Hampton Court

About 2000/1, award winning Tour Guide Ian Franklin gave a talk to the Ghost Club in London which I attended. Ian worked for Hampton Court (as of 2022, he had recently retired) and had had a chance to inspect the records of the palace looking for information on the ghosts; he also had some recent stories to relate. One of the most famous stories, as related on the Court's website is that, "It’s said that when Catherine [Howard] was arrested at Hampton Court Palace, she broke free from the guards and ran to the doors of the Chapel Royal, where she believed Henry was at prayer. She screamed to the King for mercy, to no avail." There are often references to Catherine's phantom being seen or heard in the 'Haunted Gallery' as she rushed along it in her vain attempt to plea for her life; or at the very least, some people report a chill or strange sensations in the passageway. However, Ian could find no record of anyone seeing the ghost and it seems to have started life at the end of the 19th century; it has been proposed that this was to drum up tourism. Likewise, Ian could find no historical record of many of the other famous phantoms. What he did describe to his audience was low-level reports. The most intriguing report was an amorphous orange shape that he and his fellow staff members nicknamed "Mr Blobby."
In 2006, Ian told of a few of the encounters at the Palace; a colleague hearing footsteps coming up a staircase that carried on straight past him, and there was no-one visible; cooks stopping in an apartment found that their door would not stay shut even though it was bolted (they even asked out loud for it to to left alone if they left up the upstairs window open - and it worked); and a door that would burst open with such force that the frame was distorted. This happened three days running - and on the second day, a figure was seen at the doors. The garb was dissimilar to those worn by the people at the court, and Ian said, "A person would not have time to get to the fire doors, push them open and get back without being caught [on camera]." In addition, former palace director Dennis McGuinness also talked of a "strange, fleeting glimpse of a figure in the apartment."
A housemate at University, Helen Smith, found employment at the Court from 1993-2007 and informed me of a few phenomena: "I used to half joke that we had a poltergeist in Apt 57, which is off the Tudor kitchens and was where our conservation housekeeping offices were for my first few years there. On more than one occasion, being the first person arriving in the morning I ascended to the upstairs bathroom to find a tap on. Not just on, but jammed on as far as it would go and needing force to turn it off again. The cleaners absolutely told me it wasn't them and it always remained unexplained. I never experienced anything in the public areas and the Haunted Gallery feels to me like one of the least haunted places I've ever been. I only ever got 'spooked' coming down from Apt 2 to Fountain Court late one evening and that was just a feeling of disquiet." Helen had hazy memories of a cleaner encountering something strange and the tale, related to her third hand, was that she thinks "they saw a ghostly hand or felt a ghostly hand in the royal bathroom (it has an early plumbed marble wash basin). Anyway it completely freaked them out at the time."
Unfortunately my own experience to determine whether anything has recently been encountered at the Court were hampered by customer services. I informed the Palace that I knew Ian's research and that most of the ghost stories were almost certainly fictitious. Gemma Appleby-Bowles told me, "Due to the high cultural value of the sites and items we care for, we do not allow paranormal investigations in order to protect them from accidental damage. However, Hampton Court Palace has previously been investigated by Dr Richard Wiseman and his team from University of Hertfordshire, and a copy of the report they produced can be found here [link provided]." She also gave me a link to their website in which the ghosts were described, even though I had already told her that they were bogus. I then queried again, asking if anything had been reported by staff or visitors as they went about their day to day business. Confirming my suspicion that she hadn't read anything I'd sent to her, Gemma replied: "Unfortunately we do not know of any more recent encounters, due to the fact that we do not allow paranormal investigations at our sites" - which was not what I asked.

Link: Surrey Live

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