Lady Howard's Coach

The popular version goes like this: Lady Howard, a woman of the area with a taste for husbands (the number varies in the telling), is condemned to ride out in a spectral coach drawn by headless horses, forever crossing the moor between Tavistock and Okehampton. The journey, so the story promises, will end only when she has worn away a stone bridge by the friction of the coach wheels. It is the kind of tale that gets told with relish in pubs, and it has all the ingredients: a titled woman with a reputation, horses, a curse, and a rule that makes the punishment mathematically impossible.

As for where it came from: the written trail starts with Sabine Baring-Gould's A Book of the West (1899), where he records the legend as something people in the area knew and told. Beyond that, the origins get harder to pin down. Baring-Gould was a good collector of Dartmoor tales, but he did not always note his immediate sources, and later retellings tend to copy each other rather than go back to anything older. Whether the legend belonged to a real woman, or how much older it might be, nobody seems to know for certain, and the various modern accounts do not agree on all the details.