The story is said to have occurred at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Kitty Jay was a pauper girl from the workhouse at Newton Abbot. She was apprenticed out to a household at Ford Farm near Manaton (in some versions Barracot Farm or in others Canna Farm although Canna was probably not an independent farm at the time she is supposed to have lived), on the eastern edges of Dartmoor, where according to one version the son of the house seduced her and she became besotted by him and then pregnant. Two hundred years ago it was total disgrace to get pregnant outside marriage and because of that no one would help her. She would also have been dismissed from her job, and have no means of supporting herself.
The young man refused to admit to any involvement. He, his family and the Church despised and disowned her, and in her total despair she committed suicide by hanging herself from a beam in a building on the farm.
The Church denied her a Christian burial in consecrated ground* and she had to be buried at a cross road on the Parish Boundary. She still lies at the crossways where the parishes of Widecombe and Manaton meet and there are always fresh flowers on her grave.
*In one oral version of the story she was first buried in the green lane opposite Canna, where she is said to have hanged herself in a barn, before being dug up and re-buried at the site currently known as Jay’s Grave.