Hampton Court Palace

Hampton Court was built for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and taken over by Henry VIII, who enlarged it into one of the great show palaces of the Tudor age. It was here in October 1537 that his third queen, Jane Seymour, gave birth to the longed-for son, the future Edward VI, and died a few days later. It was here, too, in 1541, that Henry learned of the alleged adultery of his fifth queen, Catherine Howard, who was still a teenager. According to the story told at the palace, when Catherine realised she was about to be arrested she broke away from her guards and ran along the gallery towards the Chapel Royal, where Henry was at prayer, screaming for him to hear her. She was dragged back, never saw him again, and was executed at the Tower of London in February 1542.

Dame Sybil Penn was nurse to the infant Edward VI. She died of smallpox in 1562 and was buried in the church at nearby Hampton. In 1829 the church was rebuilt and her tomb disturbed, and it was shortly after this, so the story goes, that reports began of a grey-clad woman walking the corridors of the State Apartments and Clock Court.

The palace's later history is quieter: the famous hedge maze was planted around 1700, and much of the building was for many years divided into grace-and-favour apartments, whose residents generated a good many of the later ghost reports.

The Skeletor footage remains the palace's most discussed case because it is on film. Security guard James Faukes told reporters at the time: "It was incredibly spooky because the face just didn't look human. My first reaction was that someone was having a laugh, so I asked my colleagues to take a look. We spoke to our costumed guides, but they don't own a costume like that worn by the figure." No explanation has ever been confirmed, and the clip is still shared on the palace's own social media channels.

The Haunted Gallery has its own body of modern reports. After the two separate faintings in 1999 and a cluster of visitor complaints of unusual feelings in the gallery, palace staff contacted the psychologist Richard Wiseman in early 2000. In May 2000 his team asked volunteers, believers and sceptics alike, to walk the gallery and record any unusual sensations. The experiment did not set out to prove or disprove Catherine Howard, but to understand why particular spots make people feel watched, cold or uneasy.

Older accounts go back to the 1820s and the first sightings of the Grey Lady after Sybil Penn's tomb was disturbed. Grace-and-favour residents and staff over the following century reported footsteps, the spinning wheel, and a woman in grey who passed through closed doors. Most guides also mention Jane Seymour's candle on the Silverstick Stairs and unexplained screaming near the Chapel Royal.

The fair sceptical view is that the palace is old, draughty and full of dim, portrait-lined spaces, and that people who know the Catherine Howard story before they walk into the Haunted Gallery are primed to feel something there. Wiseman's work was designed to test exactly that, and whichever way you lean, Hampton Court is one of the few haunted houses where the phenomena have been examined rather than simply retold.

Hampton Court Palace is open to the public all year, with shorter hours between November and March, and it is run by Historic Royal Palaces; check their website for current times and prices before you set out. A standard ticket covers the palace, gardens, Magic Garden and the maze, which has been losing visitors since around 1700 and closes a little before the palace. The Haunted Gallery is on the main route through Henry VIII's apartments, so you cannot miss it.

For the ghosts specifically, the palace runs evening ghost tours in the darker months, with a guide who tells the stories of Catherine Howard, Sybil Penn and the CCTV footage, plus a programme of Halloween events each October. Dates and times change from year to year, so look under "What's on" on the Historic Royal Palaces site.

The palace stands on the Thames at East Molesey, opposite Hampton Court railway station (direct trains from London Waterloo) and a short bus or river-boat ride from Kingston upon Thames, where most hotels and pubs with rooms are found. There is a car park by the palace but no accommodation inside it.