The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

Before we do anything else, look at the photograph.

There's a staircase rising through Raynham Hall in Norfolk and, roughly halfway down it, something appears to be standing on the steps or perhaps floating above them. It's pale and translucent, vaguely human-shaped and seems to be wearing something long and flowing, while the staircase remains visible through whatever we're looking at.

You've probably seen this photograph before even if you don't know its name because it has appeared in books about ghosts, television programmes, magazines and approximately every paranormal documentary ever made, usually accompanied by somebody telling us that it's one of the most convincing ghost photographs ever taken.

I've seen it loads of times, but what I'd never done was find out exactly how it was taken, who was standing behind the camera or whether the photographers claimed to have seen anything before the image appeared.

THE PHOTOGRAPH

Raynham Hall, Norfolk

19 September 1936

Approximately four o'clock in the afternoon

Captain Hubert C. Provand and his assistant Indre Shira weren't at Raynham Hall looking for ghosts that day, they were there to photograph the house for Country Life magazine and had already taken one photograph of the main staircase when they began preparing another.

Provand was underneath the camera's focusing cloth while Shira stood beside him holding the flash equipment, and as Shira looked up the staircase, he later claimed that he saw a vapoury form gradually taking the shape of a woman and moving towards them.

He shouted at Provand to take the photograph, Provand removed the lens cap and Shira fired the flash, but by the time Provand emerged from underneath the cloth there was nothing on the staircase and he thought his assistant had imagined the whole thing.

When the plate was developed, however, there was something on the stairs. Shira claimed he'd already seen something taking shape on the staircase and shouted for the photograph to be taken because of it. If the image was simply caused by an accidental photographic effect, we still need to explain what Shira thought he'd seen at exactly the same moment. If Shira was involved in deliberately creating the photograph, however, claiming to have seen a ghost immediately before it appeared on the plate would be a very useful way of giving the image an eyewitness.

Either way, we're going to need to know more about the woman everybody decided was in the photograph.

WHO WAS THE BROWN LADY?

The figure became known as the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall and was identified in later retellings as the ghost of Lady Dorothy Walpole.

Dorothy was born in 1686 into one of the most politically important families in England. Her brother Robert Walpole would become Britain's first Prime Minister and, in 1713, Dorothy married Charles Townshend, later 2nd Viscount Townshend, whose family owned Raynham Hall.

She died there in 1726, officially from smallpox, but over the years a much more dramatic story developed around her marriage and death.

Later versions claimed that Dorothy's marriage had been deeply unhappy and that her husband discovered she'd previously been involved with another man, became furious and confined her to Raynham Hall, preventing her from seeing her children until she died. Some versions go considerably further and claim that her funeral was staged while she remained imprisoned inside the house.

There is a problem with all of this because the more dramatic parts of Dorothy's story are difficult to establish from contemporary evidence, and that matters when those details are being used to explain why she's supposedly still wandering around the house.

The woman in the photograph didn't arrive with identification. People saw a female-looking figure in a house that already had a ghost story and connected the two, so somewhere along the way a strange shape on a staircase became Lady Dorothy Walpole.

Fortunately for our story, though, the ghost wasn't invented in 1936.

PEOPLE HAD SEEN HER BEFORE

Stories of a female apparition at Raynham Hall had been circulating long before Provand and Shira arrived with their camera, and one of the best-known earlier accounts was published in 1891 by the writer Florence Marryat, who described an experience her father, Captain Frederick Marryat, was said to have had at Raynham decades earlier.

Marryat apparently didn't believe the ghost stories and suspected that local smugglers might have encouraged them to keep people away from the area, so while staying at Raynham he decided to investigate for himself.

His version of paranormal investigation involved bringing a gun.

According to the account later published by his daughter, Marryat was walking through the house with two young men when they encountered a woman carrying a lamp and coming towards them along a corridor. At first, he assumed she was simply one of the women staying in the house, but as the figure came closer the men recognised the brown clothing associated with the supposed apparition.

Then she turned towards them and Marryat claimed that her face seemed to glow while her eye sockets appeared empty.

I don't care how sceptical you are, that would give you a moment, although Marryat's response was rather more decisive because he shot at her.

The figure supposedly vanished and the bullet was later found lodged in the door behind where she'd been standing, which gives us our second Archive ghost being attacked with a weapon after the Tower's phantom bear was stabbed with a bayonet. Historical paranormal investigation was apparently less “Can you give us a sign?” and more “Identify yourself or I'll fire.”

Personally, I'm asking questions first, preferably from another room.

BUT WAS IT EVEN DOROTHY?

Marryat and his companions supposedly recognised the apparition from a portrait hanging at Raynham, and the woman in the portrait was said to be wearing brown, which is apparently where the name Brown Lady originated.

Unfortunately, even this isn't as straightforward as I'd like because descriptions of the portrait and clothing don't neatly match what Lady Dorothy Walpole would have worn during her lifetime, and there have been questions over whether the woman represented in it was Dorothy at all.

That makes me wonder whether the ghost story and Dorothy's identity became attached to each other gradually. Someone sees a woman in brown, there's a portrait of a woman in brown and the family has a dead woman whose life can be turned into a suitably tragic story, then over enough years all three become the same person and eventually everybody knows exactly who is haunting Raynham Hall.

Except we don't. There was another reported sighting in 1926, only ten years before the famous photograph, when Lady Townshend and her son were said to have seen a female figure on the staircase, so by the time Provand and Shira arrived in 1936 the staircase itself already had a supernatural reputation.

That works rather inconveniently for both sides of the argument. If you believe the photograph shows something paranormal, people had apparently reported a similar figure in the house before anybody photographed it, but if you're sceptical, the photographers were working in a house where stories about a ghostly woman on the staircase were already well known.

And then Harry Price turns up again.

HARRY BLOOMING PRICE

I didn't plan this. After spending an entire article with him at Borley Rectory I genuinely thought we'd moved on, but apparently Harry has followed us to Norfolk. Price interviewed Provand and Shira after the photograph became public and said he was impressed by their account. He couldn't find evidence that the negative itself had been manipulated and concluded that if the image had been deliberately faked, the two men would have needed to be working together.

That's interesting, but it isn't the same thing as proving that the photograph shows a ghost. It simply means Price didn't find evidence of manipulation on the negative, and after everything we've just learned about his reputation during the Borley investigation, I'm not stamping CASE CLOSED: GHOST across it because Harry gave it the thumbs up.

Sorry, Harry.

WHAT ELSE COULD BE ON THOSE STAIRS?

There were plenty of ways to create ghostly photographs long before Photoshop arrived. Double exposure had been used to produce spirit photographs since the nineteenth century, long exposures could allow somebody moving through a scene to appear translucent, light entering the camera could create unusual shapes and deliberate photographic tricks were already well understood.

People in the 1930s were not standing around helplessly waiting for us to invent photo editing. The question isn't whether a photograph like this could have been produced without a ghost, because it absolutely could. The question is whether we can establish how this particular photograph was made, and that's considerably harder.

Some analyses have suggested that the figure could have been produced by superimposing another image, perhaps a religious statue or a person in clothing, while accidental double exposure and light leakage have also been proposed. The figure is conveniently positioned on the staircase, and its pale shape is exactly the sort of thing that makes a photographic explanation plausible, but none of those suggestions tells us with certainty what happened when Provand's camera was pointed towards the stairs that afternoon.

And once again we're back to Shira, because he said he saw something before the photograph was taken.

If the image resulted from an accidental camera effect, Shira's sighting becomes a remarkable coincidence; if it was deliberately created, then his testimony potentially makes him part of the trick. If neither explanation works, we're left with the possibility everybody has been arguing about since 1936.

THE TIMING IS INTERESTING TOO

The photograph was taken in September 1936 and published in the Christmas issue of Country Life that December, but earlier that same year Lady Townshend had published a book called True Ghost Stories, which included the Brown Lady among its stories.

I don't think that automatically means anything was faked, but it is worth knowing because this wasn't a forgotten family legend accidentally captured by two photographers who knew nothing about it. The Brown Lady was already being discussed, the house already had a supernatural reputation and then one of the most striking ghost photographs ever taken appeared on its staircase.

None of that disproves the photograph, but it definitely belongs beside it when we're deciding what we think we're looking at.

SO, WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY HAVE?

I expected to research this photograph and come away with a much stronger opinion. I thought I'd either find a brilliant piece of evidence that had been unfairly dismissed or discover an embarrassingly obvious photographic trick that had somehow survived for nearly ninety years, but instead I've ended up somewhere irritatingly in the middle.

The photograph doesn't prove that Lady Dorothy Walpole walked down the staircase at Raynham Hall in 1936, and we can't even confidently establish that Dorothy was the woman earlier witnesses believed they were seeing. There were ordinary photographic techniques capable of producing something very similar to the figure on the stairs, and the photographers were working in a house whose ghost story was already well known.

What stops me putting it neatly into the interesting old photographic mistake pile is Shira's account.

He said he saw something. That doesn't mean he saw a ghost, but it means our explanations have to account for him as well as the photograph. Either he genuinely saw something unusual, he mistook something ordinary for a figure at exactly the moment an unusual photographic effect occurred, or he was involved in creating the image deliberately.

Nearly ninety years later, I don't know how we'd confidently choose between those possibilities, and I think that's why the photograph has survived because it gives us almost everything we'd want from a good mystery without quite giving us enough to finish it. We know exactly where and when the photograph was taken, we know who was standing behind the camera and we have an account from the man who said he saw the figure before the exposure was made, but we can't go back into that hallway at four o'clock on 19 September 1936 and see what he saw.

So yes, I would absolutely like to visit Raynham Hall and stand at the bottom of that staircase with the photograph in my hand, just to see whether knowing the actual space changes how the image feels.

If a woman in brown starts coming down the stairs towards me while I'm there, though, I can promise you one thing.

I'm not shooting her.