page_title: Bruce Castle
section_title: The Ghostly Lady of Bruce Castle
hierarchical_section_title: Bruce Castle / 17th century: the Hare family / Henry Hare, 2nd Baron Coleraine / The Ghostly Lady of Bruce Castle
caption_attribution_description: Grounds of Bruce Castle, now a public park
context_page_description: Bruce Castle is a Grade I listed 16th-century manor house in Lordship Lane, Tottenham, London. It is named after the House of Bruce who formerly owned the land on which it is built. Believed to stand on the site of an earlier building, about which little is known, the current house is one of the oldest surviving English brick houses. It was remodelled in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
  The house has been home to Sir William Compton, the Barons Coleraine and Sir Rowland Hill, among others. After serving as a school during the 19th century, when a large extension was built to the west, it was converted into a museum exploring the history of the areas now constituting London Borough of Haringey and, on the strength of its connection with Sir Rowland Hill, the history of the Royal Mail. The building also houses the archives of the London Borough of Haringey. Since 1892 the grounds have been a public park, Tottenham's oldest.
context_section_description: Although sources such as Pegram speculate that Constantia committed suicide in the face of a continued relationship between Hare and the Duchess of Somerset, little is known about her life and the circumstances of her early death, and her ghost reputedly haunts the castle. 
  The earliest recorded reference to the ghost appeared in 1858—almost two hundred years after her death—in the Tottenham & Edmonton Advertiser. 
  A lady of our acquaintance was introduced at a party to an Indian Officer who, hearing that she came from Tottenham, eagerly asked if she had seen the Ghostly Lady of Bruce Castle. Some years before he had been told the following story by a brother officer when encamped on a march in India. One of the Lords Coleraine had married a beautiful lady and while she was yet in her youth had been seized with a violent hatred against her—whether from jealousy or not is not known. He first confined her to the upper part of the house and subsequently still more closely to the little rooms of the clock turret. These rooms looked on the balconies: the lady one night succeeded in forcing her way out and flung herself with child in arms from the parapet. The wild despairing shriek aroused the household only to find her and her infant in death's clutches below. Every year as the fearful night comes round (it is in November) the wild form can be seen as she stood on the fatal parapet, and her despairing cry is heard floating away on the autumnal blast.
  The legend has now been largely forgotten, and there have been no reported sightings of the ghost in recent times.
caption: The grounds of Bruce Castle, now a public park
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