The story survives because a specific, identifiable person wrote it down. J. A. Sparvel-Bayly, a Victorian antiquarian who contributed folklore and local history notes to Essex publications of the period, lived at Burghstead Lodge in Billericay in the late 1870s and early 1880s and recorded the tale of the veiled woman during his time there, which is why the account carries a name and an approximate date rather than surviving as pure anonymous oral tradition.
As Sparvel-Bayly told it, a nurse was attending a dying man in an upstairs room on the south-west side of the house. On two consecutive nights she saw a woman standing over the bed, dressed in a green gown with her face hidden behind a veil, who vanished when the nurse tried to approach her. On the third night, rather than let the figure disappear again, the nurse crossed the room and lifted the veil herself. What she saw beneath it was never recorded in any surviving account, Victorian or otherwise, and that omission is very much the point of the story as it has been told ever since: whatever the nurse saw was apparently too much to describe. By the following morning, the patient had died, and the nurse herself had lost her reason. She did not recover, and died a few months later, never having spoken of what lay behind the veil.
Folklorists classify this type of story as a crisis apparition, a figure appearing specifically at the moment of, or shortly before, a death, a category with many recorded examples across Victorian ghost-lore, though few carry the additional, deliberately withheld detail of an unveiling with no described result. The building itself has long since changed function, serving today as Billericay's library and registry office, a considerably more mundane role for a house that once, if Sparvel-Bayly's account is to be believed, cost a nurse her sanity and her life within the space of three nights.
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