Ghosts of Hampton Court Palace

Many of the palaces of London have stories of ghosts that wander the halls at night, but one palace with a particular propensity for ghost reports is the Hampton Court Palace of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames.

It is a major tourist attraction in southwest London , entertaining thousands of visitors per week. If you do happen to tour the palace during a trip to London , you'll have a chance to learn about some of these accounts of ghosts on the tour, although you may not hear about the whole story.

Some of the haunting stories themselves are as old as the Palace, which developed many ghost stories after unfortunate events hundreds of years ago. One such old story goes back to when Queen Jane Seymour gave birth to Prince Edward, the future King Edward VI, in Hampton Court Palace . After giving birth to the future king, she died there twelve days later, and her ghost was then said to haunt the staircase in the Palace, although there have been no recent reports of encounters there. When Queen Catherine Howard was arrested there in 1542, she fled along the Long Gallery screaming for King Henry VIII to save her, before his guards caught her and dragged her away. Her tortured ghost is said to haunt the palace, sometimes screaming in the same hallway, while others report seeing the notorious King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

The most compelling ghost story of recent note in the Hampton Court Palace was actually only a few years ago. In October 2003, a closed-circuit security camera recorded a blurry image of "a mysterious figure in a long coat closing the fire doors." According to one report, "the palace... maintained that the footage provided conclusive evidence that ghosts exist." A tourist wrote in the visitor book on the same day, saying that she may have seen a ghost in that vicinity at the same time. Since a video recording of a real ghost is not only relevant to the Palace, but also would be one of the most significant discoveries in the history of science, people have analyzed the video critically and attempted to debunk the story. Explanations have ranged from the idea that it could have been "a member of the public thinking they were being helpful by shutting the doors,"other researchers have suggested thermal effects. In the Toronto Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society, the possibility that the figure is not a ghost but a tour guide was investigated. They discovered that there was in fact an employee who later admitted to being in a restricted area and closing the doors. However, this explanation does not suffice given the strange nature of the video recording. The guards who were watching the security cameras said that they thought something strange was going on the second they saw the doors open. They say that the figure seems to be luminescent compared to the normal appearance of a person on the camera, and that the bottom of the figure appears translucent. So the mystery of the video recording continues.

Whatever you may think of the ghost stories that abound in Hampton Court Palace , they are fun to hear and comprise a significant portion of the Palace's history. If you visit London , make sure to stop by - you may see a ghost for yourself.