“When we began building at Bollingen in 1923, my eldest daughter came to see the spot, and exclaimed, ‘What, you’re building here? There are corpses about!’ Naturally I thought, ‘Ridiculous! Nothing of the sort!’ But when we were constructing the annex four years later, we did come upon a skeleton. It lay at a depth of seven feet in the ground. An old rifle bullet was imbedded in the elbow. From various indications it seemed evident that the body had been thrown into the grave in an advanced state of decay. It belonged to one of the many dozens of French soldiers who were drowned in the Linth in 1799 and were later washed up on the shores of the Upper Lake. These men were drowned when the Austrians blew up the bridge of Grynau which the French were storming. A photograph of the open grave with the skeleton and the date of its discovery — August 22, 1927 — is preserved at the Tower.

“I arranged a regular burial on my property, and fired a gun three times over the soldier’s grave. Then I set up a gravestone with an inscription for him. My daughter had sensed the presence of the dead body. Her power to sense some things is something she inherits from my grandmother on my mother’s side.”