Brown Lady

A belated Halloween offering. It doesn't fit on Flickr, so the whole thing is here:

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iR0PtP_ww4

 

Brown Lady

 

Lady Townshend loved chiffon –

Vanity her besetting sin –

Her husband mixed the mortar well

And grimly bricked her in.

He left her there to starve to death;

They hadn’t hit it off at all.

Her spirit ne’er slept too well

Thereafter, at Raynham Hall.

 

Major Loftus was nocturnal –

His bedtime was the dawn –

He met the Lady on the landing

Standing all forlorn.

She turned, her eyes were empty sockets,

He let his lantern fall,

And Major Loftus ne’er slept well

Thereafter, at Raynham Hall.

 

So the Major, being an artist,

Sketched her all in brown.

He showed the serving maids at breakfast

And each of them did frown,

And one by one the servants went

To give their notice all:

“We affirm, we ne’er slept well

Since we came to Raynham Hall.”

 

Captain Marryat was not disposed

To treat the Lady gently,

But she came down the corridor

Scorning military gentry.

He thrust his pistol at her breast,

The bullet lodged i’th’ wall,

And Captain Marryat ne’er slept well

Thereafter, at Raynham Hall.

 

Two cameramen from Country Life

Shot the staircase shady,

And in their photo, half way down

There stood the shrouded Lady.

Mahogany the banisters

But she stood clear and tall,

And no one e’er slept to well

Thereafter, at Raynham Hall.

 

Lyric by Giles Watson, 2010. It is extremely unlikely that Viscountess Townshend really did starve to death at Raynham Hall, and I concur with Gwladys Townshend, a later resident at the Hall who wrote vivaciously about its spectral occupants, that the legend was probably a metaphor for a “tragedy of starved affections”. The Viscountess was born Dorothy Walpole, and the emotional fallout of her loveless seventeenth century marriage has traditionally been the explanation for the disquieting manifestations which disturbed the atmosphere of the Hall until 1936, when the notorious Country Life photograph was taken. Major Loftus was a guest of Lord Charles Townshend in 1849, and the latter cannot have thanked him for his testimony, for all his servants promptly deserted their employment, and he was compelled to appoint a staff of detectives, who never discovered anything. Captain Marryat, the celebrated children’s writer, was not the sort to idly conjure ghosts out of his imagination, and the two Country Life photographers were merely there to take photographs for a feature on the house for that magazine, when they saw the Lady descend the stairs, and one of them coolly pressed the shutter. See Gwladys Townshend of Raynham, ‘Some Authentic Stories of Supernatural Occurrences in Norfolk’, in Marchioness Townshend and Maude Ffoulkes, True Ghost Stories, London, 1936, pp. 19-22; and Janet and Colin Bord, Mysterious Britain, St Albans, 1972, p. 254.

 

Done