Rough Wood Chase Local Nature Reserve in Willenhall carries an unusually specific set of three distinct hauntings for a stretch of ordinary woodland, rather than the single figure or story more typical of rural sites of this kind. The first is described simply as a mad nun, the second as a suicide, neither given any further identifying detail in the sources available, no name, no date, no clear account of circumstance.
The third and most specific of the three is a white woman, identified in local tradition as Pauline Kelly, said to have vanished from the area in the mid nineteenth century without her disappearance ever being satisfactorily explained at the time or since. The naming gives this particular strand of the reserve's folklore considerably more texture than the other two, though no source has been found offering a fuller account of who Pauline Kelly actually was or the exact circumstances surrounding her disappearance beyond that bare claim.
Taken together, the mad nun, the suicide, and Pauline Kelly suggest a reserve that has become, over time, something of a local repository for several separate and otherwise largely undocumented pieces of tragedy-adjacent folklore, rather than a site built around one coherent, traceable haunting.
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