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Alerted to an intruder, the security guard at Chester Castle knew something was up when his normally fearless dog refused to leave the car. When the guard investigated, he felt “a hundred eyes” on him but found no one.
The cameras did, however, record a strange, faceless figure walking in front of the main gates, precisely where the medieval gatehouse once stood.
English Heritage is not saying the mysterious figure was a ghost. Nor is it saying it wasn’t.
The sighting was reported – with rare documentary evidence – after a callout was made to site-based staff for examples of strange goings on, whether it was unexplained noises or eerie sightings at properties that include abbeys, castles, stately homes and Roman ruins. The response, said English Heritage, was overwhelming.
There was a disembodied hand at Belsay Hall in Northumberland, chilling, unexplainable piano music through the walls of Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire and a sighting of what appeared to be soldiers disappearing into the woods around Wrest Park in Bedfordshire.
Michael Carter, a curator of history at English Heritage, said the accounts added to a centuries-old tradition of ghostly stories associated with England’s historic landmarks.
“This isn’t just a collection of modern fabulations,” he said. “People can believe whatever they want about ghosts and ghost stories. But what I see it as being, as a historian, is an extraordinary new iteration of the telling of supernatural stories associated with ruins and historic sites that goes back to the 16th century.
“Antiquarians started developing these sacrilege narratives about the fates that would befall people if they despoiled former monastic sites and the spirits that were somehow guarding them. Then going into the 18th century you get the birth of the gothic and it’s how these ruins have all got ghosts associated with them. Then you get the Bram Stoker Dracula, which is even more sinister.”
The new accounts also shine light on a tradition that goes back even further, Carter said: telling ghost stories together, providing “a way of understanding our relationship with the dead and the past”.
The Chester Castle incident involved a security guard who had received a call from the main security control room indicating that cameras had detected unusual movement on site.
The guard arrived at the castle and says he felt “a hundred eyes” on him and felt “genuinely terrified”. His dog, “the size of a small bear”, cowered, whimpering in the car. The control room insisted there appeared to be an intruder caught on camera and encouraged the guard to investigate thoroughly. He found no one and no signs anywhere of forced entry.
The incident was not an isolated one. Louise Fountain, a property manager at Bolsover Castle, said there were so many that they had a book for visitors and staff to report them.
“We have a ghost book so that when people say we’ve just had a strange experience, we record it and sometimes people put drawings in.”
She said a staff member recently heard unexplained piano music, and visitors had talked about getting a shove in the back when there was no one there.
“We’ve had people walking through our garden and they’ve felt a child’s hand start to hold theirs, which is really, really spooky,” Fountain said.
Other accounts include someone who lives near Houghton House in Bedfordshire telling a volunteer that she came every Friday lunchtime to look up at the same ghostly figure in a window.
At Wrest Park, the sound of a bouncing ball can be heard in the staircase hall long after visitors have left.
The release of the ghost reports comes ahead of what will be a busy Halloween half-term at English Heritage sites, with ghost tours and other spooky events at properties across its portfolio.
Carter said he had vivid memories of the stories his grandad, a caretaker at the Abbey House Museum at Kirkstall Abbey in Leeds, told him.
The story was that the abbey’s final abbot “died of a broken heart looking over the ruins of his dissolved monastery and he haunted it”, he said.
When he worked nights his grandad would take his pet pekingese to work and she would sit growling at the bottom of a new spiral staircase up to a first-floor chamber.
“I think I was told that story before I went to primary school and it made a huge impression on me. It took a lot of effort to finally go up that staircase,” Carter said.
