. One Belgian account describes a white lady inhabiting an old mine who would warn the miners of impeding gas explosions.

More modern accounts follow the “vanishing hitchhiker” narration. A beautiful woman in white will wait by the roadside, asking a passing motorist for a lift. Sometimes, her directions will lead him off a cliff, or into a dangerous part of the forest. Sometimes she will direct the driver towards her grave or death site, before vanishing. Other times, the dame blanche directs them nowhere in particular, makes a prophecy, or predicts a death. No matter what, the story always ends with the white lady disappearing from the vehicle without a trace.

She is commonly depicted with will o'the wisps, as both creatures have a tendency to lure travellers into bogs or over cliffsides. They also have connections to lutins, a type of Norman hobgoblin, as they often get them to do their bidding. While a dame blanche is at best only a harmless ghost, their residency on the “borderline” between the worlds of spirit and living means that they can see more than any mortal. This leads to a very apt sense of when somebody is about to die– much to the terror of the foolhardy family member who trips upon a white lady in the house’s most dire hour. 

A dame blanches has only two observable weaknesses. The first is the sun; the only saving grace from a dame blanche’s dance is the sunrise, for they are active at night. The second is, bizarrely, hedges and any vegetation, which supposedly stops them in their tracks.

Occultists link them to the moon and hares, both of which are symbols of witchcraft, and some folklorists speculate that the white lady is a remnant of a Celtic goddess cult, or a female death deity.  At the end of the day, however, they are not goddesses or girls— they are simply what the Normans call r'venants.