Considered to be one the best captures of an apparition to date, a photo of the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall was taken at in Norfolk, England in 1936. According to legend, the Brown Lady is the ghost of Lady Townshend who was married to Charles Townshend, a man known for his fiery temper. When Charles learned of his wife’s infidelity, he punished her by imprisoning her in the family estate at Raynham Hall. He never allowed her to leave its premises, not even to see her children. She remained there until her death, when she was an old woman.
Over the two centuries following her death, Lady Townshend’s ghost was repeatedly sighted wandering through Raynham Hall, suggesting that she never left its premises even after her death.
In the early nineteenth century King George IV saw her while staying as a guest Raynham Hall. He said that she stood beside his bed wearing a brown dress, and that her face was pale and her hair disheveled. In 1835, she appeared to a Colonel Loftus. He was visiting the house for the Christmas holidays and was walking to his room late one night when he saw a figure wearing a brown dress standing in the hall in front of him. He tried to see who the woman was, but she mysteriously disappeared.
The next week Colonel Loftus again saw the figure. This time, however, he got a better look at her. He said she was an aristocratic looking woman. She was wearing the same brown dress, and her skin glowed with a pale luminescence, but, to his horror, her eyes had been gouged out. Colonel Loftus told others of his experience, and more people then came forward to say that they too had seen a strange figure. An artist drew a painting of the ‘brown lady’ (as she was now known), and this portrait was then hung in the room where she was most frequently seen.
A few years later the novelist Captain Frederick Marryat was staying at Raynham Hall. He decided to spend the night in the room in which she was most frequently seen. He studied the painting of her and waited to see her, but she never appeared that night. However, a few days later he was walking down an upstairs hallway with two friends when they suddenly saw the brown lady. She was carrying a lantern and glided past them as they cowered behind a door. According to Marryat, she grinned at them in a ‘diabolical manner’. Before she disappeared, Marryat leapt out from behind the door and fired at her with a pistol that he happened to be carrying. The bullet passed through her and lodged in a wall.
The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall continued to be sighted by various guests over the next century. However, the most remarkable sighting (and photograph) of her occurred on September 19, 1936. Two photographers, Captain Provand and Indre Shira, were on assignment at Raynham Hall for the magazine Country Life.
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An account from Shira states: “Captain Provand took one photograph while I flashed the light. He was focusing for another exposure; I was standing by his side just behind the camera with the flashlight pistol in my hand, looking directly up the staircase. All at once I detected an ethereal veiled form coming slowly down the stairs. Rather excitedly, I called out sharply: ‘Quick, quick, there’s something.’ I pressed the trigger of the flashlight pistol. After the flash and on closing the shutter, Captain Provand removed the focusing cloth from his head and turning to me said: ‘What’s all the excitement about?'”
When they developed the picture they found that they had captured the image of a ghostly woman, apparently the famous brown lady, drifting down the stairs. The picture was published in Country Life on December 16, 1936.
