Tne Augustinian priory of Barnwell was originally founded in 1098 at Castle End, Cambridge, but was moved in 1112 to a new site between the Newmarket road and the river in what was then the village of Barnwell. In 1539, the priory was dissolved and stripped of its contents, roof-tiles, iron-work and glass, all of which were sold. By this time there was little left of the priory itself, so Alexander Butler, into whose possession it came in 1659, built a new house on part of the site, later known as the Old Abbey or the Abbey House.
Beneath the ground floor of the Abbey House are vaulted cellars, one arch of which is bricked up. Local legend has it that the arch led to a subterranean passage running from the priory to Jesus College, formerly the Benedictine nunnery of St. Radegund.
From the end of the 19th century, Abbey House was often lived in by two or three families at a time, From about 1904 to 1910, the greater part was let to a Fellow of Pembroke college. While he and his family lived there, they often saw a young woman in long robes like those of a nun pass through a particular room in the house and disappear into the panelled wall.
This was not her first appearance: a Cambridge woman who died in 1960, and who had lived in the north end of the Abbey House from 1904 to 1911, said she had heard about the ghost before she went to live there. The ghost was known locally as ‘the Grey Lady’, and thought to have been one of the nuns of St. Radegund’s who came regularly via the underground way from her convent to meet her lover, a canon of Barnwell.
The children of the family living in Abbey House from 1904 were often visited by the Grey Lady, who would come to their rooms after they were in bed. They appear not to have been frightened of her, although they did not ‘like her very much’. Her visits to the children suggest that she may have had a special concern with them, like the most famous White Ladies of German tradition.
The Grey Lady is reported as having been seen during WW2, and in the 1950s the house was subject to poltergeist activity, though the Grey lady herself did not appear. Enid Porter, writing in 1969, said that she had been neither heard nor seen since 1959.