Every September, a few thousand buildings across England unlock their doors for ten days and let anyone in for nothing. Heritage Open Days runs this year from Friday 11 to Sunday 20 September, and the programme carries 6,240 events.
I went through all of them, which took rather longer than I had planned, and found that a good many of the buildings taking part are places I have been writing about for years. Not because anyone has billed them that way. Only eighteen events in the whole programme mention a ghost. But the list of what is opening includes Borley, Berry Pomeroy, Smithills, Lancaster Castle and a good deal else besides, and if you have ever paid forty pounds for an evening in one of these places you may be interested to know you can walk into them in daylight for free, with a volunteer who has read the parish records
Borley Church, Essex
Borley Rectory burned on the night of 27 February 1939 and what was left of it came down five years later. For the twenty-odd years before that it was the most written-about house in England, largely through the efforts of Ghost Hunter Harry Price, and the village has spent the eight decades since being visited by people looking to see the Ghostly Nun, poltergeist activity or the phantom stagecoach.
The church survived. It sits on the hill above where the rectory stood, and it runs all the way through the case: the organ that played to an empty building, the figure at the porch, the reports that carried on long after the house itself was rubble. Anyone who has read the literature will want to stand in it at least once.
What almost nobody mentions is that there is a mortsafe in the churchyard.
A mortsafe is an iron cage bolted over a grave to keep the resurrection men from lifting the occupant. They belong to the anatomy schools and the body-snatching panic of the 1820s and 30s, and they are overwhelmingly a Scottish and northern English thing. Aberdeenshire has dozens. Essex has more or less none. Quite what one is doing in a parish of forty-nine houses on the Suffolk border is a question with nothing supernatural about it whatsoever, and I have not been able to answer it yet.
Inside, there is an altar slab which should have been smashed in the 1540s along with every other consecrated stone in England. Somebody hid it instead. It turned up during renovations four hundred years later and is still in use, which is the sort of small stubborn survival I like enormously.
The parish is quietly making a point this year. Alongside the tours they are running an exhibition on the ordinary people buried in the churchyard, titled “The Stories behind our Stones”. The most famous haunted address in the country is offering you its real dead rather than its imaginary ones, and I think that is rather fine.
Open Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 September. Guided tours at noon and two o’clock on both days, twenty people per tour, an hour each, booking preferred through the village website. The churchyard exhibition needs no booking. There is tea and there are cakes.
Berry Pomeroy Castle, Devon
Two women haunt Berry Pomeroy, and they have been drawing visitors up that wooded lane for the better part of two centuries. The White Lady is said to be Margaret Pomeroy, starved to death in the dungeon by a jealous sister. The Blue Lady is supposed to walk the ramparts, and in the older tellings she beckons, and it is very bad luck to follow her.
I went looking for the earliest version of both, expecting to find them younger than advertised, and was proved wrong. The trail runs back to Sir Walter Farquhar, a physician who attended the steward’s sick wife at the castle some time in the late eighteenth century and described a richly dressed woman crossing the room in evident distress, wringing her hands. The patient died the next day. Farquhar’s account was published later, and a further telling of the White Lady appeared in print in 1806, which is earlier than I had assumed. What the Blue Lady seems to have carried from the beginning is the function of a death omen, specifically to the Seymour family, and that is an older and stranger idea than the tourist-trade ghost I was expecting to find.
None of which spoils the place. The Elizabethan mansion inside the medieval walls was Edward Seymour’s attempt to build something to rival Longleat on an awkward hillside in a corner of Devon nobody visited. His north range ran sixty-five metres. His long gallery was larger than the one at Hardwick. His money ran out in 1610, having swallowed twenty thousand pounds, and the toothing for the next phase is still there in the west wing, jutting out of the stonework and waiting for a wall that never came. He was a country gentleman of modest means with ambitions far above them, and the castle has been falling down around that ambition ever since.
Wednesday 16 September only. A free after-hours guided tour, pre-booking required. Berry Pomeroy after dark, at no charge, is not an offer that will sit unclaimed for long.
Smithills Hall, Bolton, Greater Manchester
George Marsh was brought to Smithills Hall in 1554 and questioned in the green chamber about his Protestant preaching. He was sent on to Chester, tried, and burned at Boughton in April the following year.
The story goes that as they led him out of that room he stamped his foot on the flagstone and asked God to leave some mark of his innocence. The mark is still shown to visitors. It has been shown to visitors for a very long time indeed, and the tradition holds that it darkens and runs wet in bad weather, which any geologist will tell you is what a certain kind of stone does. That has never made much difference to anybody’s belief in it, and I am not sure it should.
Smithills is one of the oldest continuously reported hauntings in the north west, and the room is still there, and this year you can stand in it.
Friday 18 September. Tours of the hall, pre-booking required, and the listing confirms they include the room where Marsh was questioned.
Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire
The Black Friar of Newstead has a better literary pedigree than any ghost in England, because Lord Byron put him in his book, ‘Don Juan’. He appears in Canto XVI, cowled and silent, gliding along the gallery of an old abbey turned family seat, and Byron let it be known that the figure had shown itself to him before his own catastrophic marriage. Whether he believed a word of it is another question. He was never a man to leave a good story unimproved, and Newstead was expensive to run.
The house began as an Augustinian priory in the twelfth century, came to the Byrons in 1540, and the medieval cloisters are the oldest part of it. Go and see whether anything glides.
Saturday 12 September. Free entry to the medieval cloisters, no booking needed.
Oakwell Hall, Birstall, Yorkshire
William Batt was killed in London on 9 December 1684. He was twenty-five, unmarried, and his widowed mother Elizabeth was at Oakwell. That same evening, so the story runs, he came stalking up the lane, through the hall and up the stairs to his own room, where he vanished, leaving a bloody footprint on the boards.
The earliest printed version I can find is Mrs Gaskell’s, in her Life of Charlotte Brontë of 1857, and she tells it in almost exactly those words. What is unusual is how much of the surrounding fact stands up. A surviving bond puts William at the Black Swan in Holborn on 9 December, borrowing money. The Halifax diarist Oliver Heywood noted that he died “in sport” and was “slain by Mr Gream”. He was buried at Birstall on 30 December. The apparition maybe folklore but the young man, the date and the manner of his death are all in the record.
Brontë knew the hall well and put it into her book, Shirley as Fieldhead, and the house has carried both reputations, literary and spectral, ever since.
Sunday 13 September. A National Gallery talk on Holbein, Van Gogh, Ethel Walker and Vanessa Bell with curator Dr Janine Sykes and art historian Simon Poë, pre-booking required. Not remotely about ghosts, and an excuse to get inside.
Temple Newsam, Leeds, Yorkshire
Temple Newsam has a Blue Lady, and behind her, as is so often the case, sits a real and rather grim story. Phoebe Gray was killed in the house in 1704. Servants’ quarrels and servants’ deaths rarely make it into the guidebooks, and the version that survives has been through several centuries of retelling, so treat the details lightly. The house is enormous, Tudor and Jacobean, and has the kind of corridors that hold stories of their own.
Saturday 19 September. “Working at the Big House”, a walking tour of the grounds with Hazel Lunn looking at the people who actually ran the place, pre-booking required.
East Riddlesden Hall, Nr Keighley, West Yorkshire
East Riddlesden Hall collects ghosts the way some houses collect clocks. There is a Grey Lady, a bride drowned in the pond, and a merchant’s wife walled up for an infidelity, which is a motif that turns up in about a dozen northern halls and is almost certainly folklore rather than fact. Sorting the seventeenth-century Murgatroyds from the Victorian storytelling about them is a job somebody should do properly.
Several dates, book on the day. Free entry.
Woodchester Mansion, Gloucestershire
A Victorian Gothic mansion begun in 1857 and abandoned mid-construction in 1873, with staircases that climb to nothing and doorways that open onto a drop. The workmen simply stopped and walked away, leaving their scaffolding, and nobody has ever finished it.
Woodchester has attracted more paranormal investigation than almost anywhere in the West Country. I first investigated Woodchester back in 1996, when the house still had ivy weaving through its windows and a pentagram was painted by a mysterious assailant over a stone fireplace. It is still as weird, and very haunted.
Saturday 19 September. Open with no booking required, self-guided access plus guided tours at eleven, one and three, and the boathouse in the park open too.
Blickling, Norfolk
On the anniversary of her execution, Anne Boleyn is supposed to arrive at Blickling in a coach drawn by headless horses, driven by a headless coachman, carrying her own head in her lap. It is one of the great set pieces of English ghost lore and almost certainly a nineteenth-century confection, since the Jacobean house she is said to arrive at was built decades after she died. The Boleyn family seat did stand on the site, which is presumably where the whole thing started.
Several dates, no booking. Fifty years of the National Trust’s Textile Conservation Studio, which is a great deal more interesting than it sounds.
St Osyth Priory, Essex
The town of St Osyth maybe more famous for ‘The Cage’ but in 1582 Ursula Kemp was hanged at Chelmsford after the St Osyth witch trials, convicted in part on the testimony of her own eight-year-old son. The pamphlet that came out of those trials is one of the fullest printed records of any English witch prosecution, and it makes hard reading: a village turning on its own midwife, neighbours giving evidence about curdled beer and dead pigs.
The story did not end with her. In 1921 a skeleton was dug up in a St Osyth garden, pinned through the joints with iron rivets, and declared to be Kemp. It was exhibited for years, sold, and eventually reburied in 2011. The identification would not survive ten minutes of proper scrutiny, and the whole episode says a great deal more about the twentieth century than the sixteenth. The Priory has several ghosts including a white monk, and the saint herself carrying her own head.
Wednesday 16 September. A guided walking tour of the priory, pre-booking required. Nine hundred years of the buildings, 1121 onwards.
Speke Hall, Liverpool, Merseyside
Speke Hall is a black and white Tudor house with priest holes in the walls and an eavesdrop above the porch, a small hole through which the household could listen to whoever was waiting outside. The Norrises stayed Catholic through the whole of the Reformation and built accordingly. The tapestry room is where the ghost is lingers, and the priest holes are the reason the house feels the way it does.
Wednesday 16 September. Free entry, no booking needed.
Coombe Abbey, Coventry, West Midlands
Coombe Abbey was a Cistercian house before it was a country seat and is a hotel now, and its ghost is an abbot named Geoffrey, murdered by his own monks in the telling and walking the corridors since. In the 1980s/1990s, the Abbey was linked to the Psychic Questing movement and a secret society – is there much more to this location than first seems?
Several dates. A history tour with a scone and a pot of tea, pre-booking required.
Guy’s Cliffe Castle, Warwick, Warwickshire
Guy of Warwick is supposed to have ended his days as a hermit in a cave in the rock at Guy’s Cliffe, having fought a giant, a dragon and a Dun Cow, and having declined to tell his own wife who he was. The medieval chapel cut into the sandstone is still there. So is the shell of the Georgian house that burned in 1992, and the whole site has the particular atmosphere of a ruin that stopped being a home within living memory.
Several dates, no booking. Guided tours of the buildings and grounds.
Gainsborough Old Hall, Lincolnshire
A medieval and Tudor manor house, largely unaltered, with a Grey Lady on the tower stair and one of the finest surviving great halls in the country. Having ghost hunted here several times, it is one of the most intriguing and historically fascinating locations I have visited. You often jump hundreds of years from one room to another, as the historical styles and architecture changes. Oh yes, it is haunted too.
Sunday 20 September. Free open day with medieval and Tudor music, no booking.
Gaols, workhouses and the county asylum
Different sort of building, different sort of reputation. These places do not need a legend attached to them.
Lancaster Castle held the Pendle women in 1612 and hanged ten of them on the moor above the town. It went on being a working prison until 2011, which is recent enough that the people who ran it are still around to be asked. Free guided tours across several dates, book on the day, taking in the Old Cells, Hadrian’s Tower and the Drop Room.
Hexham Old Gaol was built in 1333 and is the oldest purpose-built prison in England. House of Correction tours on Saturday 12 September, pre-booking required, and the listing promises a history that is “interesting (and rather grim)”, which is the closest the whole programme comes to a wink.
Oxford Castle is where Mary Blandy was hanged in 1752 for poisoning her father with a powder she insisted she believed was a love philtre. She asked the crowd not to hang her too high, for the sake of decency. Free entry on Sunday 13 September, no booking.
The National Justice Museum in Nottingham sits on a site that was courtroom, gaol and place of execution in the same building. A family mock trial in the Civil Courtroom on Sunday 13 September, and on Sunday 20 September an hour in the gaol laundry under the Matron.
The Workhouse at Southwell is the most complete workhouse left in England, built in 1824 to a design that was copied across the country. Open across several dates, no booking. Gressenhall in Norfolk does the same job for the rural south, open Sunday 13 September.
Horton, Epsom. Epsom had five asylums on one estate, and Horton Cemetery holds thousands of burials with no markers at all. There is a group of researchers working to put names back to them, and on Saturday 12 September you can meet them. Of everything in this guide this is the one I would most want to attend.
Pontefract Castle is opening its dungeon, cut down into the rock, free across several dates with booking required. And since you are in Pontefract anyway, East Drive is a fifteen minute walk.
Bow Street, London, free on Friday 11 September, the Runners and the cells beneath.
Dartmoor Prison Museum is walking visitors out to the prisoner of war cemeteries behind the prison on Sunday 13 September. Normally off limits, and the sort of access this festival exists for. FULLY BOOKED
Theatres
Every theatre in England has a ghost and most have several. Four are letting you backstage.
The Tyne Theatre & Opera House in Newcastle still has its Victorian wooden stage machinery, thunder run and all, and lost a man to it in the 1880s. He has been part of the building’s folklore ever since. A costumed promenade tour on Tuesday 15 September introduces you to the box office manager and the front of house intendant, pre-booking required.
Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds is the last Regency playhouse left in the country, open Sunday 13 September with no booking, stage, costume and props.
Blackpool Grand, free thirty minute guided tours across several dates with booking, and the run of the tiers.
Royal Hippodrome, Eastbourne, backstage tours, several dates, no booking.
And the ones that say so on the tin
Eighteen events in the programme announce themselves. The pick of them:
Blackpool Ghost Tour, “History and Haunts”, Saturday 19 September from the Town Hall steps, booking required. The listing says there are thirty-five known sites of haunting in the town centre and the walk covers about a third of them. Somebody has that list, and I would dearly like to see it.
Knutsford has two on Sunday 20 September, both needing booking. The Knutsford Ghost Walk takes the unusual line of asking how ghosts have hindered ordinary working life in a market town from the eighteenth century to the present, which is social history wearing a sheet and much the better for it. Ghost Walk in Knutsford does the streets, the inns and the graveyard.
Ghost Tour are available throughout the country, including Chester, Thursday 17 September, a family friendly taster with guide Ann Coward. Ripon, Thursday 17 September, no booking, though the description is all about people who lived rather than people who did not, so manage your expectations. St Benet’s Abbey on the Norfolk Broads, several dates with booking, on the ghosts of the only abbey Henry VIII never formally dissolved. Smithfield, an audio tour you can take any time. Gippeswyk Hall, Ipswich, Saturday 19 September, where the resident theatre company cheerfully describe their Tudor base as most likely haunted and invite you to go looking.
For the witch trials: Great Yarmouth stages a reconstruction on Friday 18 September of what happened after the borough sent for Matthew Hopkins in 1645. Stuart Orme of the Cromwell Museum talks on the Huntingdonshire trials on Monday 14 September. And St Peter’s at Horninghold in Leicestershire has both an escape room built around the village’s own accusations and Walking With Witches on Saturday 19 September, on four villagers put to the swimming test.
Further afield haunts
Twenty more, grouped by where you are, and every one of them with something particular to it.
The North
Souter Lighthouse, Whitburn. Souter opened in 1871 as the first lighthouse in the UK designed and built to be powered by electricity, which made it the most advanced light of its day and, for the keepers, a noisy and unnerving place to live. The National Trust runs paid evening ghost events here through the autumn. In September the tower is free across several dates, no booking.
Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland. The Delavals were the most notorious family in the north east, given to practical jokes involving beds on pulleys and partition walls that dropped in the night on sleeping guests. They also buried a great many of their own young. Vanbrugh’s house burned in 1822 and stood gutted for a century. Free on 11 and 12 September, no booking.
Newcastle Keep. Newcastle was besieged for three months in 1644 and stormed in October, and the ground under the castle garth has been burial ground, gaol and execution site by turns. A battlefield walk of the siege on Saturday 12 September, pre-booking required.
Clitheroe Castle, Lancashire. The small Norman keep looks over the whole of Pendle country, and the assizes that sent the 1612 women to Lancaster began with a magistrate’s investigation in these hills. Free entry to the museum on Saturday 19 September.
Yorkshire
Sandal Castle, Wakefield. Richard, Duke of York, rode out of Sandal on 30 December 1460 and was killed within sight of the walls. His head went to Micklegate Bar in York wearing a paper crown. The castle is a ruin now and the earthworks are still enormous. A guided tour of the grounds on Saturday 12 September, pre-booking required.
Conisbrough Castle, Doncaster. The great white keep that Walter Scott put into Ivanhoe, and which has carried a white lady ever since Scott made it famous, which may not be a coincidence. A Viking open day on Saturday 12 September, no booking.
York Cemetery. The catacombs under the chapel are opened rarely and are exactly as cold as you would expect. Catacomb tours and guided walks on Sunday 13 September, pre-booking required.
Shibden Hall, Halifax. Anne Lister’s house, and a timber-framed hall of about 1420 with a good deal more history behind the Lister years than most visitors realise. Free entry across several dates, booking required.
Abbey House Museum, Kirkstall. The old gatehouse of Kirkstall Abbey, now a museum, standing across the road from one of the most complete Cistercian ruins in the country. The Alastair Laurence Lecture on Friday 11 September, pre-booking required.
Nostell, Wakefield. Open across several dates, no booking, with the Tudor portrait of the More family and its hidden secrets on show.
The Midlands
Wollaton Hall, Nottingham. On the evening of 23 September 1979, six children from Radford, out in Wollaton Park at around a quarter past eight, reported thirty small cars coming out of the bushes towards them, two bearded gnomes in each. The cars made no engine noise, had a bell instead of a horn, and could jump logs. The children ran, and the gnomes gave up the chase at the park gates. Their headmaster taped separate interviews with all of them within about forty-eight hours, and that transcript survives, along with drawings by two of the children. It is probably the best documented fairy encounter in modern England, which is not at all the same thing as saying it happened. Read the transcript and you find the children had a private folklore about the park going back to the summer before. Make of it what you will. The walled garden project is open across several dates, no booking.
Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire. Nicholas Brome killed a priest he found with his wife in the house, some time around 1483, and paid for two church towers by way of penance. A stain in the library floor has been shown to visitors as the priest’s blood for centuries. The house also holds three priest holes, and in 1591 a party of Jesuits escaped a raid by standing in the moat drain in the dark while the searchers went overhead. Free on Sunday 13 September, no booking.
Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wrote philosophy, plays, and in 1666 The Blazing World, which has a fair claim to being the first science fiction novel in English. She was mocked for all of it. A tour of the castle built around her on Wednesday 16 September, pre-booking required.
Calke Abbey, Derbyshire. The house the National Trust decided not to restore, taken on in 1985 and left exactly as found: peeling paint, dead specimens, rooms shut up for a century. There is no need for a ghost. Free on Saturday 19 September, no booking.
Moseley Old Hall, Wolverhampton. Charles II hid here for two days after Worcester in September 1651, in a priest hole beside the chimney which you can still put your head into. Open across several dates, no booking.
Shugborough, Staffordshire. The Shepherd’s Monument carries an eight-letter inscription that nobody has ever explained, and which has been attributed to everything from a private memorial to the location of the Holy Grail. It is probably a private memorial. Free entry to the mansion, gardens and Park Farm across several dates, no booking.
Clayton Hall, Manchester. A moated manor house of the fifteenth century, last home of Humphrey Chetham, and one of the few genuinely old buildings left in east Manchester. Open across several dates, no booking.
Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire. Ralph Cromwell’s brick tower of the 1430s, which Lord Curzon bought in 1911 to stop its great stone fireplaces being shipped to America. They had already been ripped out and crated. He got them back. Open across several dates, no booking.
East and south
Norwich Castle. Robert Kett was hanged from the castle walls in December 1549 after the rebellion that took Norwich, and his body was left there through the winter as an example. The keep was the county gaol for six hundred years. Free entry on Saturday 19 September, booking required.
Ypres Tower, Rye. John Breads, a butcher, had been fined by Mayor James Lamb for cheating his customers with false weights, and on the night of 17 March 1743 he waited in Rye churchyard to kill him. Lamb was ill and had sent his brother-in-law Allen Grebell to a dinner in his place, wearing his coat. Breads stabbed the wrong man in the dark. Grebell walked home, sat down by the fire, and was found dead in the morning.
Breads was held in the Ypres Tower and tried in Rye by James Lamb, who saw no reason to stand aside from judging the man who had meant to murder him. He was hanged on 8 June and gibbeted on the marsh, where the townspeople gradually helped themselves to his bones. Only the skull is left, still clamped in the iron headframe, in an upstairs room of the town hall. The tower is now the museum, with a replica in it. Free on Saturday 12 September, no booking.
Torre Abbey, Torquay. The Rosario was taken in the Channel on 1 August 1588 and towed into Torbay, and 397 of her crew were marched up and locked in the abbey’s tithe barn, which makes it the only surviving Armada prison in England. They were there a fortnight and about fifteen of them died. By 1662 the building was already being called the Spanish Court. The Spanish Lady who is supposed to walk it followed her lover aboard disguised as a sailor and died in the barn, which is a fine story, and which the local historian J T White was already dismissing as village gossip in 1878. Free entry for one day only, Sunday 13 September.
Sherborne Old Castle, Dorset. Raleigh held Sherborne and believed the place was cursed against him, which given what happened to him is hard to argue with. He is said to walk the grounds on St Michael’s Eve. Guided tours on Sunday 13, Thursday 17 and Saturday 19 September, FULLY BOOKED
Lewes Castle, East Sussex. Norman, built by William de Warenne, with a keep you can climb for the best view in Sussex. Open across several dates, no booking.
Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire. The most crooked building in England, a Tudor house that has been slowly folding in on itself for four hundred years, with a long gallery that visibly slopes. Free on Saturday 12 September, no booking.
Croft Castle, Herefordshire. A thousand years of the Croft family on the Welsh border, with a park full of ancient sweet chestnuts said to have been planted from Armada wreckage, which is a lovely story and almost certainly untrue. Free on Saturday 12 September, no booking.
Bodiam Castle, East Sussex. A hundred years of National Trust ownership, marked with a free weekend. Open across several dates, no booking.
Ten days, and almost all of it free. Book Berry Pomeroy the moment you finish reading this, because an after-hours tour of that castle at no charge will not last the week.
And if you do go to Borley, have a look at the mortsafe and tell me what you make of it. I have been staring at photographs of the thing for a fortnight and I am no further forward.
