The Pink Lady
By Lisa Folkard(lisa.folkard@bt-sys.co.uk)
Thornham is a very small quiet village in the heart of the Suffolk
countryside, nothing really goes on here but just like many other Suffolk
villages, it has its own(alleged) ghost. I have put "alleged" as until
November 1995 I had never seen or known of anyone to have seen it. Loads
of stories are always being told of people that have had the experience,
but I didn't actually know any of them personally. Before I go on, I
will give you a bit of background to the story. Apparently, in the early
19th Century a girl worked as a maid for the local land owner Lord
Henniker and they wanted to get married. Obviously, this was not the
sort of girl that a man like Henniker wanted as a daughter-in-law, so he
set about putting a stop to the proceedings. Each evening after finishing
work, the girl walked from Thornham Hall home to her parents house about 2
miles away. To get to her home she had to walk through quite a large wood.
It appears that Lord Henniker ordered his Game Keeper to wait for the girl
in the woods and then set his dogs on her when she passed. The girl was
killed by the dogs and left to rot in the undergrowth. Her parents found
her body the next morning when they went to look for her when she had not
returned home. Now for my part of the story. Over the years the wood has
become smaller and smaller and now only a fraction of it remains(the house
in which the girls lived is still there in the middle of the remaining part).
A road has been built which goes right through what was the thickest part
of the wood, and is quite a busy road. One November night, a friend and
I were walking along the raod after having been to the local Bonfire Party.
It was only 8:30pm but it was very dark and cloudy. We were happily walking
along Thornham Road when I suddenly went very cold, being November this
was not unusual so I pulled my coad around me. Despite this, I was still
cold and suddenly had a very funny feeling, I can't describe how it felt but
it was really odd. We carried on walking and chatting when suddenly
Michelle(my friend) stopped dead and stared ahead. "What on earth is that?"
she whispered pointing in front of us. A few yards ahead we could see a sort
of yellowish glow coming out of the trees. "It's probably a car or something
coming the other way." I replied, but I wasn't sure. We stayed where we
were and continued to watch the glow. It moved out of the trees and into the
road in front of us. It definarely wasn't a car's headlights, it was about
the same size as us and moving quite quickly. Suddenly, we could hear
dogs barking and the light stopped for a few seconds just as it reached
the other side of the road, it seemed to get smaller and smaller and then just
disappeared. We both looked at each other and ran. It was about 1.5 miles
back to our houses, but we ran in silence all the way. When we got home, we
were bother so scared that we couldn't speak. My dad asked us what was
wrong, thinking that we had been attacked or something. We tried to tell
him what we had seen, but it came out all muddled. He asked where exactly
we had been standing and we said that it was just opposite the last remaining
part of the woods. He looked at us both and said "well, I think you've
just seen the Pink Lady". Obviously, we didn't really believe him, there
must have been another explanation. So he took us to see a friend of his
who had said that he'd seen her when he was younger. He did not know what
had happened to us(Dad said that we were just visiting) and when we asked
him about what he had sen, his story matched ours exactly. Michelle and I
don't walk along Thornham Road anymore, but I often go through in my car.
I've never seen anything since, and don't want to.
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