The Lady in Grey is said to have first appeared to the vicar in the 1880s while he was giving communion. He took her for a parishioner but noticed her Elizabethan style dress, and when he went to the altar rail she disappeared.
In 1902 the choirboy Frank Mitchell said the ghost was often talked about in the choir. He never saw her, but other boys, including the vicar's son, said they felt her brush past on the narrow stairs to the bell tower with a sound of rustling skirts. In the Second World War, Home Guard men on lookout duty in the tower reported the same thing on the belfry stairs.
The Dark Oxfordshire article cites the Strange Thame pages and Thame.net for this, and says it has found no suggestion who she might be. It also notes that St Mary's at Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire has its own woman in grey, so the tales may have been mixed. The spread of dated reports over sixty years makes it a stable local tradition, tagged traditional.
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