According to the account, on a summer morning in 1745 Mrs Jane Lowe, housekeeper to Mr Pringle of Clifton Park, saw the form of a lady walking in the avenue by a rivulet that runs into the Kale Water. It looked like one of her master's daughters, who had been away for a long time, about a hundred miles south of Paris. She told Mr Pringle, who laughed and said it was Miss Chattow of Morebattle, but he went with her to the spot. As they neared it the figure sprang into the water and disappeared.
The family laughed at them, including the minister of Linton, the Reverend Mr Turnbull, who was at breakfast that morning. About three months later Turnbull was at the house again and, seeing a ragged, lame, lean man approaching, joked, "Here comes another apparition." It was Mr Pringle's second son, unseen for over ten years, who said he had been a slave near Tunis for seven years and was ransomed just as he was to be put to death. Returning through France he had called on his sister and learned that she had died on 25 May that summer at about five in the morning. That was the moment he was saved from death and, he said, thought he saw her. Mrs Lowe said it was the same day she had shown Mr Pringle the apparition, and the minister confirmed it. The narrative was found in his study after his death.
The story reached print in Horace Welby's Signs Before Death (1825) and then Ingram's Haunted Homes (1897), so it was written down some decades after the events and passed through several hands.
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