Catherine Howard and the Haunted Gallery at Hampton Court

What happened

Catherine Howard married Henry VIII in 1540, aged perhaps seventeen. In early November 1541 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer handed the king a letter with information about her relationships before the marriage and her secret meetings with the courtier Thomas Culpeper. The queen was confined to her apartments at Hampton Court. According to tradition, Catherine broke free from her guards and ran down the long gallery towards the Chapel Royal, where Henry was hearing Mass, screaming and begging for mercy – but the guards caught her at the door and dragged her back. The king, it is said, did not even turn round. On 13 February 1542 Catherine was beheaded at the Tower of London. The gallery leading to the chapel is now known as the Haunted Gallery: residents of the palace apartments, staff and visitors have told of a female figure in white, screams and sudden cold. In the early 2000s the psychologist Richard Wiseman and his team asked visitors to walk through the palace and mark on a plan where they had experienced anything unusual. Most reports clustered in places with a “haunted” reputation.

Witnesses

Residents of the grace-and-favour apartments and palace staff (accounts from the nineteenth century onwards); visitors; participants in Richard Wiseman’s study, published in the British Journal of Psychology (2003).

Explanations and hypotheses

Catherine Howard’s arrest and execution are well documented, but the scene of her flight to the chapel does not appear in contemporary accounts – it is a later court tradition, and historians point out that the queen was closely guarded. Wiseman’s study found that participants reported more unusual experiences in “haunted” areas even when they did not know those areas’ reputation – and that the experiences correlated with environmental conditions, including variations in the local magnetic field and lighting levels. The authors conclude that “hauntings” may be, at least in part, people’s responses to ordinary factors in their surroundings.

Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.

Sources

1. Richard Wiseman, Caroline Watt, Paul Stevens, Emma Greening, Ciarán O’Keeffe, An investigation into alleged ‘hauntings’ (British Journal of Psychology 94, 2003)
2. Historic Royal Palaces – Catherine Howard (Hampton Court Palace: history and stories)

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