Badby Wood lies just south of Daventry and is better known for its bluebells than for ghosts. Kettering author Marian Pipe, in Northamptonshire Ghosts and Legends, tells of a woman said to have been murdered in the 1800s whose spectre rides the wood on a white horse.
In the story, a wealthy couple named Fitzgerald lived at Badby and were not happily married. Mrs Fitzgerald had a lover at Fawsley whom she would visit on her magnificent white horse. When the affair was discovered her husband's jealousy took over. One day when she returned from a meeting she found him waiting for her in the servants' quarters with a gun. Several local people have since reported seeing her ghost on the white horse in the wood. Northants Live ties the tale to Fawsley House and its Dower House, the ruin in nearby Fawsley Park.
One witness is named in the newspaper account: lorry driver Brian Birchall, who was driving up the hill just past Badby in the early hours when he saw a woman in an old fashioned long white dress mounted on a horse. The article does not give the year of his sighting.
Neither the Fitzgeralds nor the murder is given a precise date or documented in any record found, and the tale has the shape of a standard unfaithful wife legend. It is recorded here as a local tradition with one modern witness account, and the pin sits on the wood, not on any specific spot.
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