Katherine Howard’s screaming spectre!

Portrait miniature by Hans Holbein the younger.

Perhaps one of the most famous ghosts of Hampton Court Palace is that of Katherine Howard’s screaming spectre. Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s  5th wife, whose extra-marital dalliances led to her arrest and confinement in her apartments at Hampton Court Palace, discovered that her husband was near by in the Chapel. Katherine escaped her captors and ran screaming through the gallery in a final attempt to plead for her life. She was quickly restrained and dragged back to her apartments only to face the executioner’s block on the 13th February 1542 at the Tower of London. Not quite six years before, her cousin Anne Boleyn had faced the same terrible fate. Katherine’s ghost is said to replay this final desperate plea for mercy by returning to the gallery. Witnesses have claimed to have heard spectral screams coming from the ‘haunted gallery’ and have felt uneasy in this area of the palace.