Elizabeth II's Haunting and Other Royal Ghost Tales | Vanity Fair

Every year on May 19, at Blickling Hall in Norfolk, England, the former home of the Boleyn family, a terrifying specter supposedly appears. A coach gallops down the road, guided by a headless driver (the horses, luckily, have heads). Inside the carriage, glowing red, a young woman sits, holding her bleeding head in her lap. A cool blue light follows the carriage, which is sometimes seen dragging behind it a headless male corpse and a band of screaming devils. This is said to be the ghostly carriage of Anne Boleyn, murdered by her husband King Henry VIII on this day in 1536. The headless corpse? Her brother George, who was also executed by Henry VIII.

The tragic Anne of a Thousand Days—a reference to the length of her reign as the Queen of England before she was beheaded by King Henry—is unsurprisingly the holy grail of English royal ghosts as her spirit has allegedly been spotted all over England. According to the investigatory book Most Haunted Castles, she also appears at Hever Castle, another former Boleyn property, where she has been seen in a window, beating and scratching her fists against it.

With royal figures occupying so much space in history and culture—their lives public, their deaths infamous—it makes sense that many monarchs have felt haunted by the ancient palaces and castles they inhabit. Empress Josephine, the wife of Napoleon, once told her daughter how much she hated sleeping in Marie Antoinette’s old bedroom at the Tuileries Palace. “I have dark misgivings,” she said. “I feel as if the shadow of the queen is asking me what I am doing in her bed.”

Other royals are at peace with their ghostly ancestors. In 2017, Queen Silvia of Sweden cheerfully admitted there are ghosts in Stockholm’s UNESCO-listed Drottningholm Palace. “There are small friends … ghosts,” she said. “They’re all very friendly but you sometimes feel that you’re not completely alone. It’s really exciting.”

Her sister-in-law Princess Christina agreed. “There is much energy in this house. It would be strange if it didn’t take the form of guises,” she noted. “There’s stories about ghosts in all old houses. They have been filled with people over the centuries. The energies remain.”

Even the stoic Queen Elizabeth II supposedly encountered the paranormal more than once. According to British royals expert Hilary Fordwich, “Both the late Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth II reported apparitions, witnessing paranormal activity there of their late ancestor Queen Elizabeth I.” This spirit of the Virgin Queen, said to walk the library at Windsor Castle, was also reportedly seen by Princess Vicky, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. Other ghosts spotted at Windsor include the Mad King George III, muttering “what” over and over, and King Henry VIII moaning and groaning because of his ulcerated leg.

Queen Elizabeth II was also said to have felt the presence of the ghost of Queen Victoria’s beloved Scottish servant John Brown, who has been seen in his kilt on the Balmoral Estate. “Our dear late queen always said that there were ghosts, and she said ‘I never go to Allt-na-Giubhsaich – Glassalt, the cottage on the lake in Balmoral – without the corgis because the corgis sense it before I do. Their hackles go up and they start to growl so I never go without them, and I never stay the night there,’” butler Paul Burrell recalled. “Queen Victoria would stay the night there with John Brown.”

Sightings of royal ghosts are a worldwide phenomenon. Aztec emperor Moctezuma II’s ghost is said to roam Mexico’s National Palace. At the beautiful Château de Chenonceau in Loire Valley of France, the ghosts of the two women in 16th-century King Henry II’s life, his wife Catherine de’ Medici and mistress Diane de Poitiers, are spotted only when the moon is full, with Catherine combing the hair of her husband’s lover. In Russia, Peter the Great strides purposefully around the theater of the hermitage in his heavy boots.

In the Tower of London alone, there are enough ghost sightings to fill an apartment complex. The headless Anne Boleyn has been spotted leading a procession of dignitaries to her execution site. Lady Jane Grey and Sir Walter Raleigh also appear, as do the two lost little Princes of the Tower, huddled together in white nightgowns holding hands. There is even the ghost apparition of a bear, presumably left over from the days when the tower housed the royal menagerie.

Not surprisingly, tragic queens’ spirits are favorites for the tellers of ghostly tales. Mary, Queen of Scots, seems to haunt every castle she ever visited. But perhaps the creepiest sighting is at Holyroodhouse Palace, where Mary witnessed the brutal abduction and murder of her supporter David Rizzio, her Italian private secretary and (falsely) rumored lover, in 1566.

“David Rizzio is said to walk its halls,” Spooky Scotland reports. “To this day, the bloodstain remains on the wooden floor where he was murdered, outside Mary’s private quarters. According to palace staff, these floorboards have been replaced several times. However, Rizzio’s bloodstains always reappear in the same place.”

The doomed Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of King Henry VIII, is perhaps one of the most pitiful spooky stories. Accused of cheating on her aged husband in 1541, she was locked in her room at Hampton Court and desperately broke away from her guards to try and gain entrance to the royal chapel where Henry prayed.

“Since then, from time to time, her wild flight down the long gallery had been reenacted,” Joan Forman writes in Haunted Royal Homes. “On many occasions her frantic screams have been heard, as they were when the guards hauled her away…many later residents in the vast house have heard these sounds, and not a few have actually seen the figure in white, its hair long and loose upon its shoulders, as it glides rapidly along the gallery.”

But no ghostly sighting of a tragic queen caused more of a public kerfuffle than the strange case of Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain. On August 10, 1901, the two English women, trailblazing academics at St. Hugh’s College at the University of Oxford, were strolling the grounds of Versailles. According to their book An Adventure (which was originally published under pseudonyms), they were searching for Marie Antionette’s fabled Petit Trianon when they entered a “dreamy haziness.”

“Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry,” they write.

They saw two old-fashioned men, one menacing and one elegant. “He was tall, with large dark eyes, and had crisp, curling black hair under the same large sombrero hat. He was handsome, and the effect of the hair was to make him look like an old picture. His face was glowing red as through great exertion, —as though he had come a long way.”

He spoke frantically to them. “You must not go through that,” he said, “this way...look for the house.”

The women walked over a rustic bridge to a small, idyllic cottage. On the lawn, was a woman sitting on a camp stool sketching. According to An Adventure:

She saw us, and when we passed close by on her left hand, she turned and looked full at us. It was not a young face, and (though rather pretty) it did not attract me. She had on a shady white hat perched on a good deal of fair hair that fluffed round her forehead. Her light summer dress was arranged on her shoulders in handkerchief fashion…I thought she was a tourist, but that her dress was old-fashioned and rather unusual… I looked straight at her; but some indescribable feeling made me turn away.

Moberly and Jourdain, egged on by French friends who claimed Marie Antoinette’s ghost was frequently spotted near the Petit Trianon, came to believe the woman sketching was the spirit of the tragic queen. They concluded they had entered some sort of “time scape,” which was a tableau of Marie Antoinette’s famed English village and garden. Endless claims and counterclaims were made, with critics unable to understand why two highly respected, serious women would profess to have seen such a fantastical specter.

Cruel leaders also often reportedly met with otherworldly harbingers of doom (although these tales were often dreamed up by their critics). The Hohenzollern Kings of Prussia were said to be visited by “the white lady,” who often appeared without a head accompanied by guards right before the death or ruin of the monarch.

Then there was “the little red man of destiny,” a horrifying gnome dressed in scarlet said to make Faustian bargains with the rulers of France. According to Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Palaces by Brad Steiger, the little red man first appeared to Catherine de’ Medici in the 16th century and was seen before the assassination of King Henry IV in 1610, and in the prisons of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette before their executions.

It is said Napoleon made numerous deals with the little red man. He appeared for the final time in January 1814.

“It is said that Napoleon beseeched the ghost for time to complete the execution of certain proposals, but the prophetic messenger gave him only three months to achieve general peace or all would be over for him,” Steiger writes. “Three months after the red man’s final visit to the emperor, Talleyrand and the senate called for Napoleon’s abdication.”

Some monarchs were also said to be haunted by those they had harmed. Legend has it that Wu Zetian, China’s only female Emperor (624–705), was haunted by the spirits of two women she had murdered, Empress Wang and Consort Xiao. They would come back to her in her dreams, bloody and maimed as if fresh from their execution.

Royals who met horrific ends also seem to hang around the places where they were killed. In 1918, the Romanov royal family and their attendants were murdered in the basement of Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia. The Soviets turned the house into a museum, and a woman named Anna worked there as a security guard at night. According to the website Romanov Memorial:

Anna told the Archbishop that many times during her years of working there she could hear beautiful singing and see light streaming from the basement door when night fell. She said that the singing was as of many voices, and definitely church music. She would often creep up to the door to listen but was too frightened to go into the basement to look.

Of the current British royal family, it seems the greatest believer of ghosts may be Queen Camilla. According to her son, Tom Parker Bowles, the Wilshire mansion he grew up in was notoriously haunted. “As a child you would build up a fear of these rooms,” he said. “It was always cold, even in the middle of summer…. There were lots of people who were very rational people, who in the middle of the night would jump in their car and drive back to London because something had got in their bed, and it was a spirit.”

The ghost even made his presence known to the lady of the house. “My mother says she woke up one night, in the middle of the night, and there was a presence sort of pinning her down in her bed,” Parker Bowles claimed. “This was many, many years ago, but she’s made of pretty strong stuff so probably told the ghost where to go.”

Queen Camilla has also spoken of her fear of Dumfries House, an 18th-century Scottish retreat King Charles III had restored and opened to the public. “There was definitely a ghost — without a shadow of a doubt,” she recalled. “I walked up the steps, got into the hall and I thought, ‘I can’t go any further.’ I literally froze… I remember thinking I don’t want to come back, and I didn’t for years.’”

But King Charles has also reportedly had ghostly encounters, once being followed by a ghost at Sandringham. Anmer Hall, the current home of Prince William and Kate Middleton, is reportedly haunted by both a black dog and a murdered Catholic priest. But Prince William seems unfazed, once quipping, “No old hall would be complete without a ghost, would it?”

It seems as long as there are monarchies and people with vivid imaginations or a sixth sense, tales of royal hauntings will continue to titillate and frighten. It has already been claimed that the ghost of a worried Queen Elizabeth II has been caught in photographs holding her signature Launer handbag in a room at her beloved Windsor Castle. Eventually, the ghosts may outnumber the living at royal palaces across the world.

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