Dudley Castle’s grey lady ghost
THERE are many ghosts said to haunt the Black Country and one of the most celebrated is the Grey Lady of Dudley Castle. This picture from the Bugle collection is said to have captured the spirit as she made her mournful progress about the ruins.
The photograph was taken on August 30, 2014, by Dean and Amy Harper, a Birmingham couple on a visit to the famous Black Country landmark. Amy took a snap from the castle’s keep looking across to the Sharrington Range that was built in the 1540s on the orders of John Dudley, later the Duke of Northumberland, who was executed in 1553 for his plot to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne of England.
When Amy and Dean looked at their picture they spotted a strange light in the upper storey and, in the doorway below, what appears to be the figure of a woman dressed in grey. Was this the famous Grey Lady? The ghost is said to be Dorothy Beaumont, wife of Lieutenant-colonel John Beaumont, second in command of the
Royalist garrison at the castle in the civil wars of the 1640s.
Dorothy died on April 26, 1646. Seven months earlier she had given birth to a daughter, Frances, but the child died and was buried at St Edmund’s Church.
Dorothy’s dying wish was that she should be laid to rest alongside her daughter and that her husband be at her funeral, but neither came to pass.
In the months following Frances’s burial, Colonel Thomas Levenson, commander of the Dudley garrison, ordered the demolition of St Edmund’s to prevent it being used by the beseiging Parliamentarians and to give his own gunners a wider field of fire.
Parliamentary forces allowed Dorothy’s body to be taken from the castle and buried at St Thomas’s Church, but her husband was not allowed to go with her.
Denied her dying wish, Dorothy is said to haunt the castle ever since.