Unexplained encounter: Mum’s ghostly story from Lincolnshire manor

Lincolnshire’s ‘most haunted’ locations have had supposed ghost sightings for hundreds of years. 

But after we shared a selection of the historic spooky tales, readers have been in touch with their own modern ones.

One woman experienced several unexplainable events at Gainsborough Old Hall when she visited with her daughter.

The grand medieval manor was constructed by Sir Thomas Burgh, who allegedly locked his daughter up when she planned to run away with a low-born lover.

The story goes that she soon died of a broken heart, and her spirit haunts the Tower Room and corridors as ‘The Grey Lady’.

Read this unusual encounter, and see if it convinces you to believe or not…

Gainsborough Old Hall.

A spooky encounter

It was spring Bank Holiday 2000. My daughter was not quite two and a half years old. Gainsborough Old Hall had an Open Day, so I took her for a look around. It was a chilly, but bright and sunny spring day.

We were going up the wooden staircase to the bedroom with the four poster bed when she said: “Mummy, follow the lady up the stairs.”

There was nobody there, so I asked: “What lady?”

Then she pointed at nothing and said in quite an agitated voice: “That lady, there! She wants us to follow her.”

So we followed an invisible woman up the stairs.

At another point, she pointed along the hall at a square opening in the wood panelling above and asked: “What’s that man doing in that hole?”

Again, there was nothing there.

Finally, as we were leaving that afternoon, my daughter ran towards the section of the house which has brickwork and three gables with slightly more fancy half-timbering and shouted: “Look, look! It’s on fire! It’s burning!”

Again, there was nothing wrong at all.

I believe she, as a young child, could see past events and people that I, as an adult, could not see.

Many years later at a Hallowe’en event at Gainsborough Old Hall, we found out about the young woman, Elizabeth Burgh, who died of a broken heart and that there is a boy / man who blocks the spiral staircase.

I guess there was a fire, too, at some point and perhaps part of the wall was rebuilt and remodelled.