Peter Coutts hadn’t been seen in close to 20 years when the coffins were found on his old farm.

A group of Stanford students, walking to campus one April day in 1908, noticed a cluster of boxes up ahead. As they drew closer, it was unmistakable what they were: nearly a dozen coffins, uprooted by an unkind grave-robber.

Nine were wood. Inside, just a handful of bones. One was a small affair, big enough only for a toddler. And the 11th coffin was metal and air-tight, sealing inside a young woman so securely that, though long-dead, she looked like she was sleeping.

A “beautiful, magnificently dressed woman” had been found on the Stanford campus, the San Francisco Call proclaimed. Perhaps her discovery would “reveal the secret of the mysterious disappearance years ago of the dashing, talented woman.”

All around the Bay Area, the news was met with great excitement. Maybe, at last, locals would find out what happened to the strange, wealthy French family who disappeared one day without a trace.

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The rumors about Peter Coutts started right away.

The Frenchman, as he became known in Palo Alto lore, was an imposing man, tall with a mane of white hair. When he arrived in the area in the mid-1870s, he bought 1,600 acres of what is today part of the Stanford University campus. On it, he began building an estate he envisioned would rival any baronal seat in Europe, complete with a mysterious turret and series of tunnels beneath the property.

The huge land transaction set tongues wagging. Where had Coutts’ seemingly bottomless wealth come from? And why was the deed made out in the name of his children’s pretty young governess, Eugenie Clogenson?

The contemporary gossip is recorded in San Francisco newspapers, which reported the following tale as fact, more or less. Coutts was an assumed name, they said, taken when he fled Europe after the Franco-Prussian War. With him, he’d brought five million francs, stolen from the French army when he was a paymaster. Some workers on Coutts’ Palo Alto estate whispered they’d been contacted by the French vice consul in San Francisco, who was working to determine if Coutts was his missing army paymaster. The tunnels under his property were escape routes in case the authorities closed in on him.

As for the mysterious Miss Clogenson, she was surely Coutts’ lover. One San Francisco Call story speculated that with her fine manners and elegant bearing, she might be Eugénie de Montijo, the recently deposed empress of France. In any case, Coutts’ “invalid wife” hated her.

As the Coutts family settled down in the area, they did nothing to dispel the rumors swirling around them. While the locals talked, they steadily bred one of California’s finest and most famous herds of cattle. They hosted parties. The children, Albert and Marguerite, played on the farm. And Peter Coutts retreated often to his Medieval brick tower, to do God knows what.

Then one day in 1882, the family was gone. They left no forwarding address, no instructions for what to do with the property. French authorities had finally found him, neighbors speculated.

No one was entirely surprised when they heard Coutts had died in a French prison.

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And so ended the story of Peter Coutts — until 50 years later, when his granddaughter finally emerged, not from hiding but from her ordinary life in Los Angeles.

In a blockbuster 1930 revelation to Stanford officials, she confirmed one part of the story: Her grandfather’s name wasn’t Peter Coutts. It was Jean Baptiste Paulin Caperon. But he was no crooked paymaster on the run; he was a political dissident seeking asylum.

France in the late 1860s was far from serene. The nation was roiling under Emperor Napoleon III, with many advocating for an end to the constitutional monarchy. Coutts was the editor of La Liberté, a newspaper advocating for the overthrow of the royal family. When the political climate became too dangerous, he left for America.

He returned occasionally, at least once in 1880. A New York ship record shows the Coutts family — Peter, wife Elisa and daughter Marguerite — plus Eugenie Clogenson, returning to New York City on a passenger vessel from Liverpool. The document lists their birth countries as Switzerland. Coutts' granddaughter revealed the Peter Coutts identity was taken from a deceased cousin living in Switzerland.

As for Clogenson's name on the land deed, there was a simple explanation for that, too. Coutts feared that in the event of his death, his family would be saddled with a deed that didn't bear their legal names. Keeping things in Clogenson's name was easier.

One large mystery, however, remains unsolved. No one is quite sure what happened to Clogenson, and it's not even a sure thing that her corpse was the one found on the old Coutts farm in 1908. When the coffin was discovered, it bore the stamp of a San Francisco coffin-maker. But the maker's records had all burned in the wake of the 1906 earthquake.

Given her expensive dress — and the disappearance of Clogenson from historical records after the mid-1880s — it seems likely it was her. How and when she died is lost to history.

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Coutt's famous turret, today known as the Frenchman's Tower, held no secrets either. His granddaughter explained the unusual structure was built as a library; Coutts loved to read and had an extensive rare book collection.

And there was no clandestine escape through the tunnel system (which, by the way, were mundane irrigation tunnels). After the end of the French monarchy, Coutts and his family decided to move back home. Their land was sold to Leland Stanford, who used it to create his university.

Coutts and his family moved to Marseilles, where he died a quiet, ordinary death.

"Gradually, nature has returned Coutts' or Capuchin's lake to wild pasture and crumbled his tunnels," the Chronicle wrote in 1952. "But his ghost walks still over his dried lake's bridge and hovers inside his fortress tower."