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in love with a soldier and that the couple planned to elope. Her
father, the lord of the manor, opposed the union, and when he
discovered the couple’s plans he imprisoned his daughter in one
of the manor’s towers. She pined away in the tower, finally dying
of a broken heart.
Visitors to the manor have reported seeing the apparition of
a young woman gliding down a corridor, her long dress trailing
behind her. Always, at the end of the corridor the ghost makes a
right turn and then disappears through a wall. During a renovation
of the manor house in the 1960s, workers broke through the wall
and discovered it had been erected to hide a doorway. “Legend
states it is the doorway the Grey Lady comes through, looking for
her forbidden lover,”
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says British historian Susanna O’Neill.
In America, another grey lady is said to haunt Riverwood, a
mansion in Nashville, Tennessee, erected in 1795. This grey lady
has been identified as Martha Wilson Porter, who died in 1860
shortly after learning that her husband-to-be had died in a logging
accident. In 1984 historian Grace Benedict Paine wrote of this
incident at Riverwood:
Suddenly, without warning, the bridge cards flew into the
air from Miss Sadie’s hands. “Pshaw, it’s just the ‘gray
lady,’” she reassured her startled guests in the grand an-
tebellum mansion, Riverwood. “She has been our family
ghost since my relative, Judge Cooper, bought the house
over a hundred years ago.” Miss Sadie and her husband,
Dr. Lucius E. Burch, had grown quite used to the sudden
appearances and activities of the apparition during the
years they had lived in Riverwood.
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Lincoln’s Ghost
The apparitions that haunt Gainsborough Old Hall and Riverwood
seem to have stepped out of the pages of history, although their
stories are not widely known or studied. One very famous histori-
cal figure whose ghost has been reported many times is Abraham
