Lund's Court is one of York's genuinely narrow medieval snickelways, a passage barely wide enough for two people to pass each other comfortably, running between Low Petergate and Swinegate through the very heart of the old city. For years it was better known locally as Mad Alice Lane, after Alice Smith, who local tradition says actually lived on the lane and was hanged at York Castle in 1825. The popular version of her story has her driven first to violence and then to genuine insanity after years of sustained beatings from her own husband, before finally being tried and executed, guilty, in the telling, of little more than the madness that years of abuse had left her with.
Her ghost is said to drift along the passage after dark even now, and the lane remains a genuine fixture on York's own ghost walks, tours that tend to lean fully into the theatrical, dramatic version of her story rather than dwelling on its uncertain factual basis.
It is worth being honest here about how thin the actual documentary trail behind the story really is: of the women recorded as having been publicly hanged anywhere in England between 1800 and 1868, none is actually recorded as an Alice executed specifically in York, which suggests the name and date may well have been attached to the lane after the fact, or that records of this particular case have simply not survived to the present day. The story is told here as the well-established local legend it genuinely is, not as any kind of settled historical fact.
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