An Old Maniac Who Thought the Floor Was Made of Lava
Among Blucher’s crazier delusions, which came and went over the years, was his belief that a Frenchman had impregnated him. Blucher was convinced that he was about to give birth to a baby elephant at any moment. Another nutty conviction was Blucher’s paranoia that his servants, bribed by France, had heated the floor of his room to lava levels, in order to scorch his feet. So when he was seated in a chair, Blucher kept his feet raised from the floor. Whenever he had to get up, he skipped around swiftly, and hopped gingerly on tiptoe. Another of Blucher’s manic episodes occurred when the house was roused by the sounds of a ferocious struggle in the general’s bedroom.
When servants and aides rushed in, they discovered that Blucher was fighting thin air. He claimed that he was in a near fatal struggle with the vindictive ghost of a dead officer, whom Blucher had dismissed from the Prussian Army. To his credit, Blucher realized in his stretches of sanity that there was something wrong with his head. However, the problem as he saw it was that his head was made of stone. He did not mean that as a figure of speech: he literally thought his cranium was made of stone, and routinely asked people to hit him in the head with a hammer.