Even its name sounds like something fantastic deliberately conceived to conjure ghosts – but Chillingham Castle has a long and storied history.
In the 12th century Chillingham was home to a monastery. By the 13th century, due to incursions from Scottish forces, the castle was built and Edward I, ‘Hammer of the Scots’, led his Scottish campaigns from this location. Over the years it’s been host to several noble families, but nowadays it’s best known as the home to dozens of ghosts.
Historian Eleanor Janega braves Chillingham Castle and its gathering of ghosts in the film Exploring the Medieval Afterlife on History Hit.
Unlike other medieval ghost stories, the first recorded accounts of Chillingham’s ghost tales are much more recent. They were penned by Lady Leonora Tankerville, who moved there from the United States after marrying the Earl of Tankerville in 1895.
This was “something of a golden age for ghost stories,” says Janega. “The Victorian and Edwardian eras were a time of great modernization and secularism with major shifts away from religious explanations of the natural world.”
“But the flip side of all this worldly rationalism was that it actually increased interest in the occult and spiritualism,” explains Janega. “Ghost stories were a hugely popular part of fiction as people became increasingly interested in the paranormal, seances, and finding different ways of interacting with the dead. Places like Chillingham found themselves in the middle of the spiritualist revival.”
Watch NowLady Tankerville’s reports of Chillingham’s ghosts were even commended by author and fellow supernatural enthusiast Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Given the battles on the Scottish borders, perhaps it’s no wonder that there are so many reports of ghosts.
The ghosts she wrote about would seem to continue to trouble today’s residents. “In the 18th century there was a figure who spent his time wailing and moaning and shimmering in blue,” explains its current owner, English baronet Sir Humphry Wakefield, who says excavations between the castle walls revealed the bones of a child, and this “solved that problem”.
“But when I restored that room,” he continues, “my guests kept saying, ‘You must have an electric fault which is a flash of blue on the edge of the door.’ Well, there’s no electric there at all. We must have left a toe bone.”
The great hall of Chillingham Castle, a medieval castle in the village of Chillingham in the northern part of Northumberland, England. It dates from 1344.
Image Credit: Shutterstock
Sir Humphry avows that a priest, an expert in banishing ghosts, arrived at Chillingham only to report that they were so numerous he could not deal with them.
Chillingham’s resident ghost hunter Richard Craig reports 50 ghosts on the premises. One, Lady Mary Berkeley, is supposed to haunt the Great Hall, manifesting with a smell of roses and a wafting chill.
“Whether you believe in ghosts or not,” explains Janega, “ it’s clear that a natural fear of the supernatural has haunted us through the ages.” And lurking beneath these tales often lies a window into society’s changing norms and values. To figure out what makes a society tick, it often helps to look at what makes them frightened.
