But the most famous ghost of Eltham is reputedly one of the palace tour guides, who was deeply attached to the place and died only a week after retiring. He has been seen subsequently, conducting tours when the house is meant to be shut. Staff report numerous other incidents, so frequent that, when asked, one laughed at the suggestion that this must be disturbing and declared that they get used to it: the low voices and footsteps heard when locking up the house at night, and the mysterious locking or unlocking of doors. This happens regularly on the minstrels’ gallery above the great hall and in one of the adjoining bedrooms used by Ginie’s nephews.
Another intriguing report is that of a woman in medieval dress who has been seen a few times by security guards at night. She has been observed walking through the arches of the passage at the end of the great hall, through the cupboards that now conceal the arches and the modern electrics which are installed there.
Chiswick House and Gardens
Chiswick House is one of the most significant – and enchanting – examples of eighteenth-century British architecture. It was designed and built by the 3rd Earl of Burlington in the 1720s, a pioneer work of neo-classical architecture inspired by the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio and by the villas, temples and palaces of ancient Rome. The ornate interiors and formal gardens were created by Burlington and the architect, painter and garden designer William Kent.
The gardens were restored during a major project in 2010. Earlier conservation work, in 1958, seems to have restored something rather different – the cook. Workmen began to smell frying bacon in an area that once housed the kitchens. The men put it down to a ghostly cook – apparently still bent on duties at the kitchen range.
Jewel Tower
Nestling discreetly between the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, the tower is a precious survivor of the medieval Palace of Westminster. The Jewel Tower was built in 1365 by Edward III at the south-west corner of his palace, beside his private apartments and garden. It was intended to house his personal collection of jewels, gold and silver.
In the 1950s excavation of the moat turned up various objects, among them, most curiously, two heads: one of a man and one of a cat. The cat was of especial interest as her skull had been skinned and painted green. Superstition? A witch’s familiar? But it is neither man nor cat that seems to haunt the tower, although the cat’s skull is on display. A woman has been seen to walk through the wall into the tower courtyard, dressed in the fashion of the seventeenth century – at which time there had indeed been a door in the wall to the courtyard.
Kenwood
This magnificent house, triumphantly restored, stands on the edge of Hampstead Heath in parkland landscaped by Humphry Repton. Kenwood was remodelled by Robert Adam between 1764 and 1779 for William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, and contains some of Adam’s finest surviving interiors. In 1925 Kenwood was bought by Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, and subsequently left by him to the nation, together with an outstanding collection of Old Master and British paintings, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Turner, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable and Romney.
In the upper hall, off the great stair, are the dazzling full-length portraits from the Suffolk Collection. Here, with no one but a room attendant present, the door has been known to slam shut with some violence. Some suggest it could be the ghost of one of Kenwood’s most famous residents, Dido Elizabeth Belle, the mixed-race great-niece of Lord Mansfield.
The South East
Dover Castle, Kent
Dover Castle stands high on the White Cliffs above the English Channel at the narrowest crossing point between England and France. It has seen unbroken active service from its first building under William the Conqueror after the Battle of Hastings in 1066 until the Cold War. In 1216 it withstood one of the most terrible medieval English sieges, after which a remarkable series of new defences was built, linked together by underground tunnels, and enlarged and extended in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In 1797, during the Napoleonic Wars, a new series of tunnels was excavated within the famous white cliffs themselves to accommodate the large number of troops needed to man the defences. During the Second World War these tunnels housed the command centre that controlled naval operations in the Channel, and it was from here that in May 1940 the ‘miracle’ of Dunkirk was planned and coordinated – resulting in the evacuation of 338,000 Allied troops from the coast of France.
Dover has sheltered many thousands of lives within its walls over its long history. It is no wonder ghost stories abound. In the great tower, the lower half of a man’s body was seen by two members of staff in the doorway to the King’s chamber. Another staff member, while cleaning the basement, saw the figure of a Cavalier, and another has seen the figure of a woman in a red dress on the stairs and along the mural gallery. There are no stories attached to any of the ghosts at Dover, except for that of a drummer boy: it is said that the boy was carrying a sum of money on an errand to the castle and was attacked and decapitated. There have been numerous reports of the beat of his drum near the castle battlements.
Although there are no recorded reports of an American airman, such as in Stuart Evers’ story, the ghosts of naval officers have been seen in the castle’s wartime tunnels. Here, too, there are regular reports by staff and visitors of slamming doors, footsteps and voices, as well as one curious sighting of a seventeenth-century pikeman. An American couple commented to staff on the very realistic cries and moans of the audio recreation within the tunnels, but there was no such recreation then in place.
Intrigued by the frequency of all these phenomena, in 1991 a team of investigators visited Dover Castle, recording various events, the most remarkable being a pair of shaking doors in the great tower’s stairwell, which was caught on video tape – the footage was later shown on the television series Strange but True?. There is another oddity. During the filming of this episode a psychic was called in. He was ‘given the name Helen’ while standing in the wartime tunnels’ repeater room – reportedly the most haunted of the castle. A few days later an Australian tourist said she had seen a man in the tunnels who seemed distressed, and asked her ‘where Helen was’. Years later, during an exercise in the tunnels on a school trip, a boy drew a figure with a speech bubble: ‘Where is Helen?’ – the question asked him, he told staff, by a man he had met in the tunnels.
Medieval Merchant’s House, Southampton, Hampshire
This house was built in about 1290 for a wine merchant, one John Fortin, and stands on what was one of the busiest streets of medieval Southampton near the town wall. Southampton had developed into a large and prosperous port, grown rich on Continental trade. Fortin’s house included a cellar where he could store his wine, a shop at the front of the ground floor, and a bed chamber which was jettied out over the street below.
The house has been restored to its appearance in the mid-fourteenth century, including the cellar. Some years ago, staff raked over the cellar floor, which was then covered with gravel, before leaving and locking up for the day. The following morning they were astonished to see a set a footprints clearly visible in the gravel. The footprints started in the middle of the room and disappeared into a wall – the last one only partly visible, as if the ghostly tread had walked on through the stones.
Netley Abbey, Hampshire
The ruins of Netley Abbey form the most complete survival of a Cistercian monastery in southern England. The abbey was founded in 1238 by the powerful Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, and after the Suppression was granted by Henry VIII to Sir William Paulet, his treasurer, who converted the abbey into a mansion house. But in 1704 the house was sold for building materials. The remainder gradually fell into ruin, its state of romantic neglect by the end of the eighteenth century inspiring many a Gothic writer and Romantic spirit.
One of the many ghosts reported at Netley is said to be the man to whom the house was sold for building materials in 1704 – a Southampton builder
named Walter Taylor. Having signed the contract, Taylor dreamed that a stone from one of the church windows fell upon his head and killed him. He consulted a friend about the dream, afraid that it was a warning, but in the end decided to go ahead with the demolition. While at work at the east end of the abandoned church a stone from a window arch fell on his head, fractured his skull and killed him.
Portchester Castle, Hampshire
Portchester Castle, at the north end of Portsmouth Harbour, is set within the imposing walls of a Roman ‘Saxon shore’ fort – the most complete example in northern Europe. During Norman rule a keep was built, turning the shore fort into a castle, which was expanded and modernised throughout the Middle Ages. It remained a residence into the seventeenth century and was used to house prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars. The last of these prisoners left in 1819.
Given its long and varied history, it is not surprising that Portchester’s ghosts are similarly varied – a monk who wanders the bank along the outer wall (an Augustinian priory was founded here in the twelfth century), a Roman centurion who stands guard at the gatehouse and a Victorian woman in white. On one occasion a member of staff and a visitor witnessed a horse gallop across the inner bailey ward. It might have been mistaken for a living creature, had not the horse emerged from the castle walls and simply disappeared across the bailey.
Upnor Castle, Kent
Upnor Castle was built by order of Elizabeth I in 1559 on the bank of the River Medway to defend the royal fleet and new dockyard developing near the village of Chatham, just a little upstream. It was enlarged at the end of the sixteenth century and in 1667 the brave efforts of its garrison helped prevent Dutch warships from reaching and destroying Chatham during their otherwise victorious raid on the Medway. The castle then became a powder magazine to supply the Navy and a series of new defences being built along the river. By 1691 Upnor had become its largest gunpowder store. To protect this cache of explosives a small company of soldiers was employed and soon after 1718 was housed in the new barracks – one of the earliest in the country.
‘Ghost truths, not ghost stories’ is how one present-day member of staff describes the situation at Upnor. There is a list of usual occurences. This staff member, sweeping up before closing time, saw a boy in Georgian clothes standing outside the barracks, holding out his hand as if passing a message at the door. He vanished after a minute or so. More disturbingly, a face appeared over another member of staff’s shoulder in the gatehouse – a man with straggly, shoulder length hair, about forty years old. But it is the shop in the barracks that causes the most trouble. Here staff have seen handfuls of leaflets thrown to the floor in front of their eyes, and found, on opening up in the morning, boxes of merchandise hurled across the room, their contents scattered. Once – less petulantly, it seems – a basket of toy rings, with the pirate’s skull and crossbones, had been turned upside down on the shop counter, the basket placed neatly over the top.
Tilbury Fort, Essex
This coastal fort on the Thames estuary is the finest example of a seventeenth-century bastioned fortress in England, with its complete circuit of moats and outworks still substantially surviving. It was begun in 1670, under Charles II, on the site of an earlier fort built by Henry VIII, and was designed to stop warships sailing upriver and its garrison equipped to prevent land attack. In 1716 two powder magazines were built to store vast quantities of gunpowder destined for the government forces of the emerging Empire. Scottish prisoners were held here after the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and much later the fort’s modern guns helped shoot down a raiding Zeppelin during the First World War.
A diary is held at the fort that belonged to one James Bowley who joined the army in 1838. In it he describes an event on the Thames after the Royal Engineers were sent to clear a brig, The William, that had been hit by a paddle steamer and caught in the shipping lanes of the Thames. The Engineers sank a chest of explosives beneath it to blow it up into removable pieces but one of the men, Corporal Henry Mitchell, became caught during the operation. He was wearing the heavy, cumbersome diving gear of the time and his oxygen pipe became entangled. He did not surface in time and the brig blew, people unknowingly cheering on the riverside. Mitchell was found among the debris and brought to the surgeon at the fort, but nothing could be done. The figure of this unfortunate young man is said to haunt the fort where he died.
A man’s mumbling voice and his footsteps are also sometimes heard in the chapel – believed to be the ghost of a former chaplain. Redcoat soldiers have been reported marching by the blast walls as well as other sundry voices of both men and women.
The South West
Pendennis Castle, Cornwall
This Tudor fortress, together with its twin, St Mawes, stands near Falmouth, at the entrance to the Carrick Roads, the huge natural harbour at the mouth of the River Fal. The two castles face each other across a mile of sea, where for more than 400 years their guns pointed south to the open Channel, and inwards, barring access to the river. They were built in the 1540s as part of Henry VIII’s sweeping programme of defence, amid the national fear of invasion from the Catholic powers of Europe. The danger passed, but the fortresses remained armed until 1956, playing an active role in the English Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars and both the First and the Second World Wars.
Pendennis was prepared as a winter quarters for Prince Charles, the future Charles II, from October 1645, and he spent several weeks there early in 1646, leaving in early March for safety on the Isles of Scilly. (His mother Queen Henrietta Maria had also stayed briefly in July 1644 before escaping to France.)
The Killigrews were an ancient and prominent Cornish family who lived at the manor of Arwenack in the lee of Pendennis. In the 1540s John Killigrew (d. 1567) was made the first governor of Pendennis Castle. His eldest son, also called John, succeeded as governor of the castle and, like his father and many other gentlemen seafarers of the day, colluded with the very pirates he was employed to challenge. His wife, Mary, seems to have taken part in her husband’s activities. The Killigrews rebuilt their home, Arwenack, in 1567, incorporating defensive features such as gun ports.
When it comes to ghosts at Pendennis, there are many: a child visiting with his grandparents gave a detailed description of a soldier in the shell store of Half-Moon Battery; a former head custodian regularly saw a young woman on the stairs of the keep when he unlocked it in the mornings; but it seems that the one-time lieutenant governor of the castle, Captain Philip Melvill, puts in some of the most regular appearances. He was appointed in 1797 and remained at Pendennis until his death in 1811. At the age of nineteen he had been sent with his regiment to India where he was severely wounded, taken prisoner, and kept in brutal conditions for four years. His injuries, which were left untreated, never healed, and he was invalided out of active service. He liked to sit in his chair at the window of his rooms at Pendennis, watching the boats in the bay. Staff report that they frequently find a chair moved to this window in his old rooms on the first floor of the castle forebuilding. They also hear the sound of it being dragged there. And, as a member of staff points out – why dragged? Would Melvill not have lifted it? Melvill’s old wounds from India meant that he had the use of only one arm; his left he wore in a sling.
Berry Pomeroy Castle, Devon
Tucked away in Devon woodland, Berry Pomeroy Castle must be counted among the most picturesque and romantic ruins in England. It has also built up a reputation as one of the most haunted. Built by the Pomeroy family in the fifteenth century during the Wars of the Roses, it was later acquired in the mid-sixteenth century by Edward Seymour, ‘Protector Somerset’ – the most powerful man in the realm – and was developed by the Seymour family into a great mansion, so ambitious and grandiose in scale that the money eventually ran out, and the site was abandoned by 1700.
While many of the ghost stories about the castle may be attributed to the imagination of the Victorians, there does seem to be something that troubles this place. It manifests it
self chiefly in malfunctioning technology: failing cameras and smart phones, and inexplicable footage taken by a professional cameraman filming on site. He discovered the film to be entirely blank, though the audio track was intact, if disturbed by ‘occasional screeches and other odd noises’. One visitor recalled driving here with his friends one night in his youth. They saw something white in the woods and ran back to their cars in terror – but none of their cars would start. They fled on foot and returned the next morning only to find that their cars started perfectly. It took twenty years before one of the men dared to return to the spot with his partner, but she ended up visiting the castle alone. There was no way, he said, he was going ‘in there’.
Farleigh Hungerford Castle, Somerset
Sir Thomas Hungerford began this fortified mansion in the 1370s. It was extended by his son and remained in the Hungerford family until the late seventeenth century, when the notorious spendthrift Sir Edward Hungerford sold it. In the vault of the family chapel there is a unique collection of human-shaped lead coffins, the resting place of this somewhat scandal-plagued family. Two were executed during the Wars of the Roses. Another, who imprisoned his own wife at the castle for four years, half-starving her and attempting to poison her, was later beheaded beside Thomas Cromwell by Henry VIII, accused of treason, witchcraft and homosexuality. By this time he was considered by his contemporaries so ‘unquiet’ as to be mad.
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