Hello again R. L. Stein Story Club members. I'm Ivy, your beautiful host and keeper of those

strange and spooky tales from the hidden vault of R. L. Stein. Today is another chilling tale.

This spirited tale story club members might make you take the elevator instead of the stairs.

It's one I call the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall. Since the invention of photography in 1826,

photographers around the world have captured images, many ghostly in nature. In fact, the occupation

of capturing ghosts on camera was aptly named Spirit Photography,

which is still a popular picture-taking subject nearly 200 years later.

One of the most famous ghost photographs ever taken came out in Norfolk, England in 1936,

when photographers from Country Life magazine published a picture of a ghostly female figure

floating above a grand staircase in Raynham Hall.

It's one of the most widely seen ghost photographs and is easily found online. The question is,

is the photograph real or just a clever hoax? According to legend, the aforementioned ghost is

Lady Dorothy Walpole. Born in 1686, Dorothy was the sister of Robert Walpole, the first

Prime Minister of Great Britain. She died in Wainham Hall in 1726 due to smallpox. The first

sighting of the Brown Lady was in the Christmas of 1835. Lord Charles Townsend, who occupied

the hall at the time, invited guests to attend the holiday celebration. Two guests claimed to have

seen a lady in a brown dress outside of their bedrooms. She was described as having empty

eye sockets that were dark in her glowing face. A year later, another sighting occurred, this time

from Captain Frederick Marriott, a popular novelist who stayed in one of the proclaimed haunted rooms.

He wanted to prove that ghost

stories were invented only by local smugglers to keep people away from the area. It all kind of sounds

like the plot of a Scooby-Doo episode, am I right? However, Captain Marriott wrote extensively about

...