The Diary of Miss Idilia

Diary
"Father in heaven, have mercy on my soul")

Idilia Dubb (1834 – June 1851) was a 17-year-old Scottish woman whose demise in the abandoned Lahneck Castle while vacationing in Germany became famous through a diary she allegedly kept as she slowly starved to death. However, the authenticity of the diary and the historicity of the events described in it have been challenged.

In the late spring of 1851 Dubb had accompanied her father, mother, sister and brother on a holiday trip to Germany. On 16 June 1851, she set out to record landscape views of the Rhine river. When she did not return for supper that evening, the police were called and—it is said—they combed the entire area. However, no trace of her could be found and eventually her grieving family returned to Scotland.

In 1860 the ancient tower of Lahneck Castle was to be repaired. The workmen came upon a skeleton inside the top of the ruined tower. Along with the bones, they found pages of a sketchbook owned by Idilia. On the pages, she had recorded the horror of her final days. She wrote that she had managed to climb to the top of the tower on the rotted wooden stairs. When she reached the top of the tower, however, the stairs collapsed and she was trapped. Idilia was confident that people would see her signals for rescue. As she waved from a window, the boatmen waved back.

With no one to rescue her, Idilia slowly starved. In her final hours she determined to leap from the tower, but she did not do so. Her skeleton was found in the tower ruin on the top which was surrounded with an insurmountable 3-metre high stone.

References

• Eddy, Beverly D., Abbeys, Ghosts, and Castles – A Guide to the Folk History of the Middle Rhine. Carlton Press, Inc. ISBN 0-8062-1205-5.

External links

• Burg Lahneck website
• The Girl on the Tower at the Wayback Machine (archived December 12, 2007)
• Book: The Diary of Miss Idilia - edited by Genevieve Hill