White Lady

In 1950, a local man named Frederick Sanders wrote about Pluckley's ghosts in the Kentish Express, describing the village as the most haunted in England.

He listed 10 supposed ghosts, including the Red Lady, the White Lady, a highwayman, a miller and the Screaming Man of the Clay Pit.

Sanders wasn't simply inventing every story himself.

He'd collected tales from people he knew, including family members and a former school teacher.

A genuine death becomes the foundation for a narrative that is gradually made more dramatic.

The added details may make the story easier to remember but they can also turn an actual person's life into a fictional tragedy without the audience realising where the history ends.

And then we come to two of Pluckley's most famous ghosts, the Red Lady and the White Lady.

Both are associated with the village churchyard at St Nicholas's Church, a peaceful looking place surrounded by trees, old gravestones and centuries of history.

Today is another Discover a New Musical edition, where you the listener and me the host get to learn about a new show together.

Today we will learn about, all about the musical Tales of Les Dames Blanches.

To tell us a little bit more about the show is Johanna Telander and Mia Moravis.

Hello to the both of you.

Awesome.

All right.

So yeah, we were just speaking with Mia and Johanna about, uh, the new musical, Tales of Les Dames Blanches.

Check that out.

For history's shadow, we're going to Prussia, and to a royal family that for centuries was said to have its own personal warning of death.

A woman dressed entirely in white, she became known as the White Lady of the Hohenzollern.

The Hohenzollerns ruled Brandenburg and later Prussia, eventually becoming the imperial family of Germany.

And according to family tradition, whenever death or disaster was approaching, the White Lady appeared.

Stories about her go back several centuries, and by the 1800s, the legend was well-established enough that newspapers were regularly recounting supposed sightings connected to deaths in the royal family.

Nobody could quite agree on who she was.

And, in the darkest version of the story, Agnes killed her children, only to discover she had misunderstood him completely.

Whether any of that actually happened is another matter.

The White Lady.

And not to get you wrong, I mean, there are ghost ladies of all colors, which I mean in their dress.

White ladies are not always white ladies.

They're always ladies dressed in white.

So La Llorona- Very popular in Mexico.

Penny alleged she assisted in propping up Ed's ghost hunting image.

His renowned 1990 recording of the White Lady, a spirit supposedly inhabiting Union Cemetery in Easton, Connecticut, allegedly captured a week-long graveyard vigil.

That was Penny.

[laughs]

Yeah.

[laughs] Just walking around like a-

Just walking around like a white lady

... like a ghost would do.

Several spirits are here.

The most famous is, of course, the Lady in White.

The White Lady at Crook Castle is said to be the niece of the tempestuous Cuthbert Billingham, the same one who cut off the water supply to the town.

No one quite knows why she haunts the house, but she is said to glide down the stairs and then disappear on St. Thomas Eve, which is December 20th.

We're out there a lot alone in ghost tour season, so either locking up a building or setting something up or whatever, and so we hear a lot during that time.

We did compile some of the common stories that are known, you know, the three-step ghost, the lady in white, the warehouse, Thomas Slack, something called, excuse my French, folklore, and all that kind of good stuff.

But there are, like Caroline said, there's a lot of stories that are personal that people experience when they're working alone.

yeah yeah so you

He was doing his job.

Be careful what you wish for.

And then tell us about The Lady in White.

The Lady in White is a common big house ghost that's actually been noticed by a lot of different people.

"Fear not," said the monk.

"That is Mirren of Hepburn's Tower, the White Lady.

She can materialize herself and appear when she chooses, but she is not reincarnate as I am." Well, after we had gone on, it seemed for hours, as I have described, the monk paused.

"I fear I must leave you," he said suddenly.

The horror of the whole thing so upset me that my foot slipped and I fell down what seemed to be a steep stairway.

As I struck the bottom, I felt my left wrist snap and I fainted.

When I regained my senses for a brief moment, I found that the white lady bearing a taper was bending kindly over me.

She had a lovely face, but as pale as white marble.