Hampton Court Palace

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister, began turning a riverside manor of the Knights Hospitaller into the grandest house in England in 1514. When he fell from favor in 1529 he handed it to the king, who enlarged it into a royal palace complete with a great hall, tennis court and vast kitchens. Much of the Tudor palace survives, wrapped around later Baroque state apartments built by Christopher Wren for William III and Mary II. It is now run by the charity Historic Royal Palaces.

Tudor family dramas supply the ghosts. Jane Seymour gave birth to the future Edward VI at Hampton Court on October 12, 1537, and died there twelve days later. In 1541, Henry was told at Mass in the palace chapel that his fifth wife, the teenage Catherine Howard, had been unfaithful; she was confined to her rooms before being sent to Syon House and on to execution at the Tower in February 1542. Legend says she broke free from her guards and ran screaming down a corridor toward the chapel to beg the king for her life, and was dragged back. That passage is now called the Haunted Gallery — though the dash itself is legend rather than recorded history.

Other ghosts followed the Tudors into folklore. Jane Seymour is said to walk with a candle on the Silver Stick Stairs near the rooms where she died, especially around the anniversary of Edward’s birth. Sybil Penn, Edward’s nurse, died of smallpox in 1562; when her monument at St Mary’s church in Hampton was moved during the church’s rebuilding in 1829, residents reported hearing a spinning wheel through a palace wall, and workmen are said to have found a forgotten room with an old spinning wheel inside. She became the palace’s “Grey Lady” — although, records show, her body had long since been moved to Penn in Buckinghamshire and was never under the monument at all.

The palace has also produced two of the best-known modern ghost episodes. In 2000–01 the psychologist Richard Wiseman and colleagues ran hundreds of visitors through the Haunted Gallery and other reputedly haunted rooms to test what lay behind reports of cold spots and unease; their 2002 paper found that belief in ghosts and suggestion strongly shaped what people experienced. Then, in October 2003, security cameras near Clock Court recorded a pair of fire doors flying open and, on one night, a figure in a long cloak stepping out to close them. Warders told the BBC they could not explain it, and the palace denied staging a stunt; skeptics suspected a prank by a staff member or costumed visitor.

A screaming woman in the Haunted Gallery (Catherine Howard), a pale lady with a candle (Jane Seymour), a gray-robed figure and the sound of a spinning wheel (Sybil Penn), visitors fainting or feeling cold and dizzy in the gallery, and the 2003 CCTV figure in period dress.

The Haunted Gallery between the royal apartments and the Chapel Royal; the Silver Stick Stairs and Clock Court (Jane Seymour); the old state apartments in the west of the palace (Sybil Penn); the fire doors by Clock Court (the 2003 footage).

Hampton Court runs seasonal ghost tours and Halloween trails, and its 2003 CCTV clip is a fixture of “real ghost” compilations. Its ghosts feature in nearly every book on royal hauntings and in documentaries presented by the palace’s own curators.