Eleanor Cobham's underlying history is a matter of genuine, well documented fifteenth-century record rather than invented legend: as Duchess of Gloucester, wife of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, she was tried and convicted in 1441 on charges of treasonable necromancy, accused of employing astrologers and a self-proclaimed witch to cast a horoscope predicting the death of the young King Henry VI, a charge carrying obvious and serious political implications given Gloucester's own position near the throne. Her conviction led to a public penance and lifelong imprisonment, moved between several different custodial locations until her death in 1452.
Her specific connection to Hastings, and to whichever building or site now carries the local tradition of her lingering presence, is considerably less clearly documented in the sources consulted for this entry than the broader outline of her genuine historical case, and it has not been possible to establish with confidence whether Hastings was one of her actual documented places of confinement or whether the local tradition has attached her well known story to the town more loosely. Her case remains one of the best documented instances of a politically motivated witchcraft and necromancy accusation in fifteenth-century England, predating the better known witch trial era of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by well over a hundred years.
The reported haunting itself is recorded only as a general sense of her presence rather than as a specific sighting or apparition, consistent with a tradition built more around the genuine weight of her real historical downfall than around any single dramatic ghost story, and this entry is tagged accordingly as a single, thinly documented report resting on an otherwise well attested historical figure.
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