How the Castles, Abbeys and Houses of England Inspired the Ghost Story
Andrew Martin
The ruins of Minster Lovell Hall – an elegant Oxfordshire manor house of the fifteenth century – are promisingly located for the ghost fancier, lying between the graveyard of St Kenelm’s church and a lonely stretch of the River Windrush. The English Heritage noticeboard announces that the site is open at ‘any reasonable daylight hour’, which possibly does not include dusk on a day of heavy rain. But those were the conditions as I stood alone before the manor, thinking of the rumoured discovery of a skeleton in the basement in 1718, supposedly the body of Francis Lovell who had hidden there after the Battle of Stoke in 1487, at the end of the Wars of the Roses, and died of starvation. All around me were sounds, some explicable (the cooing of doves roosting in the remains of the tower, the rushing of the Windrush), some less so. Suddenly, there was a great, grey shape over my head. I looked up and saw a bird – a heron, I think – coasting to land on the adjacent pond.
If I had run away without looking up, I would have had a ghost story. As I walked back to the house in which I was staying, I contemplated developing one anyway, just to see the effect of saying to my hostess, ‘I saw a ghost just now at Minster Lovell Hall . . .’ I would have felt the lie justified by the entertainment value, and it is possible that I would have forgotten that I was lying the moment I began the story. If I had told it well enough, my story might have been passed on by my hostess. She might have embellished it – consciously or unconsciously – in her turn, and each of these retellings would have been a tribute to the lure of the Minster Lovell ruins.
The dissemination of my tale would have been rather folkloric, in that it would have been communicated by word of mouth, with no undue fussiness about the facts. Since the late eighteenth century, we have kept our works of fiction and non-fiction on separate shelves, but a ghost story should always seem to be non-fiction or – to use the word favoured by the late Victorian investigators of the Society for Psychical Research – ‘veridical’.
Often, a tale’s truthfulness is insisted on at the outset. Here is the title of what has been called, because of its forensic tone, the first modern ghost story: ‘A true Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs Veal the next day after her death to one Mrs Bargrave, at Canterbury, the eight of September, 1705’. The story, by Daniel Defoe, begins:
This thing is so rare in all its circumstances, and on so good authority, that my reading and conversation has not given me anything like it. It is fit to gratify the most ingenious and serious inquirer. Mrs Bargrave is the person to whom Mrs Veal appeared after her death; she is my intimate friend, and I can avouch for her reputation these past fifteen or sixteen years . . .
This presentation of credentials would become a familiar device and is used by Oscar Wilde in his parody ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887). As Lord Canterville says: ‘I feel bound to tell you, Mr Otis, that the ghost has been seen by several living members of my family, as well as by the rector of the parish, the Reverend Augustus Dampier, who is a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.’
Whether nominally factual or fictional, ghosts tend to fit standard templates. By the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens could write that they are ‘reducible to a very few general types and classes; for, ghosts have little originality and “walk” in a beaten track’. These words come from the mouth of the elderly and irritatingly sagacious narrator of ‘A Christmas Tree’ (1850), a minor Dickens’ ghost story. Such ghost world-weariness doesn’t belong to Dickens himself, who stated, ‘I have always had a strong interest in the subject and never knowingly lose an opportunity of pursuing it.’ But most ghosts are conventional in their appearance and behaviour, either because that is just what they are like, or because that is what most people who talk about them are like.
The female ghosts of castles or big houses, for example, tend to be ‘ladies’ and they tend to be white. White ladies have been spotted at (among others) Beeston Castle in Cheshire, Rochester Castle, Kent and Goodrich Castle, Herefordshire. Wistful aristocratic ladies are also available in green (Helmsley Castle, Yorkshire) and blue (Berry Pomeroy Castle in Devon, commonly regarded as English Heritage’s most haunted site, and also in possession of a white one).
Headlessness is another common complaint among ghosts. That icon of decapitation, Sir Walter Raleigh, appears at Sherborne Old Castle in Dorset and a headless drummer drums at Dover Castle. In the vicinity of Okehampton Castle in Devon, Lady Mary Howard (b. 1596) rides in a coach made from the bones of her four dead husbands, daintily decorated with a skull on every corner, and driven by a headless coachman. At dawn on old Christmas Day (about 6 January), a coach pulled by headless horses races through the ruins of Whitby Abbey and over the cliff edge – which makes me appreciate my computer’s point when it keeps changing ‘headless’ into ‘heedless’.
We cannot leave the stock spirits without mentioning ghostly monks. There is one or more at Waverley Abbey in Surrey, at Bayham Abbey and Reculver Towers in Kent, at Thetford and Binham Priories in Norfolk, at Hardwick Old Hall in Derbyshire, Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire, Thornton Abbey in Lincolnshire, at Roche Abbey and Conisbrough Castle, both in South Yorkshire, and Whalley Abbey in Lancashire.
A historical digression is required here, in order to note that monks – as the principal chroniclers of medieval life – were also among the first ghost story writers. In about 1400, for example, a monk at the great Cistercian abbey of Byland in North Yorkshire transcribed twelve ghost stories in the spare pages at the end of a popular encyclopaedia, the Elucidarium (so called because it shed light on points of theology and folk belief). The anonymous ghost story collector had the concern with provenance that we have already noted. He was careful in his scene setting – mentioning many places in the locality – and he gives the name of the protagonists in over half of the stories. The second tale, for example, concerns ‘a miraculous struggle between a spirit and a man who lived in the time of Richard II’ – a tailor called Snowball who encountered the ghost on his way home to Ampleforth, which is very near to Byland.
One ghost took the form of a disembodied voice shouting ‘How, how, how’ at midnight near a crossroads. It then turned into a pale horse, and when the percipient (William de Bradeforth) charged ‘the spirit in the name of the Lord and by the power of the blood of Jesus Christ to depart’, it withdrew ‘like a piece of canvas unfurling its four corners and billowing away’. In other stories, the spirit is more corporeal, a revenant of the kind associated with Scandinavian folklore: a lumbering animated corpse. In the third story, the revenant – the spirit of a man called Robert from nearby Kilburn, who has been frightening the locals and making the dogs bark loudly – is captured in a graveyard and pinioned on the church stile, whereupon it, or he, begins to speak ‘not with his tongue but from deep within his innards, as if from an empty barrel’. The story ends, as do most of the Byland ghost stories, and many others chronicled by monks throughout the Middle Ages, with the victim/protagonist confessing his sins and being given absolution. The monks did tend to conclude their stories in this way, stressing the efficacy of prayer in releasing souls from purgatory.
Even after the suppression of the monasteries, Catholics continued to believe in this pre-Reformation type of ghost: a soul returning and requesting prayers. Given that Protestantism had dispensed with the notion of purgatory, anyone holding such beliefs began to seem primitive and superstitious. Hence the sinister monks populating Gothic fiction, the genre that directly preceded the modern ghost story.
Gothic fiction (a romantic backlash against a dominant neo-classicism) had its lurid heyday in the late eighteenth century. It promoted the antique, the violent and the macabre. The spectral monks (as well as the white ladies and ranks of the headless) associated with so many English Heritage properties were probably instituted during this Gothic phase, monastics seeming to epitomise the decadence and hypocrisy of the medieval world that had brought their monasteries to ruin. Matthew Gregory Lewis set the template with The Monk (1796), closely followed by such sensational works as The Italian or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) by Ann Radcliffe, Gondez the Monk (1805) by William Henry Ireland and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin.
This anti-Catholic strain can perhaps still be detected in the work of the distinguished antiquarian and ghost story writer M.R. James, especially in the diabolism of the eponymous ‘Count Magnus’ (1904). (It was James, incidentally, who first transcribed and published the Byland stories – transcribed, not translated; he enjoyed the ‘very refreshing’ Latin in which they were written.)
The Gothic writers were drawn towards monks not only because of their exotic theology, but also because they were so picturesquely accommodated. Gothic literature got its name, after all – from its association with medieval ‘Gothic’ buildings and ruins, from the monasteries and castles with their underground passages, brooding battlements and crumbling staircases. Its level of hysteria was unsustainable, however, and its energy was channelled, and the sinister backdrops tamed, in the more decorous historical romances of Walter Scott. The new sensationalism resided in ghost stories, whose authors tried to throw off the materialism implied by Darwinism, just as the Gothic writers rebelled against eighteenth-century rationalism.
It is arguable that ghost stories were the first form of ‘genre fiction’, and for a while scientific advances complemented, rather than negated, ghostliness. There is an analogy to be drawn, for example, between telegraphy and telepathy. These new ghosts went at large into the world, and the familiar stage sets – ruined castles or monasteries – were no longer required . . .
Ghosts migrated to residential areas, where captive audiences awaited. The dining room of almost any Victorian house might have accommodated a séance, whose genteel sitters were not expecting a galumphing Frankenstein-ian revenant of medieval ghost stories to pitch up. There was not sufficient faith to animate such a creature. It was accepted that the afterlife would be proved obliquely, by a disembodied voice, a drop in temperature, a movement of the planchette. If the sitters did manage to conjure up a manifestation, it would be fleeting and transparent.
Ghost hunting became increasingly domesticated, concerned with faces at the window, slamming doors, creaking floorboards, and scufflings behind the skirting board. (In Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories, the naive principals would at first attribute these noises to rats, but rats were not so lightly invoked after they had played their role in the horrors of the First World War trenches.) A classic of the haunted house genre is Sheridan Le Fanu’s story of 1851, ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’. In this story – the brilliance of which is suggested by the title alone (the gloominess of ‘Aungier’) – two Dublin students rent a house that had belonged to a hanging judge. Lying in bed one night, one of the young men becomes aware of ‘a sort of horrid but undefined preparation going forward in some unknown quarter . . .’ Le Fanu himself would be kept awake at night with horrible imaginings. He had a persistent nightmare of a large house collapsing on him as he slept, and when he died in bed – of a heart attack and with a shocked expression on his face – his doctor observed, ‘That house fell at last!’
A bed is also the focal point of one of the best M.R. James ghost stories, ‘Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904). The ghostliness starts out of doors. A very rationalist academic called Parkins is walking along a bleak, grey beach in Suffolk. He comes to the site of a Templar preceptory, where he unearths a bone whistle. He takes it back to the inn where he is lodging, and into his bedroom, where he rashly blows it, causing a wind to stir beyond the windows. It is in the bedroom that the manifestation finally occurs, in the form of crumpled bed linen – never to be forgotten by anyone who has seen Jonathan Miller’s short film of the story, broadcast in 1968. My reading of this denouement is that the ‘sincere and humourless’ Parkins suffers a twofold comeuppance. First, there is the manifestation. Secondly, he is reduced to trembling fear by such a bathetic object as a bedsheet.
The most famous of all domestic hauntings was chronicled by the celebrated ghost hunter and charlatan, Harry Price, in his book of 1940, The Most Haunted House in England – namely Borley Rectory in Essex. When he repaired to Borley, which he did regularly over ten years, Price carried his ‘ghost hunter’s kit’, which included a flask of brandy (in case anybody fainted), and a pair of ‘felt overshoes used for creeping unheard about the house in order that neither human beings nor paranormal “entities” shall be disturbed when producing “phenomena”.’ Here, you feel, is the ghost hunter as lounge lizard.
Any sort of house might be haunted. Dickens spoke of the ‘avoided house’, the neglected and mysterious property that is put to shame by (or possibly shames) the primness of the conventional dwellings on either side. In literature, haunted houses do tend to be at the upper end of the market. In Walter de la Mare’s story, ‘Out of the Deep’ (1923), the protagonist, Jimmie, inherits his uncle’s ‘horrible old London mansion’. In ‘Moonlight Sonata’ (1931) by Alexander Woollcott one of the two principals inhabits ‘the collapsing family manor house to which he had indignantly fallen heir’. Then again, poltergeists do not need a large, grand house. They will turn up anywhere there is furniture to throw about.
‘Haunted Houses’, a poem of 1858 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, begins:
All houses in which men have lived and died
Are haunted houses . . .
And the more deaths the better, frankly, which is why I went to Minster Lovell Hall at dusk. It is what takes me to any English Heritage property: as the more studious visitors are in the next room hearing about the dentilled cornice and door surrounds, I am lingering in the previous room, and staring into the clouded mirror, daring any face from the past to appear alongside my own.
I am hoping, in short, for the sight of a ghost, and the sense of wonderment that would – I am confident – accompany the jolt of pure fear.
Ghosts have been seen – or felt – at English Heritage sites the length and breadth of the country. Here is a nationwide selection – by no means exhaustive – of properties which are said to be haunted and the shuddering histories behind them, including the eight locations which inspired the stories in this book.
This opulent palace, which at its peak far exceeded the size of Hampton Court, began life as the manor of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother of William the Conqueror. In 1296 Bishop Antony Bek of Durham built a manor house, parts of which have been excavated, and in the early fourteenth century Edward II gave this moated manor to his wife. It became a favourite royal residence and was greatly enlarged. The great hall seen today was built by Edward IV in the 1470s, a magnificent space for the king to entertain up to 2,000 guests, as he did in 1482. Henry VIII spent much of his boyhood at Eltham, but under Elizabeth I the palace began to fall into ruin. It wasn’t until 1933 that it was returned to a state of splendour, when the fashionable couple Stephen and Virginia (Ginie) Courtauld leased the estate from the Crown. Stephen was enormously rich – having inherited wealth enough from his family’s textile business to live at leisure, pursuing cultural and philanthropic interests. While preserving the medieval hall, he and Ginie employed the architects Sealy and Paget to build a new home, fitted with every technological convenience: a glamorous, ultra-modern setting for their collections of art and furniture, and their regular parties.
Ginie had a much-adored pet lemur named Mah-Jongg who was infamous for biting people he did not like. Mah-Jongg had his own heated and designer-decorated sleeping quarters at Eltham which can be seen today. The leather map of the estate mentioned in Max Porter’s story was created for the Courtaulds and remains above the fireplace in the boudoir. The vignettes he describes are in the neighbouring map room, where conservators have recently uncovered (beneath later wallpaper) large maps of areas to which the Courtaulds travelled pasted to the walls. The vignettes were painted onto the walls adjacent the maps, depicting scenes and characters from around the world.
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 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.
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.
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.
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, 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 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.
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.
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.
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 itself 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’.
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.
But none of these Hungerford men are said to haunt the buildings, rather it is Lady Agnes Hungerford who is sometimes seen in the chapel – perhaps repenting her deeds. Agnes was convicted of inciting and abetting two of her servants to murder her first husband, after which his body was disposed of in the castle kitchen’s oven and she promptly married Sir Edward Hungerford. After her second husband’s death she and the servants were hanged at Tyburn.
This remarkable castle in a remote valley was built by John, 5th Lord Lovell, one of the richest barons in England, in the 1390s. It was at the time as sophisticated as any building in Europe, its hexagonal design pioneering in its arrangement of luxurious self-contained suites for guests and its whole a symbol of Lovell’s closeness to the opulent court of Richard II – a cousin of his wife. In 1578 the new owner, Sir Matthew Arundell, decided to modernise this exquisite castle, adapting it for Elizabethan living. But during the Civil War in the 1640s it was besieged, partially blown up, and afterwards left to fall into ruin.
The usual ghost at Old Wardour is said to be that of Sir Thomas Arundell’s wife, the indomitable Lady Blanche, who in her husband’s absence during the Civil War mustered twenty-five men and servants, and withstood a siege against 1,300 Parliamentarians for six days before surrendering. But what visitors report encountering on the spiral staircase is not the figure of brave Blanche but a light, as if of a lantern, and the sound of a deep groan.
This squat, compact coastal artillery fortress was built for Henry VIII in 1540 to protect the important anchorage known as the Portland Roads. It was one of a chain of such forts built along the southern coast at a period of threatened invasion from Catholic Europe. It remained armed and garrisoned into the nineteenth century, was then converted into a private house, but returned to military use at the end of the century and remained in service until after the Second World War. During the Civil War, the island of Portland was a Royalist stronghold, while the nearby merchant town of Weymouth backed Cromwell. The castle was much fought over, and taken and retaken several times by both Parliamentarian and Royalist forces.
Richard Wiseman, a Royalist surgeon, and later surgeon to Charles II, recalled attending to one of the soldiers of the Portland Garrison in 1645. The man was haemorrhaging, and Wiseman cauterised the wound, using a heated poker. As well as pushes and pinches in otherwise empty rooms, when in the castle kitchen, where this surgery is said to have taken place, visitors have reported the smell of burning flesh.
The Cold War Bunker in York, headquarters of the Royal Observer Corps, No. 20 Group, was opened in 1961 at the height of the Cold War. In 1949, the unstable relationship between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies following the Second World War deteriorated when the Soviets detonated a test nuclear bomb. In response Britain intensified its nuclear arms development and began to research and plan for possible nuclear attack. In 1956, the Ministry of Works began designs for nuclear-resistant bunkers. York Cold War Bunker was one of twenty-nine such bunkers built to form a network of semi-secret posts to observe and monitor nuclear attack. It was built underground of reinforced concrete, three storeys deep, ‘tanked’ in three layers of asphalt protected by brickwork, and then covered with earth. Here, after the world outside had been devastated and contaminated, a body of service men and women would seal themselves off behind the airlock doors and attempt, from the operations room at the heart of this sunken asylum, to make contact with the surviving outer world. The bunker remained manned and ready until it was decommissioned in 1991.
Perhaps due to its short and mercifully uneventful life – only thirty years, and witness only to peacetime activities – there are no known accounts of ghosts here. Instead this chilling underground stronghold seems to be haunted by its own once-dreaded fate.
Scarborough Castle stands on a dramatic promontory with sweeping panoramic views over the North Sea and surrounding coastline. The Romans built a signal station here in the fourth century ad and Henry II’s massive twelfth-century great tower still dominates the site. The castle was besieged several times, notably by rebel barons in 1312, and twice during the Civil War. It was shelled and badly damaged by German warships during the First World War.
It was during the siege of 1312 that the favourite of Edward II, Piers Gaveston, who had taken refuge in the castle, was captured. Although promised safe conduct on his surrender, he was seized on the return south by his great enemy the Earl of Warwick – whom Gaveston had disparagingly named the ‘Black Dog’ – and summarily beheaded. Visitors have reported being pushed and shoved in empty rooms, and, according to local legend, the ghost of Gaveston tries to lure people to their death over the edge of the castle cliff.
The great ruins of the abbey can be seen from many miles away, dominating the headland above picturesque Whitby. The first abbey was founded here in 657 by King Oswiu of Northumbria, and its first abbess was the formidable Anglo-Saxon Princess Hild. It was here that the cowherd Caedmon was miraculously inspired to become a poet and the great synod of Whitby was held in 664 to determine the future direction of the Church in England. This abbey was abandoned in the ninth century, probably after Viking raids. The ruins seen today are not of this abbey but of the one founded in the eleventh century by a Benedictine monk, Reinfrid. The new abbey grew to be one of the most powerful monasteries in Yorkshire, but was suppressed in 1539. Part of it was converted into a handsome mansion, a section of which remains today. The Gothic ruins provide the unforgettable backdrop to the arrival of Dracula in England in Bram Stoker’s novel. In his book, Lucy Westenra is curious about the ghost of a ‘white lady’ said to have been seen at one of the abbey’s windows, though a sceptical local tells her bluntly that such stories are ‘all very well for comers and trippers an’ the like, but not for a nice young lady like you.’
The Cistercian abbey of Byland was regarded in its heyday as one of the three great abbeys of Yorkshire, alongside Rievaulx and Fountains. The enormous late twelfth-century church was bigger than most cathedrals of the time. Its west front, which dominates the ruins with the remains of a great circular rose window above three tall pointed lancet windows, proclaims Byland as an outstanding example of early Gothic architecture, a pioneer of the style in northern England. At the Suppression, Byland passed into private ownership, and fell into ruin. But one of the most remarkable survivals from the abbey is the medieval collection of ghost stories written in Latin by one of the monks at Byland in about 1400. One of the strangest tales clearly troubled the writer so much that he expresses the hope that he may not come to any harm for having written it down. It relates how, in days gone by, Jacob Tankerlay, a former rector of a nearby parish, who had been buried in front of the monks’ chapter house at Byland, would rise from his grave at night to visit his former mistress. One night he ‘breathed out into her eye’. It is not clear exactly what this means but the verb exsufflare (literally, ‘to blow out’) is used in the context of exorcism at baptism and also associated with magic rites. Whatever happened, the consequence was that the abbot and chapter took the drastic step of excavating the coffin and having it thrown into a lake. The monk concludes by praying that God should have mercy on Jacob if he is among the souls to receive salvation.
The ruins of Helmsley Castle stand on a rocky outcrop above the River Rye. It was first built in the early twelfth century by Walter Espec, a Norman baron of ‘gigantic stature’ with a voice ‘like a trumpet’, known for his soldiering and his piety – he founded nearby Rievaulx Abbey and Kirkham Priory. Helmsley passed to his sister’s husband, Peter de Ros, and he and his descendants raised most of the massive stonework defences seen today. In 1508, Helmsley came into the hands of Thomas Manners, who remodelled part of the castle into a luxurious mansion. The castle’s only – but significant – military trial was a siege in 1644 during the Civil War. It was held by a small garrison for the king for three months before surrendering, during which time four men were killed. Later in the Civil War, Royalist prisoners were held in the basement of the west tower. It is one of these unhappy soldiers, killed by cannon fire or simply returning to the place of a wretched imprisonment, who is said to be seen sitting among the castle ruins.
This magnificent Jacobean house was built on the site of Walden Abbey, a twelfth-century Benedictine monastery that was suppressed on 22 March 1538. Five days later Henry VIII gave it to his Chancellor, Thomas, Lord Audley, to adapt for his own use. Audley converted the ranges around the monks’ cloister into a courtyard house. He demolished the east end of the church, which extended from the north side of the cloister into what is now the parterre, or formal garden. Its foundations, as well as burials in what would have been the monks’ cemetery, were discovered during work on this garden. Audley’s grandson, Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, rebuilt the house between 1605 and 1614 on a palatial scale. Charles II bought this ready-made palace from the 3rd Earl in 1667; then Audley End was returned to the Howards in 1701. Later in the century the Countess of Portsmouth began remodelling the house and gardens. She bequeathed it to her nephew in 1762, who commissioned Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to transform the gardens and Robert Adam to add a fashionable suite of reception rooms. In the 1820s, the 3rd Baron Braybrooke, a scholar and antiquarian, redecorated many of its rooms in the Jacobean style.
The massive oak screen in the great hall, with its carved busts and festoons of fruit, was probably originally brightly painted. In the eighteenth century it was painted white to represent the then fashionable stucco. The 3rd Baron stripped the screen back to the wood, as it remains today, and bought Jacobean furniture and an eclectic collection of arms to display in the house. His son, the 4th Baron, had a passion for natural history and his collection of stuffed and mounted animals is to be seen in the house.
There is no known curse attached to the screen, as in Sarah Perry’s story, nor a monk who hanged himself here, but staff have experienced various peculiar happenings. A couple of years ago after closing time two members of staff doing a final check in the great hall smelt violets before the portrait of Margaret Audley. They summoned a colleague, who smelt the same thing. The scent moved about the hall and then simply vanished. On another occasion, a staff member was standing at the window outside the chapel when she felt the presence of someone behind her. She turned to see a tall aristocratic-looking man in dark clothing who then walked into the chapel. She followed him, but he had vanished. A black and white dog was seen in the butler’s pantry by a new member of staff showing visitors round. She assumed it was a guide dog only to discover there were no dogs in the building. Oddly, Lord Howard de Walden and his wife, who rented Audley from 1904, left in 1912 after becoming convinced the place was haunted: while playing billiards he had seen a dog ‘rush in through the wall’.
The abbey, founded in 1020, became one of the richest and most powerful Benedictine monasteries in England. The surviving structures are extensive and include the impressive Great Gate and remains of the immense church and monastic complex. The site became home to the remains of Edmund, king of the East Angles (d. 869), in 903 and the acquisition of such a notable relic made the monastery a place of pilgrimage as well as the recipient of numerous royal grants. It was here in 1214 that King John’s discontented barons assembled to discuss their grievances against him – which led to Runnymede and the sealing of Magna Carta the following year. Although after the Suppression the abbey precinct was soon stripped of valuable building material, the abbot’s lodging survived as a house until 1720.
Bury’s monks must have been deeply attached to the abbey. Sightings of monastic ghosts are numerous and wide ranging. In the 1960s Enid Crossley, who lived in a cottage built in the medieval remains of the abbey, claimed that a monk regularly crossed her bedroom. Another has been seen disappearing through the wall of a butcher’s shop and hanging around the basement of a local pub. He may be the lover of the spectral nun in grey, said to have been involved with one of the monks of Bury, and often seen around the place – occasionally in the pub.
This spectacular keep, one of the best preserved and most lavishly decorated in England, stands with its associated buildings surrounded by massive earthworks on a broad spur above the village of Castle Rising. Norman lord William d’Albini began work on the castle in 1138 for his new wife, the widow of Henry I. In the fourteenth century it became the luxurious residence of Queen Isabella, widow of Edward II, and the suite of buildings to the south of the keep was probably built for her. After her death it was held by the Black Prince, who ordered and authorised various building works here. In 1544 it was granted by Henry VIII to the Howard family in whose hands it remains today; the current owner is also a descendant of d’Albini, the castle’s founder.
It is the presence of the formidable Isabella which is felt most strongly at Castle Rising, where visitors believe they have heard the skirts of her dress rustling on the stairs and in the white room, one of the upper chambers of the castle. In 2015, during an investigation, a photograph was taken in this room that revealed an unexpected shape: the shadowy figure of a woman in medieval dress.
Framlingham is a magnificent late twelfth-century castle, its striking outline reflected in its glassy mere. The castle was built by Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, one of the most influential courtiers under the Plantagenet kings. It remained the home to the earls and dukes of Norfolk for over 400 years, after which it was briefly owned by Mary Tudor, where she mustered her supporters in 1553 after the death of her brother, Edward VI. At the end of the sixteenth century, by now partly ruinous, the castle was used as a prison to hold Catholic priests and recusants. In about 1600 it held forty prisoners. The following century a poorhouse was built within its walls. It was occupied until 1839.
As to ghosts, staff at Framlingham report footsteps in the upper room of the medieval hall that now forms the Lanman Museum, as well as ‘constant muttering’ on the back stairs. One winter evening while alone in the castle, a member of staff heard a bell ring right beside her – the sort of hand bell that might have been used in the poorhouse to summon the inmates. On another occasion, one of the stewards arrived at the castle one morning and, as she went to turn on the lights, she saw a man standing dressed all in black wearing a Puritan-style hat and long cloak. She has never seen him again – fortunately – as she vows she would no longer be working at the castle if she had.
Situated in the heart of England, Kenilworth was one of the mightiest fortresses in the country, a vast castle which withstood a famous medieval siege and is renowned for its association with Elizabeth I and her favourite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, to whom the queen granted the castle in 1563. A castle was first established here in the 1120s. Later in the century Henry II took it under his control and it was his building work and that of his son, King John, that extended the castle to much the form it retains today. In 1244 this strategic and magnificent stronghold was granted by Henry III to Simon de Montfort – then a great royal favourite who strengthened the castle further and installed ‘unheard of . . . machines’ – probably the trebuchets (huge counterweighted catapults) that would soon to be used here in the longest medieval siege on English soil.
After the death of de Montfort during the Second Barons’ War, his followers withdrew inside the castle. The king sent a messenger to demand their surrender. Instead, they sent him back to his master with a severed hand. The resultant great siege lasted six months. Disease and starvation finally forced the surrender of the rebels.
Kenilworth was subsequently developed as a palace by John of Gaunt, and became a favoured residence of the Lancastrian kings before passing to the Dudley family under Henry VIII. The last great works at the castle were carried out by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who built what is now known as Leicester’s Building, a four-storey tower block erected in 1571 specifically to provide private accommodation for Elizabeth I. The queen visited four times, the last time in 1575, and the current Elizabethan gardens are a recreation of those Leicester created for that visit as part of his extensive efforts to impress the queen and win her hand in marriage.
The three-storey gatehouse in Kamila Shamsie’s story was built by Leicester between 1570 and 1575. In 1650 it was converted into a house and an extension created at the back, where the staff office and kitchen now are. Staff have reported peculiar happenings in the gatehouse – things missing or moved once the castle has been closed to visitors, and the antique cot in the adjoining room rocking by itself. A night watchman reported that, while patrolling the grounds one evening, he witnessed a ghostly figure walk through his colleague, who went cold as it happened. Certainly, staff are used to various unexplained happenings. Some say ghostly chickens have even been seen pecking about the stables.
This extraordinary seventeenth-century aristocratic retreat stands on the site of a medieval castle perched high on a ridge above the Vale of Scarsdale. The medieval ruins were used as the setting for the exquisite Little Castle, built by Charles Cavendish from 1612 as an escape from his principal seat nearby. His son, William, added the terrace and the riding house, which remains the earliest complete survival in England. Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria were entertained at Bolsover by Cavendish in 1634 with a lavish feast and entertainment. This was its heyday. By the end of the century the castle began to decline, though Cavendish descendants used it as a retreat until the early nineteenth century. Indeed, it remains occupied today, permanently it would seem.
Bolsover is one of the most widely reported haunted sites in the care of English Heritage. Members of staff and visitors often report being pushed, having doors slammed on them and finding objects inexplicably moved. Night security guards have been alarmed by unexplained lights and movement in the empty property, and two workmen were terrified when they saw a woman disappear through a wall. A little boy has been seen holding the hands of women or children as they walk about the site, his living companions unaware that he is at their side.
Hardwick Old Hall was built between 1587 and 1596 by Bess of Hardwick, who was among the richest and best-connected women of the Elizabethan age. The design was for the time radically modern, drawing on the latest Italian domestic innovations. Although now only a romantic shell, it suggests the magnificence of Bess’s status and aspirations. When her fourth and final marriage, to George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, broke down acrimoniously, Bess retreated to Hardwick, where she enlarged and remodelled the medieval manor into the house now known as Hardwick Old Hall. When her husband died, leaving Bess staggeringly rich, she began work on a new hall immediately beside the old: the two intended to function like two wings of one building. Bess’s descendants came to prefer Chatsworth to Hardwick, however, and in the eighteenth century the old hall was dismantled.
Staff and visitors alike have heard voices and nonexistent doors opening and closing. It is said that the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who enjoyed the patronage of the Cavendish family and died at Hardwick Hall in 1679, haunts the grounds. Here he is joined by Bess, who people claim still glides through her once magnificent creation.
The ‘Castle of the Peak’, as Peveril was known in the Middle Ages, was founded soon after the Norman Conquest by the same powerful knight, William Peveril, who built Bolsover Castle. Its dramatic hilltop location high above what is now the Derbyshire town of Castleton was a clear position of dominance over the surrounding lands and it played an important role in guarding the Peak Forest lead-mining area. In 1155 it was taken into possession of the Crown, its defences strengthened and the keep built. The only real action that the castle saw occurred in 1216, at the end of the reign of King John. Despite the sealing of Magna Carter the year before, many of John’s most powerful barons were still in rebellion, and Peveril was held for them by the constable of the Peak, Brian de Lisle. He was repeatedly ordered by the king to hand it over, refused, and was eventually ousted by force. How many of his or the king’s men were killed at the time, if any, is not known, but reportedly a knight in a white surcoat has been seen standing beside the keep and on the ramparts, and a riderless horse and a black dog in the castle grounds – perhaps his? Visitors report banging and clanking, suggesting the iron-clad limbs of this same lonely knight still patrolling the castle walls.
After the death of John of Gaunt, who held the castle at the end of the fourteenth century, the castle fell into a decline from which it never recovered. Today it is one of the most romantic sites in this spectacular stretch of England.
Magnificent Goodrich stands in woodland on a rocky crag, commanding the valley of the River Wye. Goodrich led a largely peaceful existence until 1646, when Parliamentary forces under their commander Colonel John Birch bombarded and brought down the north-west tower before storming the castle and its Royalist garrison.
The keep was built in about 1150, probably by Richard ‘Strongbow’ de Clare and Goodrich subsequently passed to one of the greatest soldiers of that era, William Marshall, ‘the best knight in all the world’ according even to an enemy. But it was probably under William’s granddaughter and her husband that the splendid castle whose remains dominate the site today was built. After its partial destruction in the Civil War the castle fell into ruin, a magnet for visitors in search of the Romantic and the Picturesque.
During the violent siege of Goodrich, so the story goes, Colonel Birch’s niece, Alice, took refuge in the castle with her Royalist lover, Charles Clifford. As the battering of the castle by her uncle’s men grew in violence, the lovers took fright and ran, trying to escape across the River Wye under cover of darkness. But the waters were high and they were swept away by the currents and drowned. They are said to be seen standing on the ramparts looking out across the valley.
Carlisle Castle was built in 1092 by William II, in his efforts to secure the border between Scotland and England. His brother, Henry I, set about fortifying the castle in stone, but during the national crisis over the succession, David, king of the Scots, seized Carlisle, and shifted the Scottish border south again. He probably completed the works begun by Henry I at the castle and died there in 1135. But David’s successor was no match for the next English king, Henry II, who regained and strengthened the castle, which was as well – twice the Scots attacked with large forces, and twice Carlisle withstood the sieges.
Under King John, Carlisle was again besieged by the Scots, who ‘cracked from top to bottom’ the walls of the outer gatehouse, and then surged inside and similarly bombarded the inner gatehouse. To the north of this inner gatehouse was the ‘palace’ – royal apartments where a bath was later installed for Edward I’s queen, Margaret, who stayed at the castle while her husband was attempting to conquer Scotland.
In 1315 the Scots again attacked the castle, this time under Robert the Bruce, but the castle was staunchly defended under the command of Andrew Harclay, a then-favoured subject of Edward II. Some years later, however, Harclay attempted to negotiate a Scottish truce without the king’s permission. The unfortunate man was surprised inside the castle, arrested for treason, and hanged, drawn and quartered outside the city walls. One of his quarters was displayed on Carlisle keep, where it remained for five years.
Carlisle was repeatedly strengthened during the rule of the Wardens of the March, the king’s officers in charge of keeping the peace on the borders, but became neglected in the sixteenth century. But when Henry VIII’s split with the Roman Catholic Church led to fears that the Scots, siding with Europe, would invade, Carlisle’s importance was again recognised. Bulwarks were built to the east, the half-moon battery to the west, and the walls and roofs were strengthened to bear heavy guns. Carlisle gained some forty years’ respite following the union of the crowns of England and Scotland in 1603, but when Civil War broke out those Scots who supported Parliament besieged the whole city, aiming to starve Carlisle into submission. Every horse was eaten, then the dogs, and finally the rats – and after nine months a desperate Carlisle surrendered.
During the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745, captured rebels were imprisoned in the city, including the castle. The prisoners taken after the defeat of the ’45 uprising – during which Carlisle was once again besieged, this time by the Duke of Cumberland on his way north to victory at Culloden – did not fare as well as their fellows of ’15. Then, two had escaped from the castle and the rest had been pardoned. But after the ’45, although most were transported, thirty-one were hanged at Carlisle. Andrew Hurley refers to the drawing of lots by the prisoners to choose who would stand trial. This did indeed happen – the prisoners passing round a beaver hat in which were placed nineteen slips of white paper, and one of black. Nine unfortunate prisoners were executed at Carlisle on 18 October 1746. The event drew a large crowd but afterwards, ‘many returned home with full resolution to see no more of the kind, it was so shocking’.
Carlisle remained a military base until 1959, during which time various works were done to extend and update the castle, including extensive new accommodation for troops. It seems to be one of these newer buildings, where the King’s Own Border Regiment Museum is now housed, that has given rise to the most recent reports of oddities by staff, including alarms being set off, footsteps, banging doors and lights that have been turned off at night being on again in the morning.
Lying within a meander of the River Irthing with a view into the gorge that was once compared to that of Troy, Birdoswald was one of the forts built by the Romans as part of the Hadrian’s Wall frontier system. Its defences are the best preserved of any along the Wall. By the sixteenth century, Birdoswald was a fortified farm subject to raids by reivers from Liddesdale, now in Scotland. Birdoswald was farmed until 1984. Although there are rumours of a grey lady, the farmer’s family who lived here between 1956 and 1984 never saw her – although that didn’t prevent them from teasing the new hired hands, not to mention one or two archaeologists. One man was so scared after a picture fell off the wall one night that he left the next morning. The ghost was evidently more restless in earlier times, for the people who had lived at the farm previously heard chairs falling over in the night. They thought it was something to do with the statue of the goddess Fortuna, from the Roman bathhouse, that was once kept in a passageway. It is now in Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle.
Housesteads falls roughly midway along Hadrian’s Wall, which was begun in about ad 122 and stretches for seventy-three miles, spanning the narrowest stretch of northern England. Housesteads was garrisoned for most of its active life by the first cohort of Tungrians, a body of about 800 soldiers brought from the part of the Empire that is now eastern Belgium.
After the withdrawal of the Roman Empire from Britain in ad 410, the fort was largely abandoned until the sixteenth century, when a lawless community of thieving ‘moss troopers’ based themselves here, thriving in this dangerous borderland between Scotland and England.
The milecastle referred to in Kate Clanchy’s story is known as milecastle 37. These small gated forts were built, as their name suggests, roughly every Roman mile along the length of the Wall. Between each were two towers, or turrets, from which soldiers patrolling the Wall could look out over the deep ditch north of the Wall and into barbarian territory. The forts were built to a roughly standard design – a large rectangle with rounded corners, the ramparts built of stone or turf, with a gate on each of the four sides and regular towers along the perimeter. At the centre of the fort was the headquarters building, which contained a strongroom, shrine, administrative buildings and assembly hall. Flanking the headquarters were the commanding officer’s quarters and granaries, while the rest of the fort contained the barracks, workshops and storehouses.
At Housesteads, a town grew up outside the fort to the south. Many finds from this part of the site are housed in the museum. This was built in 1936 to the same footprint as one of the Roman town buildings, thought to have been an inn or shop, excavated earlier that decade. But the inn revealed something rather more than dropped dice and coins when excavated. Buried under the clay floor of the back room were two skeletons. One was that of a man, with the tip of a knife still in his ribs. The other, more fragmentary, was probably a woman. As Romans buried their dead outside the town, there is no doubt this was a murder. But it is not the ghosts of this unfortunate couple that have been seen along the Wall. Instead it seems the soldiers chose to return. Sceptics might imagine Roman re-enactors have been mistaken by imaginative visitors, but apparently not. One of the most common sightings is of a soldier in Roman armour at milecastle 42, some five miles west of Housesteads. The man is seen several metres up in the air, at the original level of the Wall.
Commanding a superb defensive position on a headland overlooking the River Tyne, the ruins of Tynemouth Priory and Castle are now surrounded only by gravestones and seagulls. But for most of its 2,000-year history, the headland was inhabited by communities of monks and soldiers. A monastic community was established here in the eighth century but its buildings were destroyed during the Viking invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries. The medieval ruins visible today belong to Tynemouth Priory, founded in the late eleventh century and dedicated to St Oswine (d. 651) whose body was preserved here in a rich shrine. Although the monastery was suppressed in 1539 it seems that one monk never left the place and still wanders through the graveyard.
Because of its strategic value in protecting the mouth of the Tyne, the headland was fortified until the 1950s. It is not within the remains of the medieval gatehouse nor the gun batteries where the latest oddity occurred but in the disused coastal station, not normally open to the public. A theatre company at Tynemouth which put on a show one recent Hallowe’en discovered that a projector, which had been carefully set up and left in a locked room, had been turned on its side.
Mighty Prudhoe was built in the early twelfth century, on the site of an earlier Norman fortress, to defend a strategic crossing of the River Tyne against Scottish invaders. It was continuously occupied for over nine centuries. Prudhoe was originally the home of the Umfravilles, and withstood two sieges, before passing to the Percy family in 1398. In the early nineteenth century they built a Regency style manor house for their land agent within its walls.
While local legend talks of a grey lady who haunts the former moat and surrounding woods and a white horse that drifts silently round the courtyard, one former resident of Prudhoe, who lived with her mother in the east tower (without electricity or running water) in the 1950s, witnessed other more disturbing phenomena. First, there was the sound of chanting from the chapel and, more unexpectedly, of someone bouncing a ball rhythmically up and down the steps outside. There had been a young boy, they were told, who later became a priest and used to spend hours practising bouncing a ball up and down the steps . . . Another resident and her husband were often awakened by the sound of water being hurled with great force at the door – although there was no trace of it on investigation.
In the hallway was an enormous oak table. One night an incredible noise woke everyone up, as if there had been an explosion. The massive top lid of the table lay on the floor. It could not possibly just have slipped or been pushed – it took three men to put it back in place.
Kate Clanchy was born in Glasgow and is the author of Meeting the English, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, and the much acclaimed memoir Antigona and Me. Her poetry has won her a wide audience as well as three Forward Prizes and a Somerset Maugham Award, among others. The title story from The Not-Dead and The Saved won the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award.
Stuart Evers’ first book, Ten Stories About Smoking, won the London Book Award in 2011 and his highly acclaimed novel, If This is Home, followed in 2012. His most recent collection, Your Father Sends His Love, was shortlisted for the 2016 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. His work has appeared in three editions of the Best British Short Stories as well as Granta, The White Review, Prospect and on BBC Radio 4. Originally from the North West, he lives in London.
Mark Haddon is a writer and artist who has written fifteen books for children and won two BAFTAs. His bestselling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, was published simultaneously by Jonathan Cape and David Fickling in 2003. It won seventeen literary prizes, including the Whitbread Award. His poetry collection, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, was published by Picador in 2005, his play Polar Bears was performed at the Donmar Warehouse in 2007 and his last novel, The Red House, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2012. His latest full-length book is The Pier Falls, a collection of stories. He lives in Oxford.
Andrew Michael Hurley has lived in Manchester and London, and is now based in Lancashire. His first novel, The Loney, was originally published by Tartarus Press, a tiny independent publisher based in Yorkshire, as a 300-copy limited-edition, before being republished by John Murray and going on to win the Costa Best First Novel Award and Book of the Year at the British Book Industry Awards in 2016. He is currently working on Devil’s Day, to be published by John Murray in 2017.
Andrew Martin is the author of a dozen novels, including a series of nine thrillers set on the railways of Edwardian Britain, one of which, The Somme Stations, won the Crime Writers’ Association Award for Historical Fiction in 2011. His latest novel, Soot, is set in York in 1799 and concerns the murder of a silhouette painter. He also writes and presents TV documentaries.
Sarah Perry was born in Essex. She has been the writer in residence at Gladstone’s Library and the UNESCO World City of Literature Residence in Prague. Her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize, and won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2014. The Essex Serpent was the Waterstones Book of the Year in 2016 and won the British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year and Overall Book of the Year in 2017. It was also shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the Walter Scott, Baileys and Wellcome Book Prizes. She lives in Norwich.
Max Porter is the author of the bestselling Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Faber & Faber, 2015), which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Sunday Times PFD Young Writer of the Year Award and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award, and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and The Goldsmith’s Prize. It has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Max lives in south London with his wife and three children.
Kamila Shamsie is the author of seven novels, most recently Home Fire. Burnt Shadows has been translated into more than twenty languages and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and A God in Every Stone was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Three of her other novels (In the City by the Sea, Kartography, Broken Verses) have received awards from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, she grew up in Karachi, and now lives in London.
Jeanette Winterson OBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents, she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn’t work out. Discovering early the power of books, she left home at sixteen to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at twenty-five. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. Twenty-seven years later she revisited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written ten novels for adults, as well as children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays. She writes regularly for the Guardian. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in London. She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.