Charlotte Dymond's murder is a matter of major, extensively documented 19th-century Cornish criminal history, the case's genuine scale, drawing an estimated 20,000 spectators to Weeks's public execution, reflecting the real and enormous contemporary public fascination with the crime, giving this haunting an unusually solid factual and cultural foundation compared with most of this register's traditions.
The precisely dated annual appearance, on 14 April each year, situates Charlotte among this wider register's smaller number of anniversary-bound hauntings, her continued wearing of the exact clothes in which she died giving witnesses, according to the tradition, an unmistakable visual confirmation of her identity across nearly two centuries of retelling.
The case's substantial cultural afterlife, inspiring Charles Causley's Ballad of Charlotte Dymond among other poetry and song, gives this haunting a documented literary legacy distinct from most of this register's more purely oral traditions, her memorial on Bodmin Moor today standing as both a genuine historical marker and the continuing focus of her annually renewed ghost story.
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