Raynham Hall — the Brown Lady

OVERVIEW

A brick and stone house begun about 1620 for Sir Roger Townshend, later the home of 'Turnip' Townshend and still the Marquess Townshend's. Its ghost is the Brown Lady, in a brown brocade dress with, in some accounts, empty eye sockets, identified with Dorothy Walpole (1686–1726), sister of the first prime minister and second wife of the 2nd Viscount, who in the story kept her shut in her rooms until she died of smallpox.

HISTORY

Sightings were recorded at a Christmas house party in 1835 (Colonel Loftus, twice) and in 1836 by the novelist Captain Marryat, who slept with a revolver and fired at the figure in a corridor; Lady Townshend's son reported her on the stairs in 1926. On 19 September 1936 Captain Hubert Provand and Indre Shira, photographing the house for Country Life, took the staircase picture published on 26 December 1936 and in Life the following January. Harry Price interviewed them and found the negative untouched; later analysts (Nickell, Fairley and Welfare) point to a double exposure — a pale line above each tread and a duplicated highlight on the banister.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The accounts are unusually well dated for an English country-house ghost and the photograph is the tradition's centrepiece. Sightings have dwindled since. The entry records both the picture and the doubts.

VISITING

A private home; the hall opens to the public on a limited number of days each year, announced by the estate. Do not enter the park otherwise.