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.
