Wanstead House was a great mansion in what is now Wanstead Park, in the London Borough of Redbridge. The Ilford Recorder says the house was demolished and sold off in pieces after William Wellesley-Pole ran up large debts. Today the grotto is one of the few reminders of the house.
Catherine Tylney-Long was the original owner of the house and Wellesley-Pole's wife. She died suddenly in 1825 of an intestinal illness, having been abandoned by a husband described as philandering. Supposedly her ghost still drifts through the park, devastated by her treatment.
The Recorder gives no named witness or date of sighting, so the haunting is a romantic tradition attached to a well documented history. The decline of the Wanstead estate is real and recorded; the ghost is the legend. The pin is approximate, set near the grotto in the park.
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