The Wilful Lady of Charles Fort

Charles Fort, near Kinsale, in Ireland, was built around 1667. It has been haunted, from very shortly after that time, by a White Lady. In life, she bore the name Wilful Warrender; in death, she seems to have a grudge against men of officer rank. And no wonder.

In the late seventeenth century, a strict disciplinarian, a Colonel Warrender (his given name is not recorded) took command of Charles Fort. He was a widower, the father of an only daughter, who had been given the name Wilful–a not uncommon name at the time, although it strikes our modern ears strangely.

Wilful was engaged when she and her father arrived at Charles Fort, and, as soon as they were settled in, she was married in a lavish ceremony. Some say her husband was, like her father, a military man, a young lieutenant named Browne; others, that he was a nobleman called Sir Trevor Ashurst.

At any rate, on their wedding night, the young lovers went out onto the ramparts of the fort for a stroll before going to bed. As they walked and talked, hand in hand, Wilful happened to look over the battlements and, on the rocks below, saw some extraordinarily beautiful flowers.

And–true to her name Wilful–nothing would do but she must have them, then and there.

Sir Trevor–I prefer that name, snob that I am–was about to doff his coat and climb down after the blossoms when one of the sentries on duty volunteered to climb down in his stead and gather the coveted flowers, providing that Sir Trevor would take his place at sentry until he got back. To this Sir Trevor agreed. He sent Wilful back to their quarters to wait for him, took the sentry’s gun and coat, and began walking back and forth along the ramparts as the soldier began the climb down to Wilful’s flowers.

That climb down, and his return, took longer than expected. The sentry had been gone more than an hour, and Sir Trevor had had an exhausting day. He settled down with his back to the parapet and within a very few minutes drifted off to sleep.

Within a very few minutes more, he was dead.

His father-in-law–fort’s commander and martinet–came along on a last personal inspection of the guard before retiring to bed himself. In the darkness, he didn’t recognize his son-in-law. He merely saw a sentry asleep. He challenged him.

And Sir Trevor, deeply asleep, didn’t answer.

Colonels in the old days could get away with many things they’d be imprisoned for nowadays. Colonel Warrender pulled a pistol and shot the sleeper through the heart. Sir Trevor never woke.

Colonel Warrender came closer, and by the light of the moon saw, to his horror, that the man he had just shot was his brand-new son-in-law. In a panic he summoned the post surgeon, but there was nothing he could do.

Who broke the news to Wilful, no one knows: her guilt-ridden father, the surgeon, the wife of some married officer. All that is known is that, once she woke and understood that her husband was dead, and that her father had killed him, she ran screaming in rage and grief from her bridal bed, widowed before she truly was a wife, and flung herself to her death from the battlements.

Before morning, her horrified father took his own life.

It seems that both Sir Trevor and his killer rest in peace, but Wilful never has. Almost from the time of her death, there have been reports of a White Lady appearing and disappearing before people’s startled eyes at Charles Fort. And this White Lady has been known to offer violence to some officers who serve there.

She usually walks into some officer’s quarters, making no sound at all as she ascends the stairs to the area where her room had been on that dreadful night. Usually, once she is spotted, she simply vanishes into thin air. Those who have seen her say that her clothing is very old-fashioned and white, like a bridal gown.

Once, the small daughter of a Major Black, who served at Charles Fort in the early nineteenth century, was watching two orderlies pack her father’s gear for a short trip when, out of the blue, the child asked, “Who’s that lady watching us over the banister?” The two soldiers looked up but saw no one; the little girl insisted, though, that she had seen a pretty lady, dressed all in white, smiling at her from the staircase.

Some years later, a nanny, in the nursery with another officer’s children, saw a figure of a lady in white appear out of nowhere in one corner of the room. Startled, she watched as the lady crossed to the bedside of the officer’s young son, who was sound asleep. The lady stood watching the boy for a few moments, then reached out and caught his wrist in her hand. The boy woke, shrieking, “Take your cold hand off my wrist!” whereupon the lady simply vanished.

In at least two other cases, her appearances were far less benign. In the autumn of 1922, it was reported that the fort’s medical officer was found unconscious at the foot of the staircase where the White Lady had been seen many times before. When he came to, he said that, as he bent over to get the key to his rooms out from beneath the doormat, where he usually hid it, he was grabbed around the torso and dragged across the hall and bodily thrown down the staircase. As he was falling, he caught a glimpse of a young woman in an old-fashioned wedding dress.

Scarcely a year later, a Captain Javes, resident at the fort, was going up to his quarters when he heard odd rattling noises from behind his locked door. At the same time, he caught a glimpse of a woman in a white gown rushing down the hall, away from him. When he tried to get into his quarters, he found the door was apparently locked from the inside, although he had not left it so. Captain Javes set his shoulder to the door and pushed with all his strength against it. Just then, he reported later, a blast of cold wind blew past him, and he was picked up by some unseen force and thrown headlong down the stairway. He lay unconscious for some time before being found by a fellow officer.

Perhaps, in the cases of the two children, she was simply pining for the children she and Sir Trevor might have had. As for the medical officer and the captain, though, it sounds like spite: against a member of the profession who could not save her husband’s life. . .

and against a man who, for some reason, may have reminded her of the father who had widowed her on her wedding day.

Wilful by name, and wilful for eternity.

I first read the story of the Wilful Lady of Kinsale in St. John D Seymour and Harry L. Neligan’s book True Irish Ghost Stories (1914; revised edition 1926). Other details come from David Knight’s Best True Ghost Stories of the 20th Century (1984) and John J. Dunne’s Haunted Ireland: Her Romantic and Mysterious Ghosts (1977).