The genuine archaeological discovery of an 11th-century skeleton within the cave system gives this haunting a real excavated find as its starting point, though the specific identification of the remains as belonging to a witch appears to rest on local tradition and the cave's own wider folkloric reputation rather than on any forensic or documentary evidence traced in the sources consulted for this entry.
Cheddar Gorge's caves are separately and much more famously associated with Cheddar Man, Britain's oldest nearly complete human skeleton, dating to the Mesolithic period, and the witch skeleton recorded here, a distinct and considerably more recent 11th-century find, should not be confused with that far older and better authenticated discovery, the caves evidently having yielded human remains from several widely separated periods across their long history of excavation.
This haunting sits alongside the separately recorded ghosts of Lady Elizabeth Somerset and a Knight Templar as one of three distinct traditions attached to the Cheddar Gorge cave system within this register, the caves' own genuinely long and continuous history of human use, from prehistoric burial through medieval activity to modern show-cave tourism, giving them an unusually deep well of material for ghost lore to draw on.
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