THE tale of a Grey Nun who is thought to wander The Lanes is one of Brighton and Hove’s most famous ghost stories.

She apparently fell in love with a soldier in medieval times, eloped and the pair were captured. The soldier was executed and the nun was left to die after being bricked-up behind a wall in Meeting House Lane. The cell, an old doorway to the Quaker Meeting House, bricked-up in 1844, can still be seen to this day.

The nun was apparently spotted in a narrow alleyway between Ship Street and Middle Street by a fire warden during the Blitz. She has also been reported scuttling around other parts of The Lanes.

The Stanford family, who lived in Preston Manor, were so troubled by sightings of a lady in white, and a lady in grey – who walked up and down the main staircase before disappearing – they saw no other option but to hold a séance in 1896.

The séance took place in the Cleves Room on November, 11, 1896. The medium, Ada Goodrich Freer, said she was receiving messages from a nun called Sister Agnes, who had been wrongly excommunicated from the Church and buried in unconsecrated ground outside the house.

It was claimed that if she was given a Christian burial, the haunting would cease. A year later, there was an epidemic of sore throats and the drains at the house were inspected. The skeleton of a woman was found under the terrace outside the dining room – now the Macquoid Room – and the bones were found to be about 400 years old.

Accounts of what happened next differ, but the skeleton was said to have been reburied discretely by a gravedigger. No further appearances of the ghost have been reported.

Photos in The Argus archive depict how nuns and convents formed a thriving part of life in the city.

Nuns of the Blessed Sacrament crowded into St John the Baptist Church for high mass in 1965.

In 1989, nuns were captured out and about taking part in a number of activities. Nuns attended the Hove Greyhound Stadium and Sisters Andrew and Georgina brought the term flying nun to life when they took a trip in a helicopter over the county.

In 1990, Sister Leila was pictured showing how the St Mary’s Convent in Portslade kept up with current affairs as photographer Simon Dack captured her reading the Daily Telegraph.

Sister Rose set to work with a broom at the same convent in 1991, and others were pictured reading their lessons.

Sisters and staff at the St George’s Retreat in Ditchling Common, near Burgess Hill, posed for the camera in their white outfits in 1993.

Mother Mary Garson, from St Benedict’s Convent in Kemp Town, received a Papal award in 2002 for her services to the church.

Fellow sister Lena was known as the fishing nun that year for being spotted regularly casting her fishing rod from the harbour wall at Brighton Marina.

In 2011, The Sisters of Charity, of Nevers in Harrington Road, closed after more than 100 years in the city when its two remaining nuns retired.

The convent had been there since 1904. Sister Theresa returned to Dublin and Sister Margaret Mary joined nuns at the order’s convent in Blackburn, Lancashire. The order cared for homeless people and ran St Bernadette’s Parish Primary School in the city.