The Lovely Lady

In September 1884, a Gloucester man named Henry Taylor sat down to write to the newspapers. He had a claim to make, and it was a bold one.

Over the border in Wales, a community of monks had become famous. Their leader, the preacher known as Father Ignatius, had built a monastery in the Black Mountains which he called the new Llanthony, and in 1880 its brothers and some of the boys in their care reported a vision of the Virgin Mary in the fields nearby. The story travelled across Britain. Pilgrims came.

Taylor wanted the country to know that Gloucester had got there first.

His evidence was a cottage. It stood at Llanthony Secunda, Gloucester’s own priory by the docks, built into the old stone gateway that still survived from the medieval house. More than fifteen years earlier, he wrote, a woman had lived there. And one morning, as she lay in bed, she was not alone.

“A beautiful female or lady appeared to rise from the floor of the room.”

The woman described her to anyone who would listen. The lady’s face shone like the sun. Her gown shimmered with all the colours of a rainbow. She looked at the woman in the bed and smiled, and then she was gone, vanishing into a golden mist. When it cleared, the little room under the arch was filled with the scent of flowers.

It might have ended there, one woman’s waking dream. It did not. Later tenants of the cottage said they had seen the lady too. Her fame spread through the streets around the priory, and the local children took her up as their own. They would stop strangers and point at the cottage door:

“That is where the vision of the lovely lady appears.”

To Henry Taylor, there was only one explanation. The lovely lady of Llanthony was the same heavenly visitor the Welsh monks had seen, and Gloucester had been honoured years before them.

But Taylor was an honest correspondent, and he did something many a ghost-hunter has regretted since. He asked a neighbour.

The neighbour was Harry Dyke, a corn porter who worked the warehouses along the docks, and Harry had his own views on the matter. He had known the tenants. In Harry’s account, they were badly behind with the rent. A vision in the bedroom, and a cottage too holy or too haunted to live in, made a most convenient excuse to pack up and leave. In the dockside speech Taylor faithfully recorded, they had set out to gammon the landlord (fool him, that is) and then hook it (run off) before he could collect.

Taylor reported this too. He closed his letter by observing that the line between the sublime and the ridiculous is a thin one.

So which was it? A radiant lady rising through the floorboards in a golden mist, smiling at the sleeper, leaving the room sweet with flowers? Or a family with empty pockets and a landlord at the door, who had heard enough Llanthony ghost stories to know a good one when they needed it?

Perhaps it does not matter as much as Harry thought. The lovely lady was seen, or said to be seen, by more than one household. She was real enough to the children who pointed at the door. And she was not the first fair lady at Llanthony: in 1861 another young woman had met a lady in white at the very same gateway, with three rings on one hand and two on the other.

The cottage is long gone. The gateway still stands, by the docks, where the children once pointed.

You decide.