“The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain” by John Henry Ingram – Part One

When I had COVID, my “use it or lose it” style of podcasting plan led to me recording three episodes. I have virtually no idea what’s in them, except that I swept a history of English haunted houses for stories that are Elizabethan and before. Thanks to the Librivox recording teams.

Usually I script in advance, but this time I’ll be transposing in the recordings and adding my comments in bold. I wonder what they will be? Off on an adventure, dear listeners!

BISHAM ABBEY

A character about to be discussed is Elizabeth Cook. Her brother-in-law is Lord Burghley, at the centre of the court. She was a famous poetess. Her family thought teaching your girls was a Protestant duty. Her brothers we’ll skip for this but her sister married Sir Nicholas Bacon, so Elizabeth was the aunt of the magician Sir Francis Bacon. Her own husband translated The Book of the Courtier into English and was ambassador to France. Her other sister married a man who was ambassador to Scotland for a while. So she’s very well connected.

Bisham Abbey, in Berkshire, was formerly the family seat of the Hobbys, and about the first half of the sixteenth century was in possession of Sir Thomas Hobby, or Hoby, a man of no slight reputation for learning in those days. He married Elizabeth, the third daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, who shared the general fame of her family for intellectual qualifications. When Sir Thomas went to France as ambassador for Queen Elizabeth his wife accompanied him, and on his death abroad in 1566 Lady Hoby brought his body home and had it interred in a mortuary chapel at Bisham. Subsequently she married John, Lord Russell.

By her first husband the Lady Hoby is said to have had a son who, when quite young, displayed the most intense antipathy to every kind of study ; and such was his repugnance to writing, that in his fits of obstinacy he would wilfully and deliberately blot his writing-books. This conduct enraged his mother, whose whole family were noted for their scholastic attainments, and who, like her three sisters, Lady Burleigh, Lady Bacon, and Lady Killigrew, was not only an excellent, classical scholar, but was also married to a man of literary note, that she chastised the unfortunate lad with all the violence at that period permitted to, and practised by, parents on their children. She beat him, according to the old legend, again and again on the shoulders and head, and at last so severely and unmercifully that he died.

It is commonly reported that, as a punishment for her unnatural cruelty, her spirit is doomed to haunt Bisham Abbey, the house where this cruel act of manslaughter was perpetrated. Several persons have seen the apparition, the likeness of which, both as regards feature and dress, to a pale portrait of her ladyship in antique widow’s weeds still remaining at Bisham, is said to be exact and life-like. She is reported to glide through a certain chamber, in the act of washing bloodstains from her hands, and on some occasions her apparition is said to have been seen in the grounds of the old mansion.

A very remarkable occurrence in connection with this narrative took place some years ago, according to Dr. Lee, author of Glimpses of the Supernatural. ”In taking down an old oak window-shutter of the latter part of the sixteenth century,” he states that ” a packet of antique copy-books of that period were discovered pushed into the wall between the joists of the skirting, and several of these books on which young Hobby’s name was written were covered with blots, thus supporting the ordinary tradition.”

This next one reminds me a faerie story. Not a faerie tale, but one of the folk stories which shows up repeatedly. Terry Pratchett does a version with a happier ending.

LITTLECOT HOUSE

Littlecot House, or Hall as it is sometimes called, the ancient seat of the Darrells, is two miles from Hungerford in Berkshire. It stands in a low and lonely situation, and is thoroughly typical in appearance of a haunted dwelling. On three sides it is surrounded by a park, which spreads over the adjacent hill, and on the fourth by meadows, through which runs the river Kennet. A thick grove of lofty trees stands on one side of the gloomy building, which is of great antiquity, and would appear to have been erected towards the close of the age of feudal warfare, when defence came to be no longer the principal object in a country mansion. The interior of the house, however, presents many objects appropriate to feudal times.

The hall is very spacious, paved by stones, and lighted by large transon windows. The walls are hung with coats-of-mail and helmets, and on every side are quantities of old-fashioned pistols and guns, and other suitable ornaments for an old baronial dwelling. Below the cornice at the end of the hall, hangs a row of leathern jerkins, made in the form of shirts, and supposed to have been worn as armour by the retainers of the Darrell family, to whom the old Hall belonged. An enormous oaken table, reaching nearly from one end of the chamber to the other, might have feasted the entire neighbourhood, and an appendage to one end of it made it answer at other times for the old game of shuffleboard. The rest of the furniture is in a corresponding style, or was a few years ago ; but the most noticeable article is an old chair of cumbrous workmanship, constructed of wood, curiously carved, with a high back and triangular seat ; it is said to have been used by Judge Popham, in the days of Elizabeth.

The entrance into the hall of this ancient mansion is at one end by a low door, communicating with a passage that leads from the outer door in the front of the house to a quadrangle within ; at the other it opens upon a gloomy stair-case, by which you ascend to the first floor, and, passing the doors of some bed-chambers, enter a narrow gallery which extends along the back front of the house from one end to the other of it. This gallery is hung with old family portraits, chiefly in Spanish costumes of the sixteenth century. In one of the bedchambers, which you pass in going towards the gallery, is a bedstead with blue furniture, that time has now made dingy and threadbare ; and in the bottom of one of the bed-curtains you are shown a place where a small piece has been cut out and sewn in again.

To account for this curious circumstance, and for the apparitions which tenant this haunted chamber, the following terrible tale is told : “It was on a dark rainy night in the month of November, that an old midwife sat musing by her cottage fireside, when on a sudden she was startled by a loud knocking at the door. On opening it she found a horseman, who told her that her assistance was required immediately by a person of rank, and that she should be handsomely rewarded, but that there were reasons for keeping the affair a strict secret, and therefore she must submit to be blind-folded, and to be conducted in that condition to the bed-chamber of the lady. With some hesitation the midwife consented; the horseman bound her eyes, and placed her on a pillion behind him.

After proceeding in silence for many miles, through rough and dirty lanes, they stopped and the midwife was led into a house which, from the length of her walkthrough the apartments, as well as the sounds about her, she discovered to be the seat of wealth and power. ” When the bandage was removed from her eyes, she found herself in a bed-chamber, in which were the lady on whose account she had been sent for, and a man of haughty and ferocious aspect. The lady was delivered of a fine boy. Immediately the man commanded the midwife to give him the child, and, catching it from her, he hurried across the room, and threw it on the back of the fire that was blazing in the chimney. The child, however, was strong, and by its struggles rolled itself off upon the hearth, when the ruffian again seized it with fury, and, in spite of the intercession of the midwife, and the more piteous entreaties of the mother, thrust it under the grate, and, raking the live coals upon it, soon put an end to its life. ” The midwife, after spending some time in affording all the relief in her power to the wretched mother, was told that she must be gone. Her former conductor appeared, who again bound her eyes, and conveyed her behind him to her own home; he then paid her handsomely and departed.

The midwife was strongly agitated by the horrors of the preceding night, and she immediately made a deposition of the facts before a magistrate. Two circumstances afforded hopes of detecting the house in which the crime had been committed ; one was, that the midwife, as she sat by the bed-side, had, with a view to discover the place, cut out a piece of the bed-urtain, and sewn it in again ; the other was, that as she had descended the staircase she had counted the steps. Some suspicion fell upon one Darrell, at that time the proprietor of Littlecot House and the domain around it. The house was examined, and identified by the midwife, and Darrell was tried at Salisbury for the murder. By corrupting his judge, he escaped the sentence of the law, but broke his neck by a fall from his horse in hunting, a few months afterwards. The place where this happened is still known by the name of Darrell’s Stile, a spot to be dreaded by the peasant whom the shades of evening have overtaken on his way.”

This is the fearsome legend connected with Littlecot House, the circumstances related are declared to be true, and to have happened in the reign of Elizabeth. With such a tale attached to its guilty wails, no wonder that the apparition of a woman with dishevelled hair, in white garments, and bearing a babe in her arms, haunts that gloomy chamber.

LONDON : THE TOWER

There is no place in the kingdom one would deem more likely to be haunted than that strange conglomeration of rooms, castles, and dungeons, known as the Tower of London. For many centuries it has been the scene of numberless deaths by violence, some by public execution and others by private murder, until it is scarcely metaphorical language to declare that its walls have been built out of human bones and cemented by human blood. That ghosts and spectres have haunted its weird precincts no believer in the supernatural can doubt; and, if we may credit all that has been told of it of late years, its apparitions are not yet quite beings of the past.

Here I’ll break in to remove one story. Edmund Lenthal Swifte, the Keeper of the Crown Jewels in 1860, wrote down two stories. One happened to him, and this makes it out of period. Also, it was more a weird illusion than a ghost. His second story, which has better form for roleplaying.

”One of the night-sentries at the Jewel Office,” records our authority, ” was alarmed by a figure like a huge bear issuing from underneath the jewel-room door, ”as ghostly a door as ever was opened to or closed on a doomed man. ” He thrust at it with his bayonet, which stuck in the door, even as my chair dinted the wainscot ; he dropped in a fit, and was carried senseless to the guard-room. ” When on the morrow I saw the unfortunate soldier in the main guard-room,” continues Mr. Swifte, “his fellow-sentinel was also there, and testified to having seen him on his post just before the alarm, awake and alert, and even spoken to him. Moreover, I then heard the poor man tell his own story. … I saw him once again on the following day, but changed beyond my recognition ; in another day or two the brave and steady soldier, who would have mounted a breach or led a forlorn hope with unshaken nerves, died at the presence of a shadow.” Mr. George Offor, referring to this tragedy, speaks of strange noises having also been heard when the figure resembling a bear was seen by the doomed soldier.

When the author talks of the soldier being willing to mount a forlorn hope, that’s a military term. The forlorn hope is the first line of infantry through a breach in a castle wall during a siege. Their chances of survival are not great, so people who participate are considered particularly brave. Some get great rewards for being members: others, for example convicts with capital sentences, are given commutations if they are victorious.

LOWTHER HALL

According to Mr. J. Sullivan, in his Cumberland and Westmoreland, the latter county never produced a more famous spectre, or ” bogie,” to give the local term, than Jemmy Lowther, well known for want of a more appropriate name, as the “bad Lord Lonsdale.

Note the intermixing of faerie and ghostly elements here. In Ars Magica and Magonomia, a bogie, which is the local for boggart, is a sort of faerie. That ism however, clearly not what’s meant here.

Infamous as a man, he was famous as a ghost. This notorious character, who is described as a modern impersonation of the worst and coarsest feudal baron ever imported into England by the Conqueror, became a still greater terror to the neighbourhood after death than he had ever been during his life. So strongly had superstitious dread of the deceased nobleman impregnated the popular mind, that it was asserted as an absolute fact, that his body was buried with difficulty, and that whilst the clergyman was praying over it it very nearly knocked him from his desk.

When placed in his grave, Lord Lonsdale’s power of creating alarm was not interred with his bones. There were continual disturbances in the hall and noises in the stables ; and, according to popular belief, neither men nor animals were suffered to rest. His Lordship’s phantom ”coach and six ” is still remembered and spoken of, and still believed in by some to be heard dashing across the country. Nothing is said of the” bad lord’s” shape or appearance, and it is doubtful whether the spectre has ever appeared to sight, but it has frequently made itself audible.

The hall became almost uninhabitable on account of the dead man’s pranks, and out of doors was, for a long time, almost equally dreaded, as even there there was constant danger of encountering the miscreant ghost. Of late years this eccentric spirit appears to have relinquished its mortal haunts, and by the peasantry is believed to have been laid for ever under a large rock called Wallow Crag.

So, first an apology: that’s not an Elizabethan ghost because it has a carriage and six. It’s Jacobean at earliest. Quick plug for the carriages episode. Note that ghosts in many Elizabethan stories are material, so you can trap them under a big rock.

CLEGG HALL

In Roby and Wilkinson’s suggestive work on Lancashire Legends, to which we are indebted for some of the traditions in this volume, is an account of the Clegg Hall tragedy. The story, as given in the work just referred to, is as follows : ”Clegg Hall, about two miles N.E. from Rochdale stands on the only estate within the parish of Whalley which still continues in the local family name. On this site was the old house built by Bernulf de Clegg and Quenilda his wife, as early as the reign of Stephen. Not a vestige of it remains. The present comparatively modern erection was built by Theophilus Ashton, of Kochdale, a lawyer, and one of the Ashtons of Little Clegg, about the year 1620. After many changes of occupants, it is now in part used as a country ale-house; other portions are inhabited by the labouring classes, who find employment in that populous manufacturing district. It is the property of the Fentons, by purchase from the late John Entwisle, Esq., of Foxholes. ”

To Clegg Hall, or rather what was once the site of that ancient house, tradition points through the dim vista of past ages as the scene of an unnatural and cruel tragedy. It was in the square, low, dark mansion, built in the reign of Stephen, that this crime is said to have been perpetrated, one of those half-timbered houses, called ‘post-and-petrel and having huge main timbers, crooks, etc, the interstices being wattle and filled with a compost of clay and chopped straw. Of this rude and primitive architecture were the houses of the English gentry in former ages. Here, then, was that horrible deed perpetrated which gave rise to the stories yet extant relating to the ‘ Clegg Hall boggarts.

’The prevailing tradition is not exact as to the date of its occurrence ; but it is said that some time about the thirteenth or fourteenth century, a tragedy resembling that of the ‘ Babes in the Wood ‘ was perpetrated here. A wicked uncle destroyed the lawful heirs of Clegg Hall and estates two orphan children that were left to his care by throwing them over a balcony into the moat, in order that he might seize on their inheritance. Ever afterwards so the story goes the house was the reputed haunt of a troubled and angry spirit, until means were taken for its removal, or rather expulsion.

”Of course, this ‘ boggart,’ ” says Mr. Wilkinson,” could not be the manes of the murdered children, or it would have been seen as a plurality of spirits; but was, in all likelihood, the wretched ghost of the ruffianly relative, whose double crime would not let him rest in the peace of the grave. Even after the original house was almost wholly pulled clown, and that of A.D 1620 erected on its site, the ‘ boggart’ still haunted the ancient spot, and its occasional visitations were the source of the great alarm and annoyance to which the inmates were subjected.

From these slight materials, Mr. Roby has woven one of those fictions, full of romantic incident, which have rendered his Traditions of Lancashire so famous. ”It is only just to state,” remarks Mr. Wilkinson, ” that the story of ‘ Clcgg Hall Boggart‘ was communicated to Mr. Roby by Mr William Nuttall, of Rochdale, author of Le Voyageur, and the composer of a ballad on the tradition. In this ballad, entitled ‘ Sir Roland and the Clegg Hall Boggart,’ Mr. Nuttall makes Sir Roland murder the children in bed with a dagger. Remorse eventually drove him mad, and he died raving during a violent storm. The Hall was ever after haunted by the children’s ghosts, and also by demons, till St. Antonea (St Anthony) with a relic from the Virgin’s shrine, exorcised and laid the evil spirits.”

To this meagre if suggestive account of a popular story, may be added, that in a curious manuscript volume, now, or recently, the property of Dr. Charles Clay, of Manchester, Mr. Nuttall notes that ” many ridiculous tales were told of the two boggarts of Clegg Hall, by the country people.” That there were two, all local accounts would seem to testify. ” At one time, proceeds Mr. Nuttall, “ they (the country people) unceasingly importuned a pious monk in the neighbourhood to exorcise or lay the ghosts,’ to which request he consented. Having provided himself with a variety of charms and spells, he boldly entered on his undertaking, and in a few hours brought the ghosts to a parley. They demanded, as a condition of future quiet (the sacrifice of) a body and a soul. The spectators(who could not see the ghosts), on being informed of their desire, were petrified, none being willing to become the victim. The cunning monk told the tremblers:’ Bring me the body of a cock, and the sole of a shoe.’ This being done, the spirits were forbidden to ‘revisit the pale glimpses of the moon till the whole of the sacrifice was consumed. Thus ended the first laying of the Clegg Hall boggarts.”

Once again that sounds a bit faerie. This isn’t bell book and candle or a version of unction.

Unfortunately, the plan of laying the ghosts adopted by the wily priest has not proved; permanently successful ; whether the “sacrifice” has been wholly consumed, or the fact that the spirit of the demand not being truly acceded to is the cause, is, of course, unknown, but, for some reason or other, the two ghosts continue to walk, and the belief in their appearance is as complete and as general as ever.

CUMNOR HALL

This recording is by Alan Mapstone, by the way. Cumnor Hall is important in the Magonomia setting because this is the “JFK magic bullet big conspiracy theory place” where people say Elizabeth put out a hit on Robert Dudley’s wife, or Dudley put out a hit on his own wife, or she was ensorcelled to throw herself down the stairs. The Amy Robsart we are meeting here is Dudley’s wife and she is the impediment to him marrying the Queen. Robsart is her maiden name and she didn’t use it after marriage so I’m not sure why it is being used here.

Cumnor Hall was a large, quadrangular building, ecclesiastical in style, having formerly belonged to the dissolved Monastery of Abingdon, near which Berkshiretown it was situated. It has acquired a romantic interest from the poetic glamour flung over it by Mickle, in his ballad of Cumnor Hall, and by Sir Walter Scott, in his novel of Kenilworth. Both authors allude to it as the scene of Lady Amy Robsart’s murder, and, although the contemporary coroner’s jury pronounced the lady’s death to have been accidental, and modern antiquarians endeavour to exonerate Lord Robert Dudley (afterwards Earl of Leicester) from having bad any hand in his wife’s tragic end, the matter is still enveloped in mystery.

According to the evidence given before the Coroner, Lady Dudley, on Sunday, the 8th of September, 1560, had ordered all her household to go to a fair then being held at Abingdon. Mrs. Odingsell, her companion, hadr emonstrated with her for this order, observing that the day was not a proper one for decent folks to go to a fair; whereupon her Ladyship grew very angry, and said, “All her people should go.”” And they went, leaving only Lady Dudley and two other women in the house. Upon their return the unfortunate lady was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs, but whether fallen by accident, or through suicide, or flung there by assassins, is, seemingly, an unfathomable mystery.

Sir Walter Scott, taking Mickle’s ballad for his authority, assumed that a foul murder had been committed, and, in his romance of Kenilworth, gives the following dramatic but purely imaginative account of the affair. Lady Dudley, miscalled the Countess of Leicester, is described as imprisoned in an isolated tower, approached only by a narrow drawbridge. Halfway across this drawbridge is a trap-door, so arranged that any person stepping upon it would be precipitated below into a darksome abyss.

Varney, the chief villain of the novel, rides into the courtyard and gives a peculiar kind of whistle, which Amy recognises, and, deeming her husband is coming, rushes out, steps on the trap-door, and falls headlong down. ” Look down into the vault,” says Varney to Foster ; ” what seest thou ? ”

“I see only a heap of white clothes, like a snow-drift,” said Foster. ”Oh, God ! she moves her arm!’

“Hurl something down upon her: thy gold chest, Tony, it is a heavy one.”

The imputation of this terrible crime, derived by Scott from Mickle, was obtained, by the latter, from Ashmole’s Antiqaities of Berkshire, the compiler of which work is said to have found the accusation against Lord Dudley in a book styled Leicester’s Commonwealth, a publication published in 1584, four years before Dudley’s death, and publicly condemned by the Privy Council as an infamous and scandalous libel.

It is interesting to know that Amy Robsart, who is believed to have been born at Stansfield Hall, Norfolk, a house which obtained a fearful notoriety some years ago as the scene of the murder of the Jermyns by Rush, was married publicly at Sheen, in Surrey, on 4th June 1550, instead of clandestinely, as generally stated. King Edward the Sixth, then only eleven years old, kept a little diary (preserved in the British Museum), and, says Canon Jackson, to whom we are indebted for much of the information given here, therein alludes to the marriage in these terms : ” 1550, June 4. Sir Robert Dudeley, third sonne to th’ Erie of Warwick, married S. Jon. Robsartes daughter, after wich mariage, ther were certain gentlemen that did strive who shuld first take away a goose’s head which was hanged alive on two cross posts.”

Although the jury and Lady Dudley’s relatives agreed to accept the poor woman’s death as accidental, the country folk about Cumnor would not forego their idea that foul play had been resorted to. Ever since the fatal event, the villagers have asserted that ” Madam Dudley’s ghost did use to walk in Cumnor Park, and that it walked so obstinately that it took no less than nine parsons from Oxford to lay her. “That they at last laid her in a pond, called ‘Madam Dudley’s Pond’; and, moreover, wonderful to relate, the water in that pond was never known to freeze afterwards.” Notwithstanding the “laying of Madam Dudley, ”however, her apparition still contrives at intervals to reappear, and he is a brave, or a foolhardy man, who dares to visit, at nightfall, the haunts of her past life. Mickle’s ballad is still applicable :

And in that Manor now no more Is cheerful feast and sprightly ball ;
For ever, since that dreary hour, Have spirits haunted Cumnor Hall.
The village maids, with fearful glance, Avoid the ancient moss grown wall;
Nor ever lead the merry dance, Among the groves of Cumnor Hall.
Full many a traveller oft hath sighed, And pensive wept the countess’s fall,
As, wandering onward, they espied The haunted towers of Cumnor Hall.”

DE BURGH CASTLE

I only want a couple of lines from this story to demonstrate a point.

On his arrival at the castle, as he was passing up the stairs, he heard a footstep behind him, and, on turning round, he perceived the same apparition. He hastily entered his room, bolted, locked, and barred the door, but, to his horror and surprise, these offered no impediment to his ghostly visitor, for the door sprang open at his touch, and he entered the room!

And there we are. Like most ghost story readers I was expecting the ghost to just fade through the door and furniture, but no. The ghost is a physical presence in the Elizabethan period and the door unlocks itself. The furniture is magically shoved aside by magic. The spirit doesn’t waft through anything.

HEATH OLD HALL

There are three Halls at Heath, near Wakefield, but the one known as the Old Hall, at present occupied by Edward Green, Esquire, is that which bears the reputation of being haunted. It is a truly magnificent and palatial pile of buildings, and has been well described to us as one of the finest specimens remaining in Yorkshire of the Elizabethan period of architecture. The Hall was built for John Kaye of Dalton. The windows were formerly emblazoned with the arms of many of the chief nobility of England, but these have disappeared, such painted glass as there is there now having been brought over by some nuns, with whom, it is said, was a Princess of Conde, who resided at the Hall during the Revolutionary troubles abroad.

Mr. John Batty, to whom we are indebted for much of the following information, says, the Kayes were succeeded in possession of the Old Hall by William Witham, Esquire. This owner died in 1593, and it is not improbable that some peculiar circumstances which attended his disease and death first obtained for the place its curious reputation. His illness, and its fatal termination, were ascribed to demoniacal agency, and a poor woman of the neighbourhood, named Mary Pannal, who lay under the suspicion of being a witch, was arrested, and executed for the supposed crime at York.

William Witham’s son, Henry, dying without issue, Heath Old Hall became the property of his sister Mary, wife of Thomas Jobson of Cudworth, whose family had grown rich upon the plunder of abbey lands, another very potent reason for an uncanny fame being acquired
by the race. Her first husband dying, Mary took for a second, Thomas Bolles, of Osberton, Nottinghamshire. Mary Bolles, whether for her loyalty or wealth is not stated, was created a baronetess of Scotland, with remainder to her heirs whatever, by James the First, in 1635, if not a solitary, still a very rare instance of such a title having been conferred.

Lady Bolles lived in great state at the Old Hall, and, after much wealth and prosperity, died there in 1662, when eighty-three. Her interment did not take place until six weeks after her
decease, she having assigned 120 pounds, a very much larger sum then than now for keeping open house for all comers during that time. Her will, only signed the day before her death, besides containing a number of charitable bequests, legacies to relatives and friends, and 200 poundsfor the erection of her tomb, further provides for the funeral festivities as follows:

“I give all my fat beeves and fat sheep to be disposed of at the discretion of my executors, whom I charge to perform it nobly, and really to bestow this, my gift in good provision ; two hogsheads of wine or more, as they shall see cause, and that several hogsheads of beer be taken care for (there being no convenience to brew). And, my bedding being plundered from me, I desire that the chambers may be well furnished with beds, borrowed for the time, for the entertaining of such as shall be thought fit lodgers.”

Beeves are cattle – things made of beef.

Besides these arrangements, Lady Bolles left 700 pound to be expended in mourning, and 400 pounds for funeral expenses, and charged her executors most earnestly to see her will exactly performed, adding that if any person interested in it obstructed them in any degree, he or she should forfeit all claim to any benefit from it.

The Old Hall fell to the share of Sir William Dalston, in right of his wife Anne, daughter of Lady Bolles by her second husband, but, after changing hands more than once, passed by purchase to John Smyth, Esquire, of Heath, from whom it descended to Captain Smyth, of the Grenadier Guards, its present possessor. The Hall and its environs, says Mr. John Batty, are beautifully described in “Emilia Monterio,” a ballad by Mr. W. H. Leatham on a young Portuguese lady who lived with the nuns when they inhabited the Hall, some sixty years ago. But the grand feature about this magnificent old Hall is that it is haunted, and by the apparition of Lady Bolles.

Her ladyship is said to walk and disturb the neighbourhood ; but her favourite resort is a fine banqueting-room, with a splendid carved stone chimneypiece, upon which are the Witham arms. Hunter, the Yorkshire antiquarian, deems that the lady’s restlessness in the grave may probably be connected with the romantic circumstances surrounding her father’s death; whilst others think it clue to the non-observance by her executors of certain clauses in her will. According to this latter account, the lady long ” walked in Heath Grove, till at length she was conjured down into a hole of the river, near the Hall, called to this day” Bolles Pit.” ” The spell, however, was not so powerful but that she still rises and makes a fuss now and then.”

A tradition, however, exists in Heath that a room in the edifice which she had had walled up for a certain period, because large sums of money had been gambled away in it, was opened before the stipulated time expired, hence the restlessness of Lady Bolles. At any rate, even now-a-days she is reported to be seen sometimes gliding along the passages of the house
she once inhabited in the flesh, whilst servants in a neighbouring residence have refused to go out after dark, as they have repeatedly seen at dusk a tall woman dressed in antiquated style in the coach-road of Heath Old Hall.

One correspondent, as evidence of the general feeling of the neighbourhood about this time-honoured apparition, informs us that when at Ledsham some time since, he was looking over the tomb in the north chancel, beneath which Lady Bolles lies buried, when two little lads whispered to him, “Don’t go there, maister, there’s t’awd Lad ! (Anglice, the Devil.)”

Let’s pause it there and come back to it next week.