Hauntings

The Pink Lady of Jesmond Towers

Jesmond Towers, Newcastle upon Tyne

Death said to have occurred 1890

Jesmond Towers is a turreted Victorian Gothic mansion built during the 1860s for the industrialist Isaac Lowthian Bell, later repurposed as a Catholic convent school under the name La Sagesse from 1912 onward. Its ghost story concerns a woman named Emily, said in local tradition to have thrown herself from the building's own battlements in 1890, driven to that desperate act by a state of overwhelming grief following her husband's death.

She is known today as the Pink Lady, apparently taking her name from the colour most consistently associated with her reported apparition, and she is said to haunt the school still, her presence a fixture of the building's own institutional folklore passed down through generations of pupils and staff alike.

As with many single-named Victorian tragedy ghosts recorded throughout this collection, no burial record, newspaper report, or other primary source has ever surfaced to actually confirm Emily's real existence, and the specific date of 1890 sits slightly awkwardly against the building's known ownership history, since the Bell family were still in residence at that particular time rather than the later convent occupants the story would seem to better fit. The story nonetheless carries enough genuine currency among former pupils and local historians to count as an established piece of Jesmond folklore in its own right, rather than a one-off invention, even if it ultimately cannot be checked against any documented death.

Jesmond Towers has operated as a school; not routinely open to the public.
Evidence
Single witness account
Access
Private property
Location
54.998, -1.603 (Sited to the building or field)

Sources: Icy Sedgwick, "Meet the Grey Lady ghosts of Newcastle upon Tyne" [other]

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