The Green Lady of the Golden Lion is unusually well anchored in print for a hotel haunting, her story traceable to a specific, genuinely surprising documentary source: an 1893 edition of the Official Guide to the Great Eastern Railway, a practical travel publication rather than any dedicated ghost-story collection, suggesting the haunting was already sufficiently well known and accepted locally by the 1890s to be worth mentioning even in a straightforward railway guide aimed at ordinary travellers.
Her activity is consistently reported within two specific rooms of the hotel, numbers 12 and 13, and takes a single, repeated and relatively gentle form: pulling the bedclothes from sleeping guests, an intimate and mildly unsettling disturbance rather than anything more frightening or violent. The nickname Ivy, and the broader Green Lady designation, follow the familiar English pattern of colour-coded anonymous female ghosts recorded at dozens of other sites across this register, though the 1893 print reference gives this particular Green Lady more documentary weight than most of her grey, white and blue counterparts elsewhere.
No identity, death, or originating tragedy has been established for Ivy beyond the bedclothes-pulling activity itself, and over a century of continuous reporting, from an 1893 railway guide through to modern guest accounts, has apparently done nothing to resolve who she actually was in life. The Golden Lion's own long service as a coaching inn and later hotel has given her more than a hundred and thirty years of documented continuity in which to keep disturbing the sleep of its guests.
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