Hauntings

Mary of Causeway House

Causeway House, Soham

Mary's story carries a specific medical detail unusual among this register's domestic hauntings: she is remembered as having suffered from catalepsy, a real medical condition involving episodes of rigid immobility and reduced responsiveness that, in earlier centuries before the condition was well understood, was sometimes mistaken for death itself, a confusion that gave rise to genuine period anxieties about premature burial. Whether Mary's own catalepsy is connected in the local telling to any specific frightening incident, a mistaken burial, a public collapse, or simply forms part of her general remembered biography without further consequence, is not clarified in the sources consulted for this entry.

Her reported ghost was seen by a guest at the property, who described an old lady dressed in a long black dress, a description said to match the traditional account of Mary's own appearance closely enough for those familiar with the house's history to identify the figure immediately. No date for either Mary's own life or the guest's sighting has been traced in the sources consulted for this entry.

The pairing of a specific, named medical condition with a matched physical description in the sighting itself gives Causeway House's haunting more individual character than many of this register's more generic elderly-woman ghosts, Mary's catalepsy functioning as a small but distinctive biographical detail that keeps her story recognisably her own rather than interchangeable with any number of similarly dressed grey and black-clad ladies reported elsewhere.

The property's current use and public accessibility could not be confirmed for this entry.
Evidence
Single witness account
Access
Access unrecorded
Location
52.335, 0.337 (Sited to the building or field)

Sources: Haunted Places, "Soham, Cambridgeshire" [other]

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