MORTON CASE

Opening

In late April 1882 Captain F. W. Despard moved his invalid wife and six children into a house on Pittville Circus Road, Cheltenham, then called Donore and earlier Garden Reach. That June his daughter Rosina, aged 19, saw a tall woman in black at the head of the stairs, her face hidden in a handkerchief held in her right hand. Over the next seven years Rosina, her sisters, servants and neighbours reported the same figure, along with footsteps on the landings.

Frederic Myers of the Society for Psychical Research began inquiries in 1886. In 1892 the Society published Rosina's account, under the pseudonym R. C. Morton, as "Record of a Haunted House". It became the "Morton case", one of the most quoted hauntings in the literature. The real names stayed out of print until 1948.

Timeline

1860sThe house is built, and its first occupants are Henry and Elizabeth Swinhoe. After Elizabeth's death Henry marries Imogen. Both drink heavily.

1876 to 1878Imogen leaves the house shortly before Henry dies in 1876. She dies in Clifton, Bristol, in 1878.

March 1882Captain Despard takes the house. Rosina later writes that none of the family had heard of anything unusual about it.

June 1882Rosina's first sighting, after she hears someone at her door and follows the figure down the stairs until her candle burns out.

29 January 1884Rosina speaks to the figure. It seems about to answer but gives only a slight gasp.

July and August 1884The figure is seen more often and by more people.

1 May 1886Myers, whose mother lives in Cheltenham, hears of the house and begins visiting.

1887 to 1889Sightings become rarer and stop.

1892The Despards leave. Proceedings of the SPR, volume 8, prints the record, pages 311 to 332.

1948B. Abdy Collins's book The Cheltenham Ghost names the Despard family.

Key figures

Rosina Despard, the principal witness, who kept notes of the sightings and later qualified as a doctor. Myers described her as "a lady of scientific training, now preparing to be a physician".

Captain F. W. Despard, her father, who rented the house.

Frederic W. H. Myers, the SPR co-founder who interviewed the household, locals and former servants and edited the report.

Imogen Swinhoe, the former occupant Rosina tentatively identified from a photograph as the figure.

Andrew MacKenzie, the SPR writer who revisited the case in 1982 and 1988.

Physical and documentary trail

The record is Rosina's dated account and letters, statements from other members of the household, and Myers's notes. Rosina tied fine threads across the stairs where the figure walked; it passed without breaking them. She tried to touch it and could not, once cornered it and saw it vanish, and tried to photograph it, but the long exposures needed in poor light defeated her. There is no photograph and no physical trace.

The face was hidden in a handkerchief held in the right hand. This is all I noticed then; but on further occasions, when I was able to observe her more closely, I saw the upper part of the left side of the forehead, and a little of the hair above.

The report also describes sounds that grew louder over time: footsteps on the second-floor landing, bumps against bedroom doors, door handles turning, and in the summer of 1885 heavy thuds on the upper landing. Rosina said each time she went out after hearing the soft footsteps, she saw the figure.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report. The figure's face was hidden by a handkerchief held in the hand, as she describes; nothing in the record mentions a handkerchief "feeling in the air".

Things you might not know

• The husband once went for Gustav Holst. Henry Swinhoe was taken to court after drunkenly trying to upset a pram carrying the infant Holst, who was born in Cheltenham in 1874.
• The house had an earlier fake ghost. During the Swinhoes' time a maidservant dressed as a ghost for Bonfire Night was attacked by a frightened errand boy, and the case went to the magistrates.
• "The Cheltenham Ghost" first meant another house. The name originally belonged to a haunting in Suffolk Street off the Bath Road, which drew enough interest for railway companies to run special trains.
• Myers rated it highly. He called it one of the "most remarkable and best authenticated instances of 'haunting' on record". The psychologist Alan Gauld later called it "the most famous ghost of all".
• The house became a school and then St Anne's. It was later a boys' boarding school and a diocesan house for Gloucester, and it is now flats.

Competing explanations

An apparition. The figure was reported over seven years by several people, not only Rosina, many of whom at first took it for a living woman. G. N. M. Tyrrell read it as a "brooding reminiscence" replaying a former resident's actions.

A living woman. In 1977 Peter Underwood proposed the figure was Captain Despard's mistress, which would explain the hidden face, and that the family misled Myers to avoid scandal. Nothing in the documents supports this, and it does not explain the threads or the vanishing.

Noises and expectation. In 1958 SPR president G. W. Lambert argued that underground water and subsidence produced the sounds, and that the family's alarm primed them to see the figure. He linked the ending of the sightings to changes in the water table after the nearby Dowdeswell Reservoir opened.

A haunted reputation feeding the story. Christian Jensen Romer's 2021 research on the Swinhoe years found the Bonfire Night incident and court case that may have given the house its name. He also judged Myers's investigation minimal, while finding no reason in the sources to disbelieve Rosina.

Later life of the case

MacKenzie's Hauntings and Apparitions (1982) reported three people seeing figures around the house between 1958 and 1961, and his 1988 paper argued the haunting had continued long after 1889. Romer, who lives nearby, writes that the ghost has not been seen for decades.

Finding

The Morton case rests on unusually good testimony for its time: a dated written record by a scientifically minded witness, corroborated by others in the household. None of the natural explanations offered covers the threads, the vanishing and the number of witnesses together, and none has been tested against the house.

What still will not resolve: who or what the woman in black was. The link to Imogen Swinhoe rests on one tentative identification from a photograph, and Myers's inquiry was too slight to rule out ordinary causes.