The Great British Ghost Tour, drawing on Antony Hippisley Coxe, says local lore held that the cliffs around Paviland were haunted, and that the Red Lady was a woman who had gone into the cave looking for treasure, was trapped there by a storm and died, and came back to haunt the place. The discovery of a red-stained "lady" in the cave, the same source suggests, gave the story new life.
There is contemporary evidence that the ghost had some currency. In March 1917 a writer signing himself "Observer" in the Cambria Daily Leader, in a column on Swansea ghosts, told of an English tourist who came back from a holiday in Gower and was asked in all seriousness by a student of the occult in London whether he had seen "the White Lady of Paviland". The colour of the lady had changed, but the idea of a female ghost in the cave was clearly in circulation.
The irony is that the one certain fact about the Red Lady is that she was not a lady. Whatever walks on the cliffs above Goat's Hole, the young man buried there with his ochre and his mammoth-ivory rods is a deliberate burial made tens of thousands of years ago, and the ghost legend is a footnote to a real archaeological misidentification.
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