Haunted places in Europe

Europe has more recorded centuries of ghost stories than anywhere else, and many of its haunted places are national monuments. The Tower of London, with its tales of Anne Boleyn, Hampton Court Palace and its Haunted Gallery, Scotland’s Glamis Castle and Edinburgh’s underground vaults, Ireland’s Leap Castle, France’s Château de Brissac and its Green Lady, and the Paris Catacombs are visited by millions every year. Britain in particular built a ghost-tour culture, from York – long promoted as one of Europe’s most haunted cities – to the village of Pluckley in Kent.

Europe is also where the serious study of ghosts began. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882 and soon carried out its Census of Hallucinations, in which about one in ten of 17,000 respondents said they had seen, heard or felt something with no apparent cause. In the 20th century Harry Price made Borley Rectory famous as “the most haunted house in England”, the Enfield poltergeist of 1977–79 became a media sensation, and psychologists such as Richard Wiseman tested visitors’ experiences at Hampton Court and in the Edinburgh vaults.

Further east, Romania’s Bran Castle trades on its Dracula image, the Hoia-Baciu Forest near Cluj has a reputation all its own, and Italy’s Poveglia island has become a byword for horror – often with more legend than history attached. Across the continent, folk traditions of white ladies, wild hunts, the banshee and the will-o’-the-wisp remain part of local identity.