'Have you ever seen a ghost at Hampton Court Palace?'

The most common question I got in 21 years of working there!

Welcome to My Life in the Past, where I hope to keep you up to date with my wandering life as a historian.

There’s one question I get asked about my work more frequently than any other.

And here it is: ‘have you ever seen a ghost at Hampton Court Palace?’*

Now, the most haunted room at Hampton Court is known - not very imaginatively - as The Haunted Gallery. And if you were to come with me to visit it, I can almost promise that you would experience a rather strange physical sensation.

I’ve felt it myself, and I’ve been with other people who’ve felt it, many, many times.

It’s a drop in the temperature.

It’s in the corner of the Haunted Gallery, where its two arms meet. It’s also just by a jib, or hidden, door, which most visitors don’t spot because it blends in with the green silk wall hangings. Behind the hidden door is the secret little back staircase to the curators’ office, and the curators have to be careful popping out of it in case they give someone a heart attack!

So, what do you think causes the spooky cold spot?

I’m sorry to tell you this but … it’s the draught coming up the stairs. And I’m afraid that I don’t believe in ghosts.

But I am very interested indeed in what ghosts have been ‘seen’, and when, and what those sightings might tell you about the society the viewer lived in.

The ghost that’s supposed to visit here at night is Katherine Howard, wife number five out of six. Poor Katherine! She was possibly still in her teens when she married Henry, who by this stage was 49, and had reached the scary, paranoid, tyrannical stage of his life.

But he loved his beautiful young wife very much, and was very happy with her until …. the day in October 1541 when he was sitting in the Chapel at Hampton Court, and Archbishop Cranmer handed him a letter.

What Cranmer had to say had to be written down because it was too awful to be spoken aloud.

The letter said that Katherine had a sexual history from before her marriage, that the king didn’t know about.

This was literally ‘game over’ for Katherine Howard. No way could she come back from an accusation like this.

And there’s a persistent story that back in her own rooms, the Queen’s Apartments, the palace grapevine let Katherine know what had happened. She’s supposed to have come running along this gallery, from her Apartments to the Chapel, in order to beg her husband for her life.

But she was intercepted by the guards, who dragged her back to her rooms. She never saw her husband again before her execution at the Tower.

The ghost is supposed to represent this horrible, dragging, screaming moment.

But curiously, the ghost didn’t really get spotted until the nineteenth century.

And that’s because of what had happened to the palace by then.

The court had abandoned it, and it had been split up into apartments occupied by the widows of retired courtiers. What the widows all wanted was a better apartment. So they’d write to the Lord Chamberlain saying, ‘I must be moved, because my apartment is too damp,’ or ‘too noisy’ or … you’ve guessed it … ‘too haunted’.

The wave of early sightings of ghost of Katherine Howard, then, is a result of the nineteenth-century palace real estate market!

And she’s been with us ever since.

In non-ghostly goings-on, the first episode of the new series of Lucy Worsley Investigates, about Jack the Ripper, was shown this week, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Did you watch? What did you think?

*I once had to give a tour of Hampton Court Palace to the Famous Actor, Tom Hiddleston. He was a bit quiet, but he did have one question. Yes, you’ve guessed what it was.