The Lady at the Gate

In the first week of July 1861, the Gloucester Journal carried a short report from the edge of the city. A ghost, it said, had been seen at Llanthony.

This was Gloucester’s Llanthony, not the famous ruin in the Black Mountains. In 1136 the canons of the Welsh priory, tired of raids and hard winters, came down to Gloucester and founded a daughter house beside the Severn. They called it Llanthony Secunda: the second Llanthony. For four centuries it grew rich. Then came the Dissolution, and by the nineteenth century what remained was a scatter of walls, a gateway and a farm, with the new canal and the docks crowding in around it.

It was a lonely place after dark. That is where our witness found herself.

She was a young woman of the town, walking home from a holiday at Hempsted, the village just beyond the priory. The evening was cloudy. As she passed the old gateway, she stepped through it to look round the ruins.

A figure in white was coming towards her.

It was a lady: young, fair and, as the Journal put it with a perfectly straight face, “of course supernaturally lovely.” She came within a few paces. She raised one hand. Then she turned aside and was gone.

The young woman fled. By the time the story reached the newspaper, it had already been told and retold across the neighbourhood, and one detail had fixed itself in every telling. The witness was certain of it, and would not be moved: the ghost wore three rings on one hand, and two on the other.

It is a strange thing to notice in a moment of terror. Yet it is exactly the kind of thing people do notice. Not the face, which blurs, nor the words, if any were spoken, but a small bright particular that the eye seizes and will not let go. Five rings, counted in the gloom of a summer evening, on the hand of a woman who should not have been there.

Who was she? The report does not say, and nobody seems to have offered a name. A priory of canons is not an obvious home for a fair young lady in white, and the rings suggest wealth rather than a nun’s vows. But Llanthony had a long life before it fell. Its lands passed through many hands after the Dissolution, and great houses leave behind more stories than records.

The Journal was not inclined to take any of it too seriously. Its closing lines are among the best in any Victorian ghost report:

“This tale has, we understand, excited much curiosity and alarm among the elderly ladies in the neighbourhood of Lanthony, and the young woman has been submitted to several severe cross-examinations, though, we are informed, she still adheres to her original statement.”

You can picture it. The front parlours of the cottages near the docks. The tea poured. The young woman, called upon again and again to describe the lady, the gateway, the hand. The elderly ladies leaning in, probing for the weak point. And the witness, unshaken, insisting on the rings.

She never changed her story. As far as the record goes, nobody ever proved her wrong.

The lady in white was not the last strange visitor to the priory. A little over twenty years later, the newspapers would be writing about Llanthony again, and about another lovely lady, this time in a cottage built into the gateway itself.

The gateway still stands.