If Althorp has a famous ghost, most visitors assume it must be Diana, Princess of Wales, who spent part of her childhood at the Northamptonshire estate and was buried there, on a small island within the ornamental Round Oval lake, following her death on 31 August 1997. The secluded grave has understandably drawn supernatural speculation ever since, with psychics and paranormal television programmes claiming to sense or contact her spirit. But there is no well-established account of Diana's ghost actually walking the grounds: no pale princess by the lake, no figure at an upstairs window. Althorp's real, older ghost traditions are considerably stranger, and considerably quieter.
The best of them dates from the middle of the nineteenth century. The Dean of Lincoln was staying at the house as a guest of Frederick Spencer, the 4th Earl Spencer, when he woke during the night to see someone enter his bedroom: a man dressed as a groom, carrying a lit candle. Rather than delivering any warning or making any dramatic gesture, the figure simply went about inspecting the room, apparently checking that other candles had been safely put out, before completing his circuit and vanishing. The next morning the Dean complained about a servant entering his room uninvited. His description matched a groom who had served the previous earl. The groom was dead. It is an unusually practical kind of haunting: an old house's real fire risk turned into a story about a servant who still does his job.
A second ghost is reported walking Althorp's Picture Gallery, a Tudor-oak-panelled room stretching some 115 feet through the house's west wing. Lady Margaret Douglas-Home described a young female apparition seen there, who became known simply as the girl with the grey slippers, since the slippers are almost the only detail anyone has ever offered about her. She has no recorded name, no known history, and no attached tragedy; the detail of her footwear is simply what stuck.
Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer and Diana's younger brother, recorded both stories in his 1998 book Althorp: The Story of an English House, while being clear that he has never personally seen a ghost, at Althorp or anywhere else. The family has nonetheless preserved the stories across five centuries of ownership, and between a quietly dutiful groom and a girl remembered only for her slippers, Althorp's older ghosts remain considerably more interesting than its newest and most famous association might suggest.
Comments