Dorothy Walpole was born on the 18th of September 1686 at Houghton Hall, a country house in Norfolk, England. Her father, Robert Walpole, was an influential Whig politician and a colonel in the militia, and her mother was Mary Burwell. The couple had nineteen children, and many of them went on to lead notable lives. Dorothy’s older brother, also named Robert Walpole, is generally regarded as the first Prime Minister of Great Britain.
The family is also remembered for Robert’s son Horace, who wrote The Castle of Otranto, the world’s first gothic novel. Given the family’s wealth and standing, Dorothy grew up in comfort and received a good education. She was taught music, sewing, reading, and writing, the skills expected of a society lady. As a young woman, she is believed to have fallen in love with Charles Townshend, a viscount twelve years her senior.
Dorothy’s father forbade the match, possibly because he did not want it to appear that he was forcing the nobleman to wed his daughter. Charles had been young Robert Walpole’s guardian years earlier, following his father’s death when Robert was just thirteen. At the time, Dorothy herself was only around twelve or thirteen years old. Charles Townshend eventually married Elizabeth Pelham in 1698.
The couple had five children, but Elizabeth died prematurely in 1711 at the age of thirty. This allowed Charles to rekindle his relationship with Dorothy. Dorothy, however, had not been idle during those years. While unmarried, she had become the mistress of Thomas Wharton, the first Marquess of Wharton.
Wharton was a politician known for his charm and skill as a public speaker, but he was also a notorious rake, described as a man void of moral or religious principles. Despite this earlier liaison, Dorothy reconnected with her former love, and the two were married in 1713. The couple went on to have at least eleven children born between 1714 and 1726, six of whom survived into adulthood. From the outside, all seemed well.
Dorothy, now the Viscountess Townshend, was about to face a terrible fate. As the story goes, rumors of the earlier liaison between Lady Dorothy and Lord Wharton began to reach Charles Townshend. Although Lord Wharton had died in 1715, it was only now that Charles learned of his wife’s adultery with the notorious rake. Townshend was furious.
He had a fierce temper, and historians have described him as a passionate man who loved and hated quickly and rarely changed his mind once an opinion had been formed. As a result, he locked his wife in an isolated room, separated from the rest of the house, where she remained a prisoner. She was never to leave and was not allowed to see her children. It is believed that she was locked away in Raynham Hall for the rest of her life.
According to legal records, Dorothy died in 1726 of smallpox. But because she died under mysterious circumstances, rumors of a more violent death circulated. Some believed she was pushed down the hall’s great staircase, breaking her neck. She was thirty-nine years old at the time and was subsequently buried.
Legend, however, holds that she did not actually die then and that her funeral was a sham. It has been suspected that Lady Dorothy remained imprisoned in Raynham Hall for many years after 1726 until her eventual death, possibly from starvation. Years passed, and her life and the mysterious tale surrounding it faded into obscurity. This would all change in the nineteenth century, when many visitors to Raynham Hall reported seeing a lady in a dated brown dress walking the halls at night.
It has been claimed that in 1815, the Prince Regent, later King George IV, saw this himself. He reportedly declared, “I will not pass another hour in this accursed house, for I have seen that which I hope to God I may never see again. ” As with other accounts, the figure appeared after the blue hour and then vanished into thin air. What made the sightings eerie was that all witnesses claimed the brown lady bore a strong resemblance to a portrait of Lady Dorothy that hung in a bedroom.
Twenty years later, in 1835, a Christmas gathering was held at Raynham Hall. Among the guests were a Colonel Loftus and a Mr. Hawkins, who claimed that one night, as they approached their bedrooms, they had seen the brown lady, noting in particular the dated brown dress she wore. The following evening, Loftus claimed to have seen her again, reporting that she had dark, empty eye sockets and a glowing face.
These sightings terrified the staff and led many to leave their jobs. The following year, Captain Frederick Marryat, a Royal Navy officer, novelist, and friend of Charles Dickens, stayed a few nights at Raynham Hall. He specifically requested the room where Lady Dorothy’s portrait hung, in order to prove that the brown lady was not real and that the ghost sightings were due to smugglers. Florence Marryat, the captain’s daughter, wrote of his experience.
He took possession of the room in which the portrait of the apparition hung and in which she had often been seen, and slept each night with a loaded revolver under his pillow. For two days he saw nothing, and the third was to be the limit of his stay. On the third night, however, two young men knocked at his door as he was undressing for bed and asked him to step over to their room at the other end of the corridor to give his opinion on a new gun just arrived from London. My father was in his shirt and trousers, she wrote, and as the hour was late, he prepared to accompany them.
As they were leaving the room, he caught up his revolver. “In case you meet the brown lady,” he said laughing. When the inspection of the gun was over, the young men, in the same spirit, declared they would accompany my father back again. “In case you meet the brown lady,” they repeated, laughing also.
The three gentlemen returned in company. The corridor was long and dark, but as they reached the middle of it, they saw the glimmer of a lamp coming towards them from the other end. One of the ladies going to visit the nurseries, whispered the young townsmen to my father. The bedroom doors in that corridor faced each other, and each room had a double door with a space between.
My father, still in shirt and trousers, felt his modesty make him uncomfortable, so he slipped within one of the outer doors, his friends following his example, to conceal himself until the lady should have passed. He watched her approaching nearer and nearer through the crack of the door, until, as she was close enough for him to distinguish the colours and style of her costume, he recognized the figure as the facsimile of the portrait of the brown lady. He had his finger on the trigger of his revolver and was about to demand that it stop and give the reason for its presence there, when the figure halted of its own accord before the door behind which he stood. Holding the lighted lamp she carried to her features, she grinned in a malicious and diabolical manner at him.
This act so infuriated my father, who was anything but lamb-like in this position, that he sprang into the corridor with a bound and discharged the revolver right in her face. The figure instantly disappeared, and the bullet passed through the outer door of the room on the opposite side of the corridor and lodged in the panel of the inner one. My father never again attempted to interfere with the brown lady of Raynham after this encounter. Sightings of the brown lady decreased significantly after this.
The next recorded sighting was not until 1926, when Lady Townshend’s son and his friend allegedly spotted the ghost on the staircase. They also said that what they had seen resembled the portrait of Lady Dorothy Townshend. In 1936, the tale of the brown lady came to national attention when the photographer Captain Hubert C. Provand, along with his assistant Indre Shira, began taking photographs of Raynham Hall for Country Life magazine.
While they were photographing the grand staircase, a vapory form gradually assuming the appearance of a woman moved towards them. It was the brown lady. Shira stated the following: “Captain Provand took one photograph while I flashed the light. He was focusing for another exposure.
I was standing by his side just behind the camera with a flashlight pistol in my hand, looking directly up the staircase. All at once I detected an ethereal veiled form coming slowly down the stairs. Rather excitedly I called out sharply, ‘Quick, quick, there’s something! ‘ I pressed the trigger of the flashlight pistol.
After the flash and on closing the shutter, Captain Provand removed the focusing cloth from his head and, turning to me, said, ‘What’s all the excitement about? ‘”
After this, the two developed the photographs and realized they had captured an image of the infamous brown lady. Three months later, Country Life magazine published an article containing Provand and Shira’s ghostly experience, along with the photograph. The story was reprinted in Life magazine just weeks later, and the photograph became the most famous ghost picture in the world.
One organization, however, was not convinced. The Society for Psychical Research was determined to discover the truth. Their investigator, a Mr. C.
V. C. Herbert, interviewed both men. He noted that Shira was a nervous and superstitious Scotsman, not a very good photographer, more interested in business, and had told Lady Townshend that he hoped to photograph a ghost.
When Herbert spoke to Captain Provand, the conversation mainly centered on the camera. Herbert examined the photograph and found anomalies toward the edges of the frame. He noted that it seemed the camera had been shaken and that the staircase appeared to have been accidentally photographed twice. Provand replied that the camera had been placed on a slightly unsteady marble table and that when he removed the lens he did it very quickly, which could explain the shakiness of the exposure.
In Herbert’s mind, what they had captured was not the brown lady but a mistake made by the photographers. Despite Herbert’s skeptical report, many experts were satisfied with the pair’s explanation. Even the prominent Harry Price gave them the benefit of the doubt, saying, “I could not shake their story, and I had no right to disbelieve them. ” Others claimed it was a fake.
Although manipulating photos in 1936 was difficult compared to today, it was doable. Critics offered various explanations for how the image could have been a hoax: putting grease on the lens in the shape of a figure, moving down the stairs during an exposure, a double exposure, or a simple superimposition of the Madonna statue onto the empty staircase. Thus, while the photograph may not be real, the life of Dorothy Townshend certainly was. The subsequent haunting and the recorded sightings over the centuries make one wonder what exactly was going on at Raynham Hall.
Real or not, the story of the brown lady and its basis in history remains a very interesting tale.