The Ghost of Lord Lyttelton: The Three-Day Warning and the Apparition at Dartford

Thomas Lyttelton, 2nd Baron Lyttelton, was born on 30 January 1744. Society knew him as "the wicked Lord Lyttelton." In November 1779 he had guests at his house in Hill Street, Mayfair: the Misses Amphlett and their chaperone, Mrs Flood. His country house, Pitt Place, stood in an old chalk pit close to Epsom parish church.

Wednesday 24 November 1779. Lyttelton dreamed that a bird came fluttering to his window. It flew into the room. Then it changed into a woman dressed in white. She told him to prepare for death. He asked whether it would be soon. Her answer, as his uncle Lord Westcote recorded it, was "Yes in three days." Another version gives her words as "Prepare to die, you will not exist three days!"

At breakfast the next morning he told the story. The Amphlett sisters and Mrs Flood heard it. So did Rowan Hamilton and Captain Ascough. Mrs Thrale wrote it into her diary. Lyttelton himself partly blamed a recent incident, when a robin flew into a Mrs Dawson's room.

Saturday 27 November. Lyttelton told his cousin Hugh Fortescue, "But you and I, who are gentlemen, shall live to a good old age." That morning he said he would "BILK THE GHOST." He drove down to Pitt Place, and the party passed a cheerful evening. Mr Russel, the music master, played the pianoforte and heard guests say, "We shall jockey the ghost after all." To calm their host, the clocks and watches were put forward half an hour.

He went to bed at eleven. His valet, Faulkner, stirred his rhubarb and mint water with a toothpick. Lyttelton called him a slovenly dog and sent him for a teaspoon. When the man returned, he found his master in a fit. The death was instantaneous.

That same night Miles Peter Andrews was at the Dartford powder mills in Kent. He was expecting Lyttelton for the weekend. About half an hour after he went to bed, his curtains were suddenly pulled aside. Lord Lyttelton stood at the bedside in his robe de chambre and nightcap. "It's all over with me Andrews," the figure said.

Andrews thought it was a trick. He rang for his servant, and in one version threw his slippers. The figure vanished into an adjoining dressing room with no other exit. The room was locked from the inside. They searched the house and garden and found no one. The next day Andrews learned his friend had died. He stayed badly shaken for three years.

No inquest was held. The St James's Chronicle blamed a fit. Dr Fothergill, Lyttelton's physician, said a blood vessel in the gut had burst. Some argued Lyttelton invented the vision and poisoned himself. The accounts also clash. Russel described a collapse in the butler's pantry, while Horace Walpole wrote that he "went into the next room and died in an instant." The DNB treats Andrews' experience as a dream.

Samuel Johnson called it "the most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day." Lady Lyttelton painted a picture in 1780 to commemorate the event. J. W. Croker noted that Andrews "always told the tale reluctantly, and with an evidently solemn conviction of its truth." The story became a classic crisis apparition. Pitt Place was demolished in 1967. Its icehouse survives.