The Woman in White

“You know I didn't want to have to haunt you / But what a ghostly scene”

Community readers connect the song's white-lady-ghost framing to Wilkie Collins's 1860 sensation novel The Woman in White, whose titular figure appears unbidden at the edges of the narrative, most famously as a ghostly woman at a window observed by a child. Additive to the broader folkloric White Lady reading already attached to the song: Collins's novel anchors a specific Victorian-literary precedent alongside the oral tradition.