Episode 10. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

The Effect

Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a woman who wasn’t there. She wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish she’d go away.

It is the middle of September 1936, and a London-based photographer and his colleague are on an assignment for the magazine beloved amongst the upper crust, ‘Country Life.’ They have been tasked to photograph the grand 17th century stately pile Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England, to illustrate an upcoming article in the magazine. The two men spend several hours exploring the building, taking photos in various locations, before deciding to set up their camera in the hallway to capture some pictures of the main staircase. Little do they know, that fateful day in early autumn, that the photograph they produce will go on to become one of the most famous examples of ‘spirit photography’ the world has ever seen.

The ancestral seat of the Townshend family for nearly four hundred years, Raynham Hall is located in North Norfolk, in the east of England. It was originally built in 1619 for Sir Roger Townshend, and modernised a century later for his hot-tempered descendant Charles, who we’ll meet again later. Still occupied by the Townshend family to this day, over its many hundreds of years of occupation, Raynham Hall has amassed a rich history of hauntings and supernatural sightings.

The first of these sightings to be recorded takes place in 1835, when an enigmatic ghostly presence puts in an appearance at the family’s Christmas festivities.

One of the guests gathered at Raynham Hall that festive season is Colonel Loftus. Late one night over the Christmas period, he and another friend of the Townshends’, named Hawkins, are retiring to their bedrooms, passing down one of the hall’s long, first-floor passageways. Suddenly, through the powdery blackness at the far end of the corridor, they see an unmistakable form: there is a person moving towards them, a woman, quite alone, and unrecognisable. But they do discern one thing about her. The garment the woman wears is a long brown dress. It indicates her to be a woman of means, a member of the nobility, even. But her dress, the same dress that is whispering toward them, is over a century out of fashion. Possibly tipsy after an evening of merrymaking and thinking little more about it, Loftus and Hawkins retire to their beds.

But late the following evening, Loftus has another encounter with the lady in brown. He is, again, walking along the same first-floor passageway to his bedroom. There are only a scattering of lamps lit this time, and the cavernous building is fully cast into gloom. Then, without warning, a shape coalesces from the darkness at the far end of the passageway. Just like the previous night, a woman’s form gradually moves towards Loftus. But this time, when the mysterious figure passes him by, he gets a better look at her. She is still wearing the same dated brown dress she had been the night before, and as she edges - or rather, glides - closer to him, he notices the strange ghostly pallor about her cheeks, which almost seem to be glowing. And - most chillingly of all - he sees the places where her eyes should be, her empty eye-sockets nothing more than two black pits.

Unsurprisingly, word of Captain Loftus’s encounters with the disturbing ‘lady in brown’ begin to spread amongst the Townshend’s staff. Some of these people are so unsettled by the reports of the woman gliding along the upper passageway with her chalky countenance and missing eyeballs that they quit their jobs at Raynham Hall with immediate effect. Though they are working people, with families to support, they don’t think twice about leaving, and don’t come back.

It is the following year, 1836, when the next sighting of the spectral lady of Raynham Hall is recorded. Captain Frederick Marryat, an esteemed author and Royal Naval officer, had heard the stories of the terrifying ‘brown lady’, and wants to put forward a new theory. He suspects that the ghostly woman sighted in the Townshends’ home is nothing more than an impressive hoax, created by local smugglers anxious to keep people away from the area, thereby detracting attention from their own lucrative and illegal activities. In 1891, Marryat’s daughter, Florence, writes a detailed account of what happened next…

Marryat asks to spend three nights in the bedroom on the first floor, around which most of the hauntings seemed to be concentrated. It is the same room, in fact, in which a grand 17th century portrait had been hung years earlier. A portrait of a woman in a brown dress. Marryat arrives at the hall and takes up residence in the room, sleeping with a loaded pistol tucked beneath his pillow, as protection against the smugglers he is convinced are at work in the house. During the first and second nights of Marryat’s stay, nothing untoward takes place. However, on the third night, Marryat is just in the process of undressing for bed when there comes a violent knocking on his bedroom door. Reaching for his gun, Marryat opens the door to find two young nephews of the Townshends outside. Thinking either the brown lady or the smugglers have been discovered, Marryat urgently asks what they want. But the men are just there to request that Marryat comes to their bedroom, further along the corridor, and take a look at a new gun recently arrived from London. Marryat is still half-undressed at the time, but as the hour is late and the rest of the household has retired for the night, he agrees to accompany them to their room wearing only his shirt and trousers. Having inspected the new gun, Marryat and the two young men are back out in the pitch-black first-floor passageway when the encounter occurs. As they reach the middle of the passageway, they detect the faintest glimmer of a lamp some distance along it. The men assume it is merely one of the nursemaids, going to check on the children in the nursery. But Marryat, self-conscious at potentially being caught in his state of undress by a lady, quickly scuttles behind a door, with the intention of concealing himself there until the nursemaid has gone. The other men do the same. Hidden behind the door, Marryat peers through the crack, watching the woman edge closer and closer, until she pauses right in front of them. And then Marryat recognises her, her murky form, the long brown dress which swathes her body. His finger creeps closer to the trigger of his pistol. Then the woman slowly turns, until she is facing him, as though she knows exactly where he is. And, holding the lamplight at her chin to illuminate the disturbing features of her face, she, and I quote, ‘grins in a malicious and diabolical manner.’ The act infuriates Marryat, who leaps from his hiding place brandishing his gun, firing it at her face. At once the woman completely disappears, and all the evidence left from the encounter is Marryat’s bullet, ominously lodged in the opposite wall.

The same frightening apparition was spotted again in 1926, this encounter reported by the then Lady Townshend herself. She wrote that her son and his friend had seen the by-now-infamous figure of the brown lady of Raynham Hall on the main staircase. And, furthermore, she said, they had been able to identify her as the woman from the portrait in the first-floor bedroom, the bedroom also known as ‘the haunted room’. But who was this woman?

It was 1713 when Charles, Viscount Townshend, married Dorothy Walpole. She was his second wife and died thirteen years later, in mysterious circumstances. While some say her death was due to smallpox, others swear that Dorothy met her end at the hands of her husband, a man with a notoriously violent temper. There were rumours that, before her marriage to Charles, Dorothy had been having an affair with Thomas, the 1st Marquess of Wharton, something which she had never admitted to. But on hearing gossip of the romance, Charles became utterly incensed, locking Dorothy up in a room in Raynham Hall, and even holding a mock funeral for her, to trick others into believing his wife had died, allowing him to keep her as his prisoner without anyone asking awkward questions. Could this depressing story of an imprisoned woman be behind the sightings of the brown lady of Raynham? Could she really be the restless, desolate spirit of Dorothy Townshend?

On 19th September, 1936, Captain Hubert C Provand and his assistant Indre Shire, arrive at Raynham Hall with their photographic equipment. They are capturing pictures for a Country Life article and, after a few hours at the property, they set up their camera at the foot of the hall’s main staircase. They take one photograph, a perfectly normal image of the stairs. But it is as they are setting up for the second photo that Shire sees, quote: ‘a vapoury form gradually assuming the appearance of a woman’ descending the stairs towards them. Provand is under the camera cloth at the time, totally oblivious as to what is going on, so Shire shouts at him to remove the lens cap and take the photo. He hastily does so, with Shire frantically activating the camera’s flash. ‘What happened?’ Provand asks when he emerges from beneath the cloth. When Shire explains what he has seen, Provand doesn’t believe it, even betting him £5 that nothing out-of-the ordinary will show up on the photo. Neither man has any way of knowing that the photograph they have managed to capture is about to become world famous.

The Method

After Captain Provand and Indre Shire capture their photograph at the foot of the main staircase at Raynham Hall, they are doubtful as to whether anything will show up on it at all, beyond the staircase itself. They make their £5 bet and wait to see what happens. But when the photograph is developed, they are astonished to see that the brown lady of Raynham Hall has indeed been captured, right there in the centre of the picture, seemingly in the act of descending the stairs towards them, just as the 1926 ghost sighting described.

Knowing the credibility of the photograph was likely to be called into question if it went to print, Shire wanted an independent observer to offer his thoughts on the image. He asked Benjamin Jones, a chemist who owned the premises above the development studio, for his opinion. Jones verified that the photo was genuine, as did experts at Country Life magazine, and it was subsequently printed in the December 26th edition of Country Life, as well as the January 1937 edition of Life magazine.

From here, news of the extraordinary snap spreads far and wide, attracting the attention of none other than the UK’s foremost investigator of all things paranormal, Harry Price. Price interviewed Provand and Shire about both the photograph and how it had come to be taken, and was impressed and satisfied by what they had to say. Price stated: “I could not shake their story, and I had no right to disbelieve them. Only collusion between the two men would account for the ghost if it is a fake. The negative is entirely innocent of any faking.”

Despite this assessment of the image’s authenticity, and the majority of people who saw the photograph believing it was real, several sceptical voices began making themselves heard, and a variety of theories as to how the photo could have been faked started to circulate. While some commentators thought the presence of the figure in the photograph was merely an accident; a double exposure, or beam of light that had somehow found its way into the camera, several other very credible theories were put forward to suggest that the photo had been deliberately created.

The first of these theories suggested that Shire had faked the photograph using a deceptively straightforward method. Namely, that he had put a smear of grease on the lens of the camera, cleverly applied in the shape of a woman. Others claimed he had simply moved down the stairs himself during an exposure, while Provand was under the cloth, creating the blurred human figure seen on the image.

The American magician John Booth was a supporter of this second theory. A performer himself, Booth was perhaps best known for his work as a magic historian, recording magic performances and being one of the first people to create documentaries for lectures on magic. Booth studied the by-now famous photograph of the brown lady of Raynham Hall and decided he could recreate the very methods Provand and Shire had used to produce the spectral form on the stairs. Booth asked a fellow magician, Ron Wilson, to help and Wilson agreed. Wilson covered himself in an ordinary bed sheet, and descended the grand staircase of the illustrious Magic Castle in Hollywood while Booth attempted to take his photograph. The resulting image was strikingly similar to the picture captured at Raynham Hall.

Examining the supposed ghost photo in subsequent years, American sceptic and paranormal investigator Joe Nickell was also amongst those who believed the image was faked using a double exposure. He stated that a detailed examination of the photograph itself betrayed clues as to what had happened. Nickell wrote: ‘there is a pale line above each stair-tread, indicating that one picture has been superimposed over the other; a patch of reflected light at the top of the right-hand bannister appears twice.’ Could Provand and Shire have used this method to combine their ordinary photo of the stairs with one of Shire descending the stairs dressed in a sheet? Many people think not, citing the fact that all the features of the stairs and wall share the same vanishing point, something which is consistent with the photograph being a single exposure.

But perhaps the most persuasive theory of all pointed out that, rather than an image of one of them wearing a sheet, a photograph of a very specific object could have been superimposed by Provand and Shire onto their initial picture of the empty staircase. And that object was a statue of the Virgin Mary, the kind of statue to be found in any English Catholic church. In fact, the supposed ghostly woman in the photograph doesn’t have the shape of someone wearing an early 18th century gown at all, but a shape far more closely resembling a traditional depiction of the Virgin Mary, from the cowl covering her head, to the ‘v’ shaped form of the parted robes at her knees. It is even possible to make out that the figure in the photograph is holding their hands together at their chest in prayer. If you were to look very closely, many argue, you can also discern the rectangular pedestal or base on which the statue stands.

So who were the two men at the centre of such a cunning hoax? Just like their photograph, it seemed that they were not everything they first appeared to be. It was suspected that Captain Provand and Indre Shire were not the men’s real names at all, but aliases, that Shire had taken his from his wife’s stage name. She was Madame Indre Shire, a successful society psychic, palmist and astrologer working in and around London in the 1930s. And Captain Provand was not a captain at all, but a photography tutor who had been employed by the navy in the First World War.

But so-called spirit photography was not a new phenomenon, even in the 1930s. Ever since the development of the first photograph in the 1820s, photographers had experimented with various techniques and special effects. The daguerrotype, the first publicly available photographic process, was developed from an original plate, and so didn’t allow a double exposure. But the method could still be manipulated to create tricks of the eye, something recognised by Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster in 1856. He deduced that if a person was having their photograph taken this way, any movement they made could create the faint image of an additional person in the picture, as the process required such a long exposure. Brewster’s idea was later used to great effect by the London Stereoscopic Company to create their series of images called ‘The Ghost in the Stereoscope.’

As technology improved over the years, and cameras became more widely available, many photographers realised that the techniques for manipulating photographs at their disposal could be exploited for profit. A notable example of this was William Mumler who, in 1862, produced a photograph which he claimed showed the image of his cousin, who had in fact died twelve years earlier. The public sensation this photo subsequently caused, led Mumler to begin a profitable business as a ‘spirit photographic medium’. However, in 1869, his purported spirit photographs were revealed to be fakes and he was charged with fraud. Despite evidence that one of his so-called spirit subjects was still alive and well, Mumler was acquitted of the charge and went back to working as a regular photographer, capturing the likenesses of the living, rather than the dead.

So did the disturbing photograph taken late that autumn afternoon in 1936 provide genuine proof of the afterlife? Did it really show the unquiet spirit of Dorothy Townshend, still stalking the passageways of Raynham Hall two centuries after her untimely death? Or was the photo merely a clever trick? A smear of grease on the camera lens… a double exposure… a statue of the virgin Mary superimposed on an unremarkable image of a regular staircase? Whatever the conclusion, the current owners of Raynham Hall are absolutely certain that Dorothy’s presence there remains, stating in a 2009 newspaper article: ‘Dorothy is not there to haunt the house but she is still there, and I know she’s there, and I’m glad she’s around.’ Perhaps the latest DSLR or smartphone will capture her likeness again one day very soon.

© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.