Dorothy Walpole married the man her father forbade, died of smallpox at Raynham in 1726, and became the Brown Lady photographed on its stairs in 1936

Kind 2, with the record. Dorothy Walpole, sister of Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister, grew up at Mannington and Wolterton near Aylsham. She and Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, wanted to marry, and her father forbade it. Townshend married Elizabeth Pelham, who bore ten children and died. He married Dorothy in July 1713, and they had eleven children. She died of smallpox at Raynham in 1726 and was buried in the family crypt in the church across the park. The legend says Townshend learned she had a lover and locked her in the house until she died, away from her children; another version says her coffin held bricks. In 1835 a guest, Colonel Loftus, reported a woman in a brown dress with empty eye sockets. The novelist Frederick Marryat is said to have fired a pistol at the figure, and the family says the bullet is still in a bedroom door. On 19 September 1936 the Country Life photographers Hubert Provand and Indre Shira photographed a veiled figure on the oak staircase; the magazine published it in December 1936. The investigator Joe Nickell concluded it was two images combined. Raynham Hall is still the home of the Townshends. The present head of the family rejects the walled-up and brick-coffin stories and turns away ghost hunters.