Salisbury Hall is a seventeenth century manor house on the outskirts of St Albans, best known today as the home of the de Havilland Aircraft Museum, but for generations before that it carried a reputation as a haunted house. Reported figures include a Cavalier and an attractive young woman wearing a blue fichu about her shoulders, popularly identified as Nell Gwynne, who is said to have entertained Charles II at the hall for several years until his death in 1684. Former staff have described hearing her laugh in the garden when the grounds were known to be empty of visitors.
A small bedroom above the entrance porch, used for many years as a children's nursery, was for a long period troubled by the appearance of an unidentified figure that seemed to step out of the wall near the fireplace. The story gained an unusual piece of corroboration during refurbishment work in the 1950s, when workmen discovered a genuine bricked-up doorway hidden beneath the plaster in exactly that spot, a detail that lends the haunting more weight than most, since it suggests the tradition of a figure emerging from that particular wall predated the physical discovery of an actual concealed opening there.
As with many country house hauntings, the identification of the Grey Lady with a specific historical figure such as Nell Gwynne should be treated as popular tradition rather than established fact, and no contemporary source directly links her to a haunting at the hall. The building's long and well-documented history, and its more recent association with aviation history through the de Havilland connection, sit alongside this older, thinner tradition of a haunted country house.
Comments