The ghost of a spiteful monk who delighted in misfortune was said to haunt Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, England, the ancestral home of the colorful Byron family.

The abbey was the priory of the Black Augustine canons for almost 400 years. But in the sixteenth century King Henry VIII, angry with the Roman Catholic church for opposing the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, began confiscating church lands and parceling out some of them to his nobles. Newstead Abbey fell to the Byrons and remained in the family for the next 300 years. The last Lord Byron to inherit it was none other than the Romantic poet and handsome rakehell, George Gordon, who not only loved the estate but found fodder for his verse in the most notable of its several ghosts, the Black Friar.

No one knows who this restless soul might have been in life, but some believe that his shade, cowled and dark visaged, represented the church's curse on usurpers of its lands. Certainly the Black Friar seemed ill-disposed toward the Byrons. Legend tells that when a family member died, the phantom monk would bake a visit to gloat at the tragedy. Conversely, it would present a sorrowful face at happy occasions such as births. The appearance of the grief-strucken mien was the norm at most family weddings as well - but not all. The poet Lord Byron averred he saw the ghost looking cheerful enough at his own marriage to Annabella Milbanke, which he would come to describe as the unhappiest event of his life.

In his Don Juan, Byron alludes to the Black Friar:

By the marriage-bed of their lords, 'tis said,
He flits on the bridal eve;
And 'tis held as faith, to their bed of death
He comes - but not to grieve.