Old Palace's genuinely long institutional history gives its central ghost story a plausible, if not precisely dated, foundation. The building served for centuries as one of the principal residences of the Archbishops of Canterbury, a role that placed it at the centre of English church administration for a remarkable span of English history, before eventually passing out of ecclesiastical use and, in a later period, serving as an orphanage housing children without living parents or family able to care for them.
The haunting attributed to the building centres on a grieving mother, reported wandering its corridors in apparent search of a child she has lost, her sorrow rather than any threat to visitors being the defining note of the sightings. Local tradition draws a direct line between this haunting and the building's orphanage period, reading her as either a mother who lost her own child to the institution or, in a more general symbolic sense, standing in for the grief of separation that the orphanage's very existence represented for the families whose children passed through it.
No specific name, date, or documented sighting with independent witnesses has been traced for this entry beyond the general and long-standing tradition, and the story functions as much as an emotional reading of the building's own institutional history as a conventional ghost sighting account. Old Palace's continued life today as part of a working school keeps the building occupied and its history actively told to new generations, even as the specific woman said to walk its corridors remains as unidentified as ever.
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