At Okehampton a strong and mighty castle once was found.
Now all that's left are ruins atop a grassy mound.
And if you ask a local guide to tell a ghostly tale,
They'll speak of Lady Mary and her curse to make you quail.
Lady Mary was an heiress much desired as a bride,
Who came into a fortune when her drunken father died.
Four times her suitors wooed her,
Four times the lady wed,
Four times she killed her husbands,
Or so the locals said.
And as her crimes were wicked and her deeds were thought the worse,
Her punishment was fitting. It was an eternal curse.
*scary music*
At the hour of midnight a traveler unwary
Might see a phantom coach; within, the ghost of Lady Mary.
And if you linger longer as it rattles o'er the stones
You will see that Lady Mary's coach is formed from human bones!
A hell hound follows in her wake,
Up to the castle, where
It must pluck each night one blade of grass
Until the mound is bare.
So she is doomed to journey thus
Until the judgement day,
In a coach made of her husbands' bones
Or so the locals say...
The story of the Lady of Okehampton is that of a female serial killer allegedly who turns
in a supernatural monster, and was probably none of those things.
The legend of Lady Mary is that every midnight
her ghost rides out of her old family home at Tavistock in a coach made of human bones,
specifically the bones of her four dead husbands and of other people she'd murdered. The skull
of each of her husbands is placed decoratively at the corners of the coach. And to make things
worse, or better, a phantom black dog trots in front of her and together Lady Mary and
the pooch ride across Dartmoor to Okehampton where the hound takes a single blade of grass
in its mouth and then brings it back to Tavistock by the end of the night. When the hound has
stripped the Okehampton area of blades of grass Lady Mary's penance will be over and
her soul will be free to pass on.
In one respect the story of Lady Mary is a very common one, that of the sinner who is
sentenced to a long penance of an impossible, repetitive task in order to purge away their
sin. The Greek Sisyphus who has to push a stone endlessly uphill is the eldest one of
these but in Devon and Cornwall there are people who make ropes of sand or empty a big
lake out with a cockle-shellful each night, and so it goes on.
The reason why Lady Mary became a folk villainess is almost certainly just because she went
through four husbands in short order in a time when most women could get through one.
So people got the idea she must have bumped them off and probably other people as well,
and she ended up with the reputation of a villainess. I think a better word for her
would be victim.