Some ghosts attached to stately homes appeared to warn of a death in the family. Seeing a double of yourself could also spell doom.
By Richard Holland
‘The beautiful Lady Diana Rich, daughter to the Earl of Holland, as she was walking in her father’s garden at Kensington, to take the air before dinner, about eleven o’clock, being then very well, met her own apparition, habit and everything, as in a looking glass. About a month after she died of small-pox.’
So writes John Aubrey, the celebrated antiquarian, who died in 1697. He tells the story in his ‘Miscellanies’ and continues: ‘And ‘tis said that her sister, the Lady Isabella Thinne, saw the like of herself also before she died.’
There are many accounts of apparitions of living people having been seen but it is considered desperately unlucky to see the ghost of oneself. Such an apparition is known as a ‘fetch’, the rather unpleasant inference being that the ghost has been sent to ‘fetch’ you away.
There are other ghosts recorded as serving as death omens. Most ‘belong’ to great families and grand houses of the past. Folklorist Christina Hole, herself a Cheshire woman, records of Combermere Abbey, in Cheshire: ‘The Cottons of Combermere Abbey were warned by the ghost of a little girl with a sad, troubled face, who ran wildly about the room in great distress. In an account of one of her appearances published in ‘All Year Round’ [the journal owned by Charles Dickens] for December 1870, it is stated that she resembled in face and dress a little sister of Lord Combermere who had died with great suddenness at the age of fourteen. Her death appears to have been quite natural, and there seems to be no obvious reason why she should have acted as a death warning for the family.
‘It was his [Lord Combermere's] niece who saw the ghost running round her bed in her room and then suddenly disappearing as though swallowed up by the floor. Lord Combermere did not see her himself and it is possible that in spite of the resemblance, she was really the spirit of someone who lived farther back in the history of that ancient house and came to some untimely end.’
Another famous family ghost is that of the Radiant Boy of Corby Castle in the Lake District. This shiny little chap was seen on many occasions in the past, a particularly well documented appearance being in 1803, when a clergyman was awoken in the haunted room by ‘a bright flame’ which shortly condensed into the form of ‘a beautiful boy, clothed in white, with bright locks resembling gold’.
Family tradition had it that ‘whomever the Radiant Boy appeared to would rise to the summit of power, and when he reached the summit of power, would die a violent death’. Although this was said to have been borne out in many instances, it doesn’t appear to have been true of the reverend gentleman of 1803, who rushed away in his carriage at first light the next morning, only explaining the reason for his hurried departure several years later.
There are other such traditions attached the great houses of the United Kingdom, but far more common were the ‘corpse candles’ and phantom funerals which would appear as death portents for the country folk of yesteryear. More of these eerie apparitions next time.
[SOURCES: 'Haunted Homes and Family Legends' by John Ingram, 1886 ed.; 'Haunted England' by Christina Hole, 1941]
© Richard Holland 2008
