Over the years, there have been countless photos taken by people from all over the world, who have claimed to capture ghostly entities. But there is one that tends to stick out a lot more than others and still astounds us almost a century later.
In 1936, this ghostly apparition was captured by Captain Hubert C. Provand at Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England. He and another who accompanied him were photographers for a magazine called Country Life. Casually taking picture at the time, they came across this compelling figure of a woman we now know as the ‘Brown Lady’ due to the brown brocade dress she wears.
The identity of the feminine ghost is said to belong to Lady Dorothy Walpole (1686-1726), the sister of the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, Robert Walpole. She was the third wife of ill-tempered man, Charles Townshend. According to the legends, Charles caught Lady Dorothy committing adultery and punished her by locking her inside her rooms of Raynham Hall, the family home. How long she spent in this seclusion, I was not able to find. Dorothy lived out the rest of her days at Raynham Hall until 1726 when she passed away from smallpox.
But Provand’s photo from 1936 was not the first time the Brown Lady had been spotted, as the first recorded sighting was over a hundred years earlier in 1835. Multiple guests were invited to Raynham on Christmas of that year, including a Colonel Loftus. Loftus brought a guest who claimed to have seen the apparition on a previous night while he approached the bedrooms, noting the infamous brown dress. The following night, Loftus confessed to seeing her as well, explaining that he was drawn to her empty eyes that were dark, a contrast to her glowing face. His sightings frightened away some staff members, causing them to permanently leave Raynham Hall.
Another recorded sighting followed in 1836 when a man named Captain Frederick Marryat (a friend of the novelist, Charles Dickens) requested to stay the night at Raynham Hall. His goal had been to disprove the existence of the Brown Lady. Though his daughter wrote about what her father confided to her. She discussed the three nights that he stayed there and how he hadn’t had a single sighting during the first two. During the third night, however, she describes how he and two other men (who he had spent time there as well during his stay), spotted someone who they had mistaken as a living lady going to examine the nurseries. He and his friends slipped into one of the outer doors to hide (he wore only a shirt and trousers but this was considered a large indecency back then).
They observed her as she drew closer and closer to them and within a moment, he realized that her appearance fit the description of the Brown Lady. His finger was on the trigger of a revolver he’d been holding and he was getting ready to demand and ask it about its reasoning for being there when he spotted her dark and malicious smile. This struck him with instant anger. He jumped out and rose the revolver to her face, firing a shot. But the bullet had passed through to the opposing side of the corridor. She had vanished. Frederick Marryat left that night a believer and never did try to disprove or intrude on the Brown Lady ever again.
Now, about the skepticism… Some believe that the Brown Lady (1936) photo was faked by smearing grease or another substance onto the lens in the shape of the apparition. Others think that the Brown Lady photograph is packed with evidence of double exposure. More people have observed that the ghost looks just like the virgin Mary statue found at any Catholic church. (This one was a stretch for me..)
I’m not sure about whether or not the image is real. I wasn’t there, none of us were. But due to the large volume of witness accounts with the Brown Lady, it seems like there’s something true here.
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