Aside from Loewenstein, a town of Wirtemberg, on mountains whose highest summit is more than eighteen hundred feet above the level of the sea, lies in romantic seclusion, surrounded on all sides by woods and hills, the hamlet of Prevorst.

Its inhabitants number about four hundred and fifty, most of whom support themselves by wood-cutting, and making charcoal, and collecting wood seed.

As is usual with those who live upon the mountains, these are a vigorous race, and generally live to old age without sickness.  Diseases that infest the valley, such as ague, never touch them; but they are subject in youth to attacks upon the nerves, which one would not expect in so healthy a class.  In a town situated near to, and like Prevorst, the children were often attacked with a kind of St. Vitus’s dance.  They would foresee when it would seize upon them, and, if in the field, would hasten home to undergo the paroxysms there.  From these they rose, as from magnetic sleep, without memory of what had happened.

Other symptoms show the inhabitants of this region very susceptible to magnetic and sidereal influences.

On this mountain, and indeed in the hamlet of Prevorst, was, in 1801, a woman born, in whom a peculiar inner life discovered itself from early childhood.  Frederica Hauffe, whose father was gamekeeper of this district of forest, was, as the position and solitude of her birthplace made natural, brought up in the most simple manner.  In the keen mountain air and long winter cold, she was not softened by tenderness either as to dress or bedding, but grew up lively and blooming; and while her brothers and sisters, under the same circumstances, were subject to rheumatic attacks, she remained free from them.  On the other hand, her peculiar tendency displayed itself in her dreams.  If anything affected her painfully, if her mind was excited by reproof, she had instructive warning, or prophetic dreams.

While yet quite young, her parents let her go, for the advantages of instruction, to her grandfather, Johann Schmidgall, in Loewenstein.

Here were discovered in her the sensibility to magnetic and ghostly influences, which, the good Kerner assures us, her grandparents deeply lamented, and did all in their power to repress.  But, as it appears that her grandfather, also, had seen a ghost, and there were evidently legends in existence about the rooms in which the little Frederika saw ghosts, and spots where the presence of human bones caused her sudden shivering, we may be allowed to doubt whether indirect influence was not more powerful than direct repression upon these subjects.

There is the true German impartiality with regard to the scene of appearance for these imposing visiters; sometimes it is “a room in the Castle of Loewenstein, long disused,” a la Radcliffe, sometimes “a deserted kitchen.”

This “solemn, unhappy gift,” brought no disturbance to the childish life of the maiden, she enjoyed life with more vivacity than most of her companions.  The only trouble she had was the extreme irritability of the optic nerve, which, though without inflammation of the eyes, sometimes confined her to a solitary chamber.  “This,” says Dr. K. “was probably a sign of the development of the spiritual in the fleshly eye.”