With Britain's royal residences being home to some of the most scandalous and shocking moments in the country's long history, there is certainly no shortage of haunted sightings at the Royal Family's homes of past and present.
From Prince Charles experiencing the wicked tricks of a poltergeist at the Sandringham Estate during a Christmas gathering in the 1980s to the Queen herself witnessing the ghost of her late mother, Queen Elizabeth I, at Windsor Castle, the U.K.'s royal palaces continue to be of fascination to ghost hunters and paranormal investigators around the world.
But one site is still to this day considered the most haunted of all -- Hampton Court Palace. Home to the Tudor dynasty and King Henry VIII, who famously ordered the beheadings of two of his six wives, the grand palace has become the site of regular spectral sightings over the centuries, including mysterious robed figures gliding through walls and terrifying knocks from behind doors in unoccupied rooms.
For a Halloween episode of ABC News' royal podcast, "The HeirPod," ABC News' foreign correspondent Maggie Rulli and ABC News royal contributor Omid Scobie were taken on a private tour of the haunted building to hear some of the terrifying tales for themselves.
Joined by Historic Royal Palaces' guide and State Apartment Warder Jo Cooper, the pair retrace the steps of King Henry's third wife Jane Seymour, who is buried in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, where Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan were married in 2018. Seymour has reportedly appeared at Hampton Court Palace floating up the stairs that once led up to the room in which she gave birth and tragically died moments later.
Scobie and Rulli also check out the Haunted Gallery, a corridor where sightings of the ghost of Henry VIII's fifth wife Catherine Howard are often claimed. It is said that after the queen consort was arrested for adultery in 1542, she broke free of her guards and ran along the corridor screaming out to the King, who was at prayer in the chapel, for mercy. Unfortunately, she never made it to her husband and was beheaded at the Tower of London aged 19. It is said that her robed ghost now regularly repeats this tortuous journey, her screams often heard by visitors.
Watch if you dare!
