Lord Lyttelton's health had for some time been bad; he had made his will a few weeks before, and his nights…
- Date of account
- Published 1897
- Source
- The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
- Reference
- The Book of Dreams and Ghosts · selected passage 124
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
Lord Lyttelton's health had for some time been bad; he had made his will a few weeks before, and his nights were horror-haunted
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyLord Lyttelton's health had for some time been bad; he had made his will a few weeks before, and his nights were horror-haunted. A little boy, his nephew, to whom he was kind, used to find the wicked lord sitting by his bed at night, because he dared not be alone. So Lockhart writes to his daughter, Mrs. Hope Scott. {131} He had strange dreams of being in hell with the cruel murderess, Mrs. Brownrigg, who "whipped three female 'prentices to death and hid them in the coal-hole". Such a man might have strange fancies, and a belief in approaching death might bring its own fulfilment. The hypothesis of a premeditated suicide, with the story of the ghost as a last practical joke, has no corroboration.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.