The Great Storm of 1703 is a matter of major, extensively documented English meteorological and historical record, one of the most destructive storms ever to strike England, and Bishop Kidder's death, along with his wife's, in the collapse of the Palace's own chimney stacks during the storm is itself a genuine and well attested historical event, giving this haunting an unusually solid factual anchor compared with most of this register's traditions.
The further, unidentified robed bishop reported in the corridors is recorded more thinly and may represent either a separate historical figure or a less specifically attributed retelling of Kidder's own haunting, the Palace's centuries of continuous use by a long line of Bishops of Bath and Wells making it plausible that more than one former resident's memory has become attached to the general figure of a wandering cleric.
St Andrew's Well's own folkloric association with much older sacred ritual gives the Palace grounds a supernatural tradition considerably predating Kidder's own 1703 death, the moonlit lights and whispering voices reported there suggesting a genuinely separate, pre-Christian layer of local belief persisting alongside the Palace's own more recent and better documented ecclesiastical haunting.
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