Anybody who has read a good number of books on the paranormal has seen the photograph. It is of a blurry outline of a cloaked figure descending a staircase. The photograph has been examined many times and it does not appear to be a fake - unless there was a freak accident and a light leak in that exact, peculiar shape managed to expose itself onto the film. While such things are definitely possible, there is other, more compelling evidence that this photograph is an authentic record of a ghost.No respectable English manor house is without a ghost. There are hordes or grey, green, black, and white ladies that walk the halls of these great old homesteads that dot the English countryside. But few are as ghastly as the one - and only - Brown Lady.
Nobody seems to know who the ghost is. Her name has long been lost in history, and there are no tragic or violent deaths connected to the house - or at least the kind that would normally produce a ghost. Similarly, there is a portrait of the lady hanging in an upstairs room, and the figure bears no resemblance to anybody in the family.
In 1835 a certain Colonel Loftus was the first to report the specter. He was climbing the stairs to his bedroom and saw an oddly dressed lady in the hall in front of him who vanished before he could get a good look at her. A week later he got a better look. He was walking down the same hall and nearly ran right into her. According to his description she wears a brown satin dress and appears to be a noblewoman of an earlier period. Her face glowed and, in lieu of eyes, her face was possessed of gaping, black eyesockets where the eyes should have been.
A few years later a novelist by the name of Frederick Marryat was staying at the hall and was interested in sleeping in the haunted room. He spent some time looking at the figure in the portrait. Later that evening himself and his two companions were walking down an upstairs corridor when they saw the figure of a woman carrying a lamp appear some ways down the hallway in front of them. They hid inside a room and, when the figure passed the door, she turned her eyeless head their direction and grinned in a "diabolical manner."
Marryat was armed and, seeing that the light from the lamp seemed to reflect off the figure's dress as if she were solid, pulled his pistol and fired point-blank at the image. It vanished immediately - and had the woman been mortal she would have been shot dead.
The figure was not reported again until 1926, and later in 1936 when the photograph was taken for the magazine Country Life. She has not been reported since that I know of - perhaps she is just biding her time.