East of Huntcliff

The short life of Charlotte Meade

This was supposed to be a lighthearted (and short) article about a harmless piece of Middlesbrough lore. As usual it’s gone out of control and now takes in slavery in the Caribbean and untimely death. Apologies in advance.

Grey Ladies are the default ghosts of the UK. It seems that every time some “paranormal investigator” spies an errant bedsheet in a shadowy corner of an old manor house, they’ll immediately open their ghost book and tick the box marked “Ladies: Grey” before popping off to defraud some pensioners.

In fact, there as so many of these Grey Ladies knocking about the county that the venerable ghost-hunters at spookyisles.com have somehow managed to churn out a listicle about them, as if they were haunted pokemons.

But even by the loose factual standards of the ghosthuntery tradition, Acklam Hall’s Grey Lady story is dubious.

I first heard the story in the 80s, on the school bus to the baths. We were always driven from Kader Primary School down Hall Drive and past Acklam Hall, which – despite being a bustling college at the time – was imprinted on our minds as some dark, abandoned home of malevolent spirits. The Grey Lady was said to be the previous mistress of the house – Charlotte Hustler. She roamed the upper halls at night and occasionally showed herself at windows, dressed in a flowing grey dress, terrifying students and staff alike.

For a ghost you need a death, and Charlotte’s list of supposed deaths was long and varied. One said that she fell to her end from the roof, some that she drowned in the lake. Another, and this is where it gets somewhat nonsensical, claimed that she jumped from the roof into the lake. The lake, by the way, is about 100 metres from the house, which would make poor Charlotte the world’s long jump record holder by some 91.05 metres.

There’s no shortage of local newspaper articles about Acklam Hall’s tragic mistress. Teesside Live wrote that she, “appears on one of the hall’s staircases – before fading away before [their] very eyes“. Even the sober minds at Tees Business noted how, “The Grey Lady, a ghost of a woman that is said to have fallen to her death in Acklam Hall, sent shivers down the spine of the venue’s caretaker during refurbishment work“.

The most common story though is that, sometime around 1800, Charlotte died in childbirth at the hall and now roams its corridors in torment. It’s a common trope in the paranormal world; perhaps a way of making sense of a terrible event or clinging to the memory of a loved one. It’s often said that stone remembers.

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So what do we know about the person behind the grey veil? There were actually two Charlotte Hustlers at the hall in the 1800s, but as one of them died at age 72 it’s unlikely that childbirth was involved. That leaves us with Charlotte Meade (1781-1801). She was married to Acklam Hall’s owner William Hustler (b. 1771), and they did indeed have a child – Thomas – who was born on August 1st, 1801.

There is some ambiguity here. 19-year-old Charlotte died in the same year as Thomas was born (he survived and lived into his 70s by the way), but she didn’t actually die until December, some 4 months after the birth. There’s a chance the two events were related but, as you’ll see, things are not totally clear.

Charlotte’s Family – The Meades

There’s something else that doesn’t quite make sense within the internal logic of ghost stories – that of the ghost haunting the location of its death – and to look as that we’ll need to explore the Meade family’s murky past.

Charlotte was born Philadelphia to a family with interests in a lot of places. Her father George Meade was a slaver (he’d probably call himself a merchant, but let’s not) with a mother born to another white slaver family in Barbados and a father from Philly. George married Henrietta Constantia Worsam – daughter of a Barbados plantation owner – in 1768. They had ten children, of which Charlotte was the ninth.

Where Charlotte met Acklam’s William Hustler is unknown, but their son Thomas was born, not at Acklam Hall, but in his mother’s hometown of Philadelphia.

But Charlotte’s short life doesn’t end in America. And it’s even more remote from the chilly climes of the North of England, Charlotte actually died in – not in Acklam or Philadelphia – but in Barbados, on Christmas Day 1801.

This is where we can only speculate. Was she well enough after the birth to travel to Barbados, where she died of unrelated causes? Or was the trip a last-ditch attempt at convalescence in a warmer climate? Either way, Acklam Hall was far away.

How this story became part of Middlesbrough folklore can be readily imagined. William Hustler returned to England a widow, with a young son and a tragic tale, and we know how quickly a tale can change in the telling. It probably didn’t take many generations before the details and location of Charlotte’s death were transposed to Acklam Hall, and from there to the schoolchildren of Middlesbrough, a town that didn’t even exist when Charlotte died in Barbados.

Sources

The American Catholic Historical Researches – THE CHILDREN OF GEORGE MEADE

Ancestry.com

Stowe, A: A Philadelphia Gentleman: the Cultural, Institutional, and Political Socialization of George Gordon Meade

Ronnie Hughes: Barbadian Sugar Plantations Index 1640 – 1846

Various Local Newspapers