Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

The name tradition puts behind the Brown Lady is Dorothy Walpole, born at Houghton Hall on 18 September 1686, thirteenth child of Robert Walpole and sister of the prime minister who bore their father's name. In 1713 she married Charles Townshend, second Viscount Townshend, as his second wife. The version told at Raynham says Townshend discovered that before the marriage she had had an affair with Thomas Wharton, first Marquess of Wharton, and had kept it from him; and that he punished her by shutting her in her rooms, with a mock funeral to explain the disappearance. There is a rival version, set down by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: she was not locked up by her husband but entrapped by the Countess of Wharton, who invited her for a few days knowing Townshend would never let her come back, not even to see her children. She died on 29 March 1726, and the cause the sources record is not starvation but smallpox. It is worth saying, because the popular telling usually has her starve to death in confinement, and that is literature, not archive.

The testimony that fixed the Brown Lady was published in 1891 by Florence Marryat, recounting what had happened to her father, Captain Frederick Marryat the novelist, who spent his last fifteen years on his estate at Langham in Norfolk. The Townshends had just refurbished Raynham and filled the house with guests, and the guests were leaving one after another because they said they saw a woman in the corridors. Marryat, a county magistrate and no man of nerves, suspected the smugglers and poachers of the district and asked to sleep in the haunted room to put an end to it. He slept three nights with a loaded revolver under his pillow. On the third, returning along the dark corridor with two nephews of the owner, they saw the glimmer of a lamp coming towards them. All three slipped behind the outer door of a room so as not to be seen. The figure stopped right in front of it, held the lamp up to her features and grinned at them, the account says, «in a malicious and diabolical manner». Marryat sprang into the corridor and fired point-blank. The figure vanished, and the bullet passed through the outer door opposite and lodged in the panel of the inner one. One detail of that account should not be lost: the three recognised her from a portrait hanging in the bedroom, and in that portrait she wears brown satin with yellow trimmings and a ruff at the throat. The ruff belongs to about 1600, a good century before Dorothy Walpole was born.

On 19 September 1936 Captain Hubert C. Provand, a photographer, and his assistant Indre Shira were photographing Raynham for Country Life magazine. They had already taken one plate of the main staircase and were setting up a second when Shira saw a vapoury form gathering and coming down the steps towards them; he shouted to Provand to take the cap off the lens and fired the flash himself. The image was published on 26 December 1936 and is by far the most reproduced ghost photograph in history. There is no agreement about what is in it: the conventional explanation is a double exposure or light leaking into the bellows, and neither that nor the contrary has been demonstrated. What should be set aside is an argument often made in its defence: that modern analyses find no «digital manipulation». A 1936 plate cannot have digital manipulation. If there was a trick it was done with light and film, and that is the only thing worth examining. The two names should also be kept apart, because they are usually merged into one: Provand was the photographer and Shira his assistant, and it was Shira who said he saw the figure and Provand who did not see it until the plate was developed.

There is something the fame of the photograph has erased, and it has been in print since 1901. The Brown Lady was not from Raynham. W. A. Dutt, travelling through East Anglia, places her at Houghton Hall (the Walpole house, where Dorothy was born) and writes that she «was introduced into the neighbouring hall of Raynham when one of Sir Robert Walpole's sisters married a Marquis of Townshend». That is: the ghost travelled with the bride. Dutt also tells the only Houghton episode he knew, and tells it with admirable reluctance: «Houghton Hall has its ghost story; but it is sadly lacking in sensational details.» All that was known was that Prince George, staying there when the house belonged to the Marquis of Cholmondeley, came down to breakfast in a very disturbed state and asked to be given another room for the rest of his visit, without saying why. The room was the Velvet State Bedchamber. That reticence, and not the staircase of 1936, is the oldest shape this story has, and it explains why the Brown Lady has always been seen in two houses and not one.