Halloween is here, and when it comes to the Royal Family, there are plenty of ghost stories. With palaces and castles dating back hundreds of years, it’s no surprise that there have been some spooky encounters in their historic halls. Windsor Castle, as it turns out, is haunted by the ghost of Queen Elizabeth I.
In fact, King Charles has allegedly seen the Tudor-era monarch wandering through the castle, which dates back to the middle ages.
“The late Queen saw her namesake Queen Elizabeth [I] in the library at Windsor Castle. The King has seen the same ghost, and his grandfather George VI saw Queen Elizabeth eight times in the library before the start of the Second World War,” paranormal historian Richard Felix claimed in the Amazon Prime documentary The King of UFOs.
Glynn was apparently “intrigued by the woman’s resemblance to the portraits he had seen of Elizabeth I” and went searching for the woman. However, he “could find no trace of her,” Jones wrote, adding “furthermore, there was no doorway through which she could have left the library.”
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When Glynn brought up the incident to an attendant in the castle, the staff member replied that the lieutenant “was the only person who had entered the library that afternoon.” It seems that such occurrences weren’t that odd, because instead of being shocked, the attendant suggested that Glynn “had been honored with a special sighting of Queen Elizabeth I.”
The story definitely seems in line with what I’ve heard from a friend who once worked at Kensington Palace; she recalled a fellow staff member seeing the figure of a woman dressed in period clothes and crying after the palace had closed for the day. When he turned around, the lady had disappeared.
Felix said that the Royal Family is well aware of these ghostly inhabitants. “All of their properties have ghosts in them, and they know it and have witnessed it,” he said in The King of UFOs.
Prince William and Princess Kate even have their own resident specter at their country house, Anmer Hall. Speaking on Hello! magazine’s A Right Royal Podcast, Felix said there’s “a ghost there of a Catholic priest that lived there and was hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason.”
Apparently, it didn’t bother the couple too much, because, according to Felix, “Before the Waleses moved in, they were warned about the ghost, and the comment was—I presume it was from Prince William—he said, ‘No old hall would be complete without a ghost, would it?’”
Who needs Halloween when you have your own personal ghoul?
According to the book Haunted Castles of Britain and Ireland, Elizabeth I—who died in 1603—is a frequent visitor to Windsor’s library. Sightings of her ghost date back as early as the 19th century, with author Richard Jones writing that in 1897, Lieutenant Carr Glynn, a member of the Grenadier Guards “was sitting in the outer room of the Queen’s library when a lady dressed in black walked past him and turned a corner.”
