The 1891 Deptford ghost survives mainly through two sceptical retellings. The first is in The Lone-Star of Liberia (1892) by Frederick Alexander Durham, who used it to argue that Londoners were as credulous as anyone. He describes a crowd of thousands turning out at St Paul's Church to see a rumoured spirit, and says it was no more than a trick of the moonlight on handbills posted on the church door.
A later newspaper account from the Maitland Daily Mercury (New South Wales, 15 July 1896), found by the Transpontine blog, adds that a well-known local man who had killed himself in romantic circumstances was lying in the mortuary beside the church awaiting inquest at the time, and that this fed belief in a ghost in a flowing white sheet.
There is no detailed witness testimony here, only the crowd and the explanation. It is included as a documented episode of a ghost scare rather than as a haunting with a settled legend.
Comments