The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

A ghost said to walk Raynham Hall in Norfolk, known from 19th-century sightings and from a 1936 Country Life photograph of a veiled figure on the stairs.

The Brown Lady is traditionally identified as Lady Dorothy Walpole, who was mistress of the house in the 18th century, Country Life says. The Museum of Hoaxes says people went on reporting her for about a century.

The novelist Florence Marryat, in her 1891 book There Is No Death, retold her father's account. She said she had heard him describe watching a woman with a lamp come toward him down a corridor. He knew her as the figure in the portrait called the Brown Lady. His finger was on his revolver's trigger when, Marryat wrote, the figure stopped at his door, lit her face with the lamp and grinned at him with malice.

On 19 September 1936, Country Life reports, photographers working for the magazine at Raynham took a picture of a pale, veiled shape coming down the main staircase. Country Life calls it probably the best-known spirit photograph in history, and many take it to show the Brown Lady.

Others disagree. The Times reports that a Society for Psychical Research inquiry at the time blamed a fault in the equipment, and that psychologist Richard Wiseman thinks the image is a double exposure. Wikipedia cites Joe Nickell as finding signs of double exposure on close study, and quotes John Fairley and Simon Welfare on a pale line over every stair tread and a patch of light on the banister that "appears twice".