The Cheltenham Ghost: the Woman in Black of Garden Reach (the Morton Case)

The villa on Pittville Circus Road in Cheltenham was built as Garden Reach. Its earlier owner, Henry Swinhoe, began drinking after his first wife Elizabeth died. His second wife, Imogen, did too. Their marriage was stormy. She left him shortly before he died in 1876. She died in Bristol in 1878. In April 1882 Captain F. W. Despard moved in with his invalid wife and six children. They renamed the house Donore.

June 1882. Rosina Despard, aged 19, had gone up to her room but was not yet in bed. "On opening the door, I saw no one; but on going a few steps along the passage, I saw the figure of a tall lady, dressed in black, standing at the head of the stairs. After a few moments she descended the stairs, and I followed for a short distance, feeling curious what it could be."

She looked so real that witnesses first took her for a living person. Widow's weeds. Widow's cuffs at the wrists. A dress of soft woollen material, "judging from the slight sound in moving." Her face was hidden in a handkerchief held in her right hand.

Her route rarely changed. Down the stairs. Into the drawing room, "generally standing to the right hand side of the bow window." Then along the passage towards the garden door, "where she always disappeared."

Edith Despard said the figure passed her on the stairs one night. Wilfred Despard saw it in the drawing room through the window. A neighbour saw a crying woman matching the description in the orchard. Rosina's brother heard her "crying so bitterly." In all, at least 17 people saw the figure.

Rosina wrote everything down from the start in letters to her friend Catherine Campbell. She stretched threads across the stairs. The figure passed through without breaking them. She tried to touch it but could not, and when she cornered it, it vanished. Her attempts to photograph it failed because poor light required long exposures.

Frederic W. H. Myers of the Society for Psychical Research, whose mother lived in Cheltenham, visited at intervals from 1886. Rosina's "Record of a Haunted House", written as R. C. Morton, appeared in 1892, the year the family left. Myers called it "one of the most remarkable and best authenticated instances of 'haunting' on record." After Rosina picked out a photograph, the figure was tentatively identified as Imogen Swinhoe.

G. N. M. Tyrrell saw a "brooding reminiscence", replaying actions from her lifetime. G. W. Lambert blamed underground water, subsidence and misread noises, and linked the haunting's end to the nearby Dowdeswell Reservoir. Peter Underwood argued she was a real woman, Captain Despard's mistress, hiding her face to avoid scandal. Christian Jensen Romer found an older story. A maidservant dressed as a ghost for Bonfire Night in the Swinhoes' time was attacked by a frightened errand boy.

Andrew MacKenzie followed reports at and near the house, later St Anne's, for roughly another century. In 1970 a woman in a long black dress stepped into the road and vanished. The last recorded sighting came in 1985. Today she is often called the real Woman in Black.