A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Hauffe, Frederica
HAUFFE, FREDERICA,
Commonly called the Seeress of Prevorst, was born in 1801, at Prevorst, a little village among the mountains of Wirtemberg, not far from Löwenstein. Her father was game-keeper or district forester, and Frederica was brought up in the most quiet simplicity. She early showed great sensibility to spiritual influences, which her family endeavoured to discourage. At the age of nineteen she was married to Mr. Hauffe, and went to reside at Kürnbach. There she was attacked by a singular illness which lasted for seven years, during the latter part of which she was attended by Dr. Kerner, a well-known German physician and poet, who has since published an account of her, highly coloured, probably, by his own imagination. The last three years of her life were spent at Weinsberg. She saw, or imagined she saw, and held converse with spirits; and the system of philosophy she revealed, and which she had, apparently, acquired from her close communion with the spirit-world, is singular, from its being the production of a woman entirely uneducated in such matters. Frederica Hauffe died at Löwenstein on the 6th. of August, 1829.