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History[]

In 2012 film adaptation[]

In this adaptation Jennet Humfrye (1859 - 16 November 1889) was the younger sister of Alice Drablow who gave birth to a child, Nathaniel out of wedlock. Alice orchestrated that doctors recognized Jennet as mentally unstable, so she was forced to give her child to her sister. Alice Drablow and her husband, Charles Drablow (who was secretly Nathaniel's birth father) adopted the boy insisting he never knew that Jennet was his real mother. Jennet was kept away from Nathaniel, while Alice refused to pass Jennet's gifts and cards to the boy. However, Jennet could no longer stay away from her son, and forced an agreement to stay at Eel Marsh House with them. The agreement was that she never reveals her true identity to the boy. One day, a pony and trap carrying Alice Drablow and the boy across the causeway got lost and sank in the marshes, killing Nathaniel, while Alice escaped. Jennet had been watching all of this from a window from the house. Nathaniel body was never recovered from the marshes. Jennet was so distraught and heartbroken that she committed suicide in the house's nursery. Before she died, she wrote 'You Could Have Saved Him' on the nursery' wall either in red ink or in her blood. She came back as an evil, vengeful ghost dressed in black. The locals, who lived in Crythin Gifford a nearby village, called her 'The Woman in Black'. Whenever she has been seen; anywhere, whenever and whoever by, a child nearby kills themselves as she forces them to. If an adult sees her, their first born child would die.

In the 1989 TV adaptation[]

In this adaptation Jennet Goss, unmarried sister of Mrs. Alice Drablow, gave birth to son Nathaniel. As the child was born out of wedlock Jennet was forced to give her child for adoption to her sister. She came to live with her sister, her husband and Nathaniel at Eel Marsh House, remote mansion cut off by high tides for all but a few hours a day and surrounded by marshes. The Drablows refused to allow Jennet to ever reveal her true relationship to the child. Eventually, the desperate woman kidnapped Nathaniel and tried to run away with him, but the carriage was caught in the rising tides as she fled. She and Nathaniel both drowned in the marshes. Their bodies were retrieved and buried at the graveyard near the House.

Her ghost, dressed all in black, now haunts the house and nearby village and whenever she is seen, a local child will die soon afterwards. At the marshes people hear ghostly sounds of a horse and buggy, along with its passengers, Jennet and Nathaniel, screaming while vanishing into the marshes.

She is seen by Arthur Kipps at the funeral of Alice Drablow, then at the graveyard near Eel Marsh House. She also appears to him in nightmarish form after his grim adventures in Eel Marsh House, while he lies with fever in the local inn. She is finally seen by Arthur, when he is boating with his family in London park, before tree falls on the boat, sinking it and killing Arthur and his whole family.

Gallery[]

Behind the scenes[]

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