In 1891, eighteen-year-old Mary Jane Langley visited a photographer's studio at the junction of Witham and Great Union Street in Hull to have her portrait taken, an entirely ordinary errand for a young Victorian woman. It was the last confirmed sighting of her alive. She was later found dead in Long Lane, Preston, her throat cut, and the police investigation that followed was, even by the standards of the time, widely regarded as bungled. One suspect was eventually charged, but nobody was ever convicted, and several people, including the photographer whose studio she had visited that day, came under suspicion without the case ever being resolved.
Local historian and paranormal researcher Mike Covell has since drawn attention to contemporary newspaper reports linking the case to Frederick Bailey Deeming, a man who had just been released from Hull Jail under the alias Harry Lawson and was at liberty in the city at the time Langley was killed. Deeming's own later history is genuinely chilling: he would go on to be hanged in Australia for the murder of his wife and children, and has since been proposed by some researchers as a possible Jack the Ripper suspect, though nothing formally ties him to Langley's death beyond the striking coincidence of his presence in Hull that same year.
The building where Langley was last seen alive went on to house a funeral parlour for more than a century afterwards, an occupation that feels, in retrospect, grimly fitting, and it now operates under the Annison name as a venue for organised ghost hunts. Visitors and staff report seeing the figure of a young woman believed to be Mary, and paranormal investigation groups have promoted the site as one of Hull's most active locations for exactly that reason. What anchors this story more firmly than most is its unsolved core: the murder itself is real, formally documented, and remains officially unsolved to this day. The ghost, as with any haunting, is a matter of report rather than record, but the crime behind it is not in question at all.
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