At least that's what the Bavarian government said when it stripped him of his royal powers in 1886 and confined him to his summer house.
It wasn't that "Mad" King Ludwig II was evil, it was just that the fairy-tale castles he kept building were driving Bavaria broke.
Ludwig came from the art-loving Wittelsbach family, which had ruled Bavaria for centuries. The family had promoted music, arts and building in Munich, and gave it much of the character it has today. But Ludwig took this love to an extreme. Sometimes he would go for midnight sleigh rides with cavalrymen with torches ahead of him. At Linderhof, another of his dreamy retreats, he enjoyed being rowed in a swan boat while dressed as Lohengrin, the hero of a German romantic tale.
But that was the least of it.
When the government deposed him, Ludwig was working on the third and most famous and ambitious of his castles, Neuschwanstein, the hilltop castle shown here. The castle, which was planned by a theatrical set designer, was begun in 1869 and finished 17 years later.
Though the castle didn't make the Bavarian government happy, it has made millions of others happy since that time. Neuschwanstein is one of Germany's top tourist attractions and is the model for the castle in the movie "Sleeping Beauty," and the Disneyland castle in California.
Ludwig only spent 102 days in his dream castle. Before it was finished he was confined to the grounds of the modest Castle Berg near the waters of his beloved Starnbergersee, where he had spent his summers as a boy. But two days after his confinement, he and the doctor attending him were found drowned in the lake under circumstances that are still mysterious today.
