I’ve recently taken possession of a book I’ve been after for ages. ‘The Recollections of Sophia Lonsdale’ was published in 1936 and I’m hoping reading it will give me an insight into the world of this fascinating woman, who led the committee which founded the Lichfield High School for Girls in 1892 (later to become The Friary) but was also an ardent adversary of women’s suffrage. 

The chapter headings promise an intriguing look at life in Victorian Lichfield, with chapters on ‘The Close and its Inhabitants’, ‘The Dyott Family’ and ‘A Poor Law Guardian’ still to read. The chapter I’m currently on however is ‘Ghosts’. With dark grey skies and storms brewing overhead, it seems a good time to share some of Sophia’s stranger recollections with you.

In The Precentor’s House, in The Close, a housemaid was caught turning down her bed in the afternoon. When asked to do it later by her mistress she burst into tears. The reason behind her reluctance to do it after dark was that the poor girl had recently seen a man with long hair and feathers in his hat looking at her before he disappeared into a small room leading off her bedroom. Sophia concluded the man was a Cavalier, a lingering spirit still defending Lichfield’s Cathedral Close for the King in a war that ended some two hundred years prior.

Still in The Close, but at The Chancellor’s house, Sophia’s mother saw a woman in a red shawl with long dark hair in the back dining room. A maid who once sat up late one night to let the Lonsdales in after a ball also saw the woman and refused to be alone in that part of the house afterwards. Then, in 1905, a young governess by the name of Miss Rosamon went into the drawing room with the family dog. The poor pooch suddenly let out a howl, as if he’d been kicked and as the governess glanced up she saw a tall woman gliding across the room, before disappearing into one of the walls with a sigh.

When Sophia told her father, the Canon, of these ghostly goings on, the reaction she records is a little surprising. He wasn’t sceptical or shocked, and he certainly wasn’t afraid of no ghost. Instead he was annoyed as he’d, ‘hoped that tiresome thing had gone…it’s so long since anyone has seen it. If it goes on I really must see what I can do about it!’. Did Canon Lonsdale ever get rid of the lady in red or is the house (and its hounds) still haunted?

Sophia’s best known ghost story takes place at the now demolished Yeomanry House. When the girls’ high school moved here from Market Street, the boarders would ask the headmistress to see the baby they heard every night. She told them there was no infant in the house and that they must have mistaken the mewls of a cat for a crying child. The girls however were sure what they heard and Sophia seems to agree. She ends the chapter by saying her friends Captain and Mrs Webb, who lived at the house before the school moved there, had also heard the pitiful cries at night. The site where the house once stood on St John Street is now empty and awaiting redevelopment. Will its future residents be woken at night by these supernatural sounds or was this sad little spirit lost when Yeomanry House was?