Haunted London walks are our included in our wide list of tours of London. Indeed, we both revel and specialise in London’s darker history and our London Ghost Walks are incredibly popular.
Today though we though we’d take you out of London to a magnificent Palace a short distance outside London.
Walks around Hampton Court Palace take place every Halloween, and there are many ghostly tales to chill the blood of even the most hardened ghost hunter. Several of them concern the wives of Henry V111 the 500th anniversary of whose accession to the throne is celebrated this year.
In 1541 Cardinal Wolsey constructed a magnificent palace on the banks of the Thames. He lived in the completed building in regal splendour and entertained on such a lavish scale that his hospitality became the talk of Europe.
But, when he failed in his attempts to persuade the Pope to annul the marriage of Henry V111 and Catherine of Aragon, his fate and downfall were sealed.
In a last desperate attempt to buy his way back into Royal favour, the crestfallen cardinal presented his “jewel on the Thames” to Henry, who gratefully accepted the gift and then promptly summoned Wolsey to answer charges of treason.
Frail in both mind and body, the dejected cleric headed south from his see at York, but died en route at Leicester, wishing that he had “served God as diligently as I have served my King”.
Henry wasted no time in introducing his second wife, Anne Boleyn, to the splendours of Wolsely’s Palace and, following her beheading in 1536, her ghost remained behind to drift forlornly through its passages and chambers wearing a blue dress.
Typically, Henry was courting Jane Seymour while Anne was still alive. When she became his third wife, however, she does appear to have brought the despotic tyrant genuine contentment and did provide him with his longed for son and heir, Edward, born on 12th October 1537. Sadly, shortly afterwards, Jane Seymour died (from natural causes) and ever since her phantom has made an annual pilgrimage to the Palace, on the anniversary of her sons birth. Holding an unflickering candle, her head bent in sorrow, she glides eerily along corridors, passes through closed doors and has, on occasion, shocked witnesses into resigning from the palaces staff.
But it is Henry’s fifth wife Catharine Howard, who makes the most dramatic return to Hampton Court Palace. She was still a teenager when she married the King in 1540, although she was certainly sexually experienced. Her past liaisons had included her music master, Henry Mannock, and a youthful nobleman named Denham.
She found Henry physically repulsive and had soon sought solace in the arms of a young man at court, Thomas Culpepper. Servants tittle-tattle, brought her previous indiscretions to light and, not long afterwards, her adultery was exposed. Henry was furious at the betrayal.
The unfortunate Culpepper was soon languishing in the Tower of London and was subsequently executed (as was Mannock), and his unfaithful Queen found herself imprisoned in her chambers at Hampton Court. Brooding on her inevitable fate, the young girl, decided that her only hope lay in meeting with her husband, and pleading with him to spare her life.
On 4th November 1541, knowing that Henry would be at prayer in the chapel, she broke free from her guards and ran through what is now known as the “Haunted Gallery” where she threw herself at the chapel’s locked door, screaming at her husband to grant her an audience.
The King listened in stony silence and, moments later, the guards had recaptured the hysterical girl and were dragging her back to her chambers.
On 13th February 1542, at just twenty years of age, Catharine Howard went bravely to the block: “I die a Queen but I had rather died the simple wife of Tom Culpepper. May God have mercy on my soul. Pray for me”. She was smiling when the axe fell.
Ever since, servants noblemen and even modern day wardens have reported seeing her ghost, dressed in a white gown, racing towards the chapel, her face contorted into a terrifying, unearthly scream. Many visitors have reported a peculiar, icy coldness and intense feeling of desperate sadness around the doors of the chapel itself, and some people have even witnessed a disembodied, ringed hand knocking upon the door.
As recently as 1999 two women on separate guided tours fainted at exactly the same spot in the “Haunted Gallery”. On regaining consciousness, both victims reported a sudden chill and said they felt as if they had been punched shortly before passing out.
In December 2003 Hampton Court Palace released CCTV footage that apparently showed a fuzzy image of a ghost (or to the more sceptical a person in a long coat) walking through a fire door.
In October 2003 the alarms had gone off in the exhibition area of the palace several times on different days. Security guards had gone to investigate and, having secured the door, had gone back to their office to view the CCTV footage to see if the person who had opened the doors had been caught on film.
On the first occasion the footage showed the fire door flying open but no person was visible. But on the second occasion a “ghostly” figure suddenly appeared and appeared to struggle to close the doors.
It also emerged that a woman had noted in the palace’s visitor book that she had “seen a ghost” in that area. James Faukes, one of the security guards stated that “I was shocked when the CCTV footage showed an eerie figure in period dress in the doorway. It was incredibly spooky because the face just didn’t look human. My first reaction was that someone was having a laugh, so I asked my colleagues to take a look. We spoke to our costumed guides but they don’t own a costume like that worn by the figure.” A spokeswoman for Hampton Court told newspapers, “We are baffled. It’s not a joke, we haven’t manufactured it.”
As the leading experts when it comes to Haunted London walks, we will always keep you up to date on the comings and goings of the ghosts that haunt the streets and buildings of the world’s most haunted capital city.
