Grace Dieu Priory was an independent Augustinian priory founded around 1235 to 1241 by Roesia de Verdun, lying between the villages of Belton and Thringstone near the A512, a genuinely significant medieval religious foundation in its own right. Its nuns, who called themselves the White Nuns of St Augustine in reference to their distinctive white habits and were formally forbidden from ever leaving the priory's own precinct during their religious life, were finally dispersed at the priory's dissolution in 1538, leaving behind the ruined shell that still survives, weathered but recognisable, today. For at least the last eighty years, and by some local accounts considerably longer than that, people visiting or simply passing the ruins have reported a White Lady: a female figure, often described as entirely without visible facial features, seen drifting among the old stonework or crossing the nearby road specifically at dusk, with some witnesses also independently describing faint chanting or unexplained lights moving among the walls.
One version of the story gives the ghost a specific identity, naming her as Agnes Litherland, prioress of Grace Dieu around 1530, said to have had a child outside her sacred vows, a scandal severe enough within the story's own telling that the child was drowned and Agnes herself walled up alive inside the priory as punishment for her transgression. This reads, on close examination, considerably more like a moralising folk tale constructed to warn against exactly this kind of religious failing than like any event actually supported by surviving documentary evidence from the period.
A frequently retold modern anecdote describes a bus driver and conductor who stopped their bus to let on what they took to be an entirely ordinary waiting passenger standing near the ruins, only to find absolutely no one there once the doors had actually opened for them to board. Taken together, this stands as one of the stronger and more consistently repeated ghost traditions found anywhere in the county, even though the White Lady's supposed identity as Agnes Litherland remains firmly folklore rather than documented historical record.
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