Katherine "Kitty" Canham was the wife of the vicar of Thorpe-le-Soken when she left him for a member of the aristocracy, becoming his mistress or bigamous second wife (accounts differ on the exact legal standing of the arrangement) under the style of Lady Dalmeny. She died abroad in Verona, and, according to the tradition attached to her, asked before her death to be brought home to Thorpe for burial. Her body was duly shipped back to England packed in a chest, a common enough method of transporting a corpse over distance in the period, before refrigeration or embalming for long transit were readily available. It was seized by customs officers at Harwich on suspicion of smuggling, since a sealed chest of the right size and weight to raise suspicion was exactly what a smuggler's cargo might look like on that stretch of coast.
Once opened and the contents identified, the chest was released and Kitty Canham was buried at Thorpe-le-Soken in 1752, reportedly in the presence of both the husband she had left and the man she had left him for. It is a detail that, if accurate, would have made for a genuinely remarkable graveside scene, though it rests on local tradition rather than any parish record specifying who attended. The ghost story that later attached itself to the church, a grey or white lady seen near the grave, is a comparatively minor addition to a story whose factual core (elopement, bigamy or near-bigamy, a body shipped home in a chest and stopped by customs) is already dramatic enough to have circulated on its own merits.
The difficulty in treating this as fully documented history rather than well-established local legend is that the exact chain of primary sources (parish burial records, any contemporary newspaper account of the customs seizure, correspondence confirming her circumstances in Verona) has not been assembled for this record, and the story as told locally may have accumulated embellishment over nearly three centuries in the way such stories reliably do.
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