The Brown Lady Photograph

What is on the record

Raynham Hall is a country house in Norfolk, in the east of England. It was built in the seventeenth century for the Townshend family.

On 19 September 1936 a London photographer, Captain Hubert C. Provand, was there on a job for Country Life. That is the magazine that prints photos of English houses for people who like looking at English houses. He was working the main staircase with his assistant, Indre Shira. Provand had his head under the cloth, setting up a second shot.

Shira's account is this. He saw a vapoury form on the stairs above them. Slowly it took the shape of a woman coming down. He shouted to Provand to fire. Provand took the cap off the lens and set off the flash. Only later, when Shira told him what he had seen, did either man think the plate showed more than stairs.

The photograph ran in Country Life on 26 December 1936, a Christmas issue. It ran again in Life magazine on 4 January 1937. That is how a picture taken in a Norfolk hallway became one of the most copied photos of its time. It shows a staircase. On it is a shape, bright and unclear, that hints at a figure in something long and pale.

The house had a story first

This matters, because it cuts both ways.

The figure is said to be Dorothy Walpole. She lived from 1686 to 1726. She was the sister of Robert Walpole, generally regarded as Britain's first prime minister. She married into the house. By the family's account, she did not have a happy time of it.

Reports of her on that staircase go back 100 years before the camera. At Christmas 1835 a Colonel Loftus and a guest named Hawkins said they saw her near their bedrooms. Both noted the dated brown dress. That is where the name comes from. In 1836 Captain Frederick Marryat, a naval officer and novelist, said the figure grinned at him in a malicious and diabolical manner. He said he fired his revolver at it. In 1926 Lady Townshend said that her son and his friend had seen the figure on the stairs.

So by 1936 two men with a camera walked into a house where all knew what was meant to be on the staircase. Does that make the photograph easier to believe, or harder? That is the whole fight.

What was found when anyone looked

No fraud has ever been shown. No test has cleared it either.

The doubts raised have stayed the same for 90 years. A double exposure: the plate used twice, the second image faint over the first. Light leaking into the camera during the flash. Grease or a smear on the lens. And one point made more than once. The shape looks like a standard plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, the kind found in any church supplier's list, laid over the stairs.

Against that: the two men stood by their account for the rest of their lives. The negative was checked at the time by people who said they found no sign it had been touched. And neither man made money from it in any way that anyone has traced.

What is left

A staircase. A plate exposed on a Thursday afternoon in September. Two accounts that have never been broken and never been proved.

The honest short version is the one Country Life itself has more or less kept to for 90 years. This is a photograph of a staircase with a shape on it. It was taken by men who said what they saw. No one has been able to prove what it is either way.