I was intrigued enough to check into it a little. It was easy enough to find out if there had been a total eclipse over the island on the day of the disappearance. There hadn't, nor on any other day that year, nor in fact, as far as the records went, ever. But never mind, I thought; mere detail.
Some years later, in 1987, I was working and living at a research station in Hampshire. One beautiful Friday afternoon in early summer it was just too nice to contemplate staying at the hostel for the weekend. After work I grabbed my rucksack, packed a few things and caught the next train down to the coast. I decided I was going to walk across the Isle of Wight, a place I hadn't been to since I had been very young.
After staying overnight in a Newport B&B I set off nice and early on a very sunny Saturday morning, armed with a tourist info map of the island. As I passed Carisbrooke Castle I realised that I recognised one of the names on the map: Gatcombe, the setting of the Lucy Lightfoot story. I was in no hurry so I decided to investigate.
Gatcombe church was exactly as it had appeared in the magazine article. Inside it there was indeed the effigy of a medieval knight. However, according to the legend the dagger should have been a 19th Century replacement, the original damaged when a gemstone in the hilt exploded the day that Lucy disappeared. I'm no expert on wooden effigies but the dagger in question looked to be carved from the same piece of ancient wood as the figure and not a more recent addition.
My next port of call was the Rectory. But having plucked up the courage to ask about the legend, I was told by the lady who answered the door that the Rector was over at the Rookley fete that day. My investigative spirit now spent I resumed my walk across the island, stopping at Godshill to look around a museum full of rocks (as I recall), and also to have a couple of much-needed pints in a pub whose name I forget. Finally I reached the coast at Shanklin.
Some time later I wrote to the Rector, asking him about the story. Eventually I got a reply, but not from him. He had passed my letter onto James Evans, the former Rector at Gatcombe who had first written about the legend. Suddenly the mystery was solved.
To quote from the Reverend Evans' response:
"Little did I think when I wrote the story of Lucy Lightfoot that I had given her invisible wings to fly to many places and to speed down the years. I must admit that the Crusader's to be found in the church, but I have taken the few white bones of history and covered them with the flesh of imaginative history."
Enclosed with his letter was a story that the Reverend Evans had written about the scorch-marked timbers in the church porch, which he stated were from a ship at the Battle of Trafalgar. This fact formed the basis of a story about finding treasure, and had been made into a booklet that I suppose had been sold to raise a few extra shillings for church funds. Just as had happened with a time-travel story inspired by the church's resident medieval effigy.
So there we have it. Reverend Evans wrote a cracking little mystery story set in his church. It was written in a convincing documentary manner, peppered with learned quotes and references, and sold as a booklet. One of these booklets found its way to somebody who took it at face value and wrote it up in a magazine about the paranormal. Nobody thought to check the facts, and a legend was born.
I still love a good mystery, and I'm a little sorry to be the one who got to the bottom of the Lucy Lightfoot legend. But then again, the process of how a legend came to be born is almost as interesting as the legend itself. If Lucy could spring so convincingly to life in our modern age then what chance did our predecessors have, relying on the spoken word to pass on their versions of history?
I still have a place in my heart for Lucy; after all, who needs to be factual when they can live on in such a great fiction? She managed to get me stay a little longer and find out a little more about a part of the world that I still hold in great affection: that was real enough. And I rather think that is exactly what the Reverend James Evans wanted when he dreamt her up.
Mark Wightman, 19th March 1998