Things that go bump in the castle

A century ago, with a pall of loss and decay hanging over once splendid houses, a haunted history was one way for struggling estate owners to stay connected to a more illustrious past

- Caitlin Blackwell Baines

ON September 19, 1936, COUNTRY LIFE photographers on assignment at Raynham Hall in Norfolk took what is probably history’s most famous example of ‘spirit photography’. The ethereal, veiled form they captured gliding down the hall’s main staircase is widely believed to be the fabled ‘Brown Lady’ of Raynham—the ghost of Lady Dorothy Walpole, an 18th-century mistress of the manor.

Readers may be familiar with this image, but most will not know that, less than a year before it was taken, the incumbent lady of the house, Gwladys, Dowager Marchioness Townshend published a book of ‘true’ ghost stories. She wrote: ‘I must confess I believe in ghosts and I have for many years lived in a definitely haunted house.’ She was neither the first aristocratic homeowner to hold such beliefs, nor the first to write about them.

Two hundred miles north of Raynham is Chillingham Castle in Northumberland, the former home of American-born Countess Leonora Tankerville. Lady Leonora began documenting spectral sightings at her 13thcentury home as early as 1895. In fact, her first supernatural experience of the aptly named Chillingham came in a dream, months before she took up residence. In the dream, Lady Leonora’s deceased brother-in-law (whom she had never met, but recognised from photographs) greeted her at the gates of her soon-to-be home. When she finally visited the place in the flesh, she mused: ‘This is the second time I find myself approaching the gates of Chillingham Castle but strangely, it’s the first time I have actually been here.’ By 1925, she had amassed enough material to fill an entire guidebook.