Saturday, May 22, 2004

Blickling Hall is one of the country’s most beautiful stately homes – and it is renowned for being haunted. The ghost of Anne Boleyn is said to appear on May 19, so KEIRON PIM decided to see whether she would make an appearance.

Denis Mead keeps an eye out for anything unusual in the South Drawing Room at Blickling Hall, where the ghost of Anne Boleyn has been spotted.

It’s five to midnight in the usually quiet North Norfolk village of Blickling and there’s a buzz of anticipation in the air. Fifty people are huddled by the railings in front of Blickling Hall, a few chattering into walkie-talkies or holding clicking electronic gadgets and thermometers.

Most are simply peering straight ahead, waiting in the dark, their keen faces lit only by the faint glow from the stately home’s floodlights.

On May 19, 1536, Anne Boleyn was beheaded at the Tower of London so her husband Henry VIII could marry his third wife. Folklore has it that her ghost appears in Blickling at midnight on every anniversary of her death.

The apparition is supposed to be spectacular: a phantom coach and horses carries Anne across the surrounding dark fields to her ancestral home, two headless horsemen leading the way and Anne sitting with her severed head resting upon her knee.

The carriage rolls down the front drive before disappearing in front of the hall, and Anne’s ghost then roams the hall until daybreak.

Whether or not anyone has seen this spectre, for many members of staff over the years there has been no doubt that the hall is haunted.

Denis Mead is a keen collector of Blickling’s ghostly tales and has often given talks and tours on the subject.

“Her apparition has long been accepted by those of us who work here as being one of the family. There have been several instances of people having seen this lady in a long grey dress, with a white lace collar and a white cap. The description of her has always been the same,” he says.

Anne Boleyn.

“Freda Pert, who was a housekeeper at the hall, was a typical country girl with no disrespect to the dear soul.

“She said that in the dining room she saw this lady in the long dress and took no notice, because she had seen this woman in the house so often that she took it as normal. And she wasn’t one to make things up.”

Then there was the wife of the head gardener in Lord Lothian’s time, before he died in 1940 and left the estate to the National Trust.

“She used to say that on May 19 she could never go to sleep before midnight because she was listening for the crunch of the gravel under the coach wheels.

“She never dared look out of the window because of what she might see. Once she heard the crunch she could go to sleep.”

A little more recently there was a strange occurrence in the hall’s library.

“Going back 25 years, it was the end of September or early October, and a very dull day,” Denis recalls.

“One of our stewards was coming on duty into the long gallery. At the far end of the library there was a lady reading a book, dressed in a long grey dress.

“As our steward was approaching, she seemed to fade into the background. When she got to the table and looked at the book, it was a book of Holbein’s paintings. It was open at his painting of Anne Boleyn.”

The long gallery, where the ghost of Anne Boleyn is said to have been seen reading.

Denis is 86 and long retired from his job as the stately home’s house manager, but continues to work as a volunteer.

Every year on May 19, he and the other staff are accustomed to seeing a crowd gathering outside in the hope of being scared witless.

“Thinking back over the 43 years I have been here, we always get a few people against the railings waiting to see the apparition,” he says.

He has never seen Anne’s ghost but trusts the word of a number of people he considers to be reliable sources, such as Lord Lothian’s butler.

“Sidney Hancock was a fellow I knew quite well – he was a good old Norfolk character. Down to earth, a fellow who wouldn’t make up a story.

“He was on duty and the only man there. It was late and when he looked out of the hall window, over the lawn that goes down to the lake, he saw a figure of a woman walking along the edge of the lake. She was dressed as I’ve described, in the white collar and cap.

“Sidney was rather disturbed to see this woman so he approached her and said ‘Excuse me, are you looking for somebody?’, and she said: ‘That for which I seek has long since gone.’

“Sidney was perplexed and turned his head away, and when he turned to look again she was gone.”

Mr Mead’s theory is that Anne was referring to the happiness she associated with her childhood in Blickling – which would tally with the poem she wrote while awaiting execution.

Anne is thought to have been born at the hall between 1501 and 1507. The building that was her home during her early childhood was demolished in the early 17th century and replaced with the existing Jacobean hall.

Her father Sir Thomas Boleyn was an ambitious man eager to further his family’s reputation in the royal court. Anne had two older siblings, Mary and George.

Sir Thomas paid the price for his ambition by losing both his younger daughter and his son.

Henry VIII became desperate to escape his marriage to Anne, who failed to provide him with a son.

She was arrested on fabricated charges of adultery including a supposed incestuous affair with her brother George, Lord Rochford. Both were executed for treason, and it is said that Lord Rochford’s ghost follows Anne’s carriage on the night of May 19. Before cockcrow on the same night their father’s spirit is said to cross 12 bridges in North Norfolk, on a coach drawn by four headless horses.

The legends endure as there will always be a human fascination with the possibility of a paranormal realm.

James Cannell and his girlfriend CJ Parker made the journey over to Blickling from Wymondham, having read of the haunting on the EDP’s Spooky Norfolk website, which records all manner of ghostly goings-on in the county.

Blickling Hall at night.

James said they had been intrigued by the stories since a visit to Blickling last summer. As the midnight hour approached, it seemed apt to ask what they would actually do if Anne’s ghost appeared.

“I’d run,” laughed CJ. “I’d be very nervous and stand here frozen.”

But for many people the enjoyment is in the waiting.

“It’s just such a thrill, the feeling of anticipation and the fact there’s so many people here,” she added.

So did Anne’s ghost make an appearance this year? All that seemed out of the ordinary was a sharp drop in temperature. From being a balmy May evening, the temperature suddenly dropped to shiver-inducing levels just before midnight, and leapt up again not long after. It’s a phenomenon often associated with hauntings, but it’s hardly conclusive.

It could be that this myth has become a victim of its own success.

Would any self-respecting spirit make an appearance when confronted by a horde of people willing her to appear, armed with cameras, electromagnetic field detectors and thermometers?

By all accounts Anne Boleyn was a pious and contrary soul.

Maybe as the last car pulled away and we all traipsed back to our beds, she commanded her headless horsemen to whip the horses to a gallop and send her speeding across the misty fields to her spiritual home. Just maybe . . .

It is suggested Anne Boleyn haunts Blickling Hall as it was a place she associated with childhood happiness, far from the tensions of the royal court.

While she was captive in the Tower of London and awaiting execution, she wrote the following lines:

A captive, I in this dread Tower, scenes of childhood gaiety recall,

They comfort bring in this dark hour, now gaiety hath flown,

Through Blickling’s glades I fain would ride, soft green sward,

Sequested shade, no cruel intrigues to deride my simple rustic day.

A child, I watched the timid fawn, gentle eyed, steal to the lake

With thirst to quench when mists of dawn had from cool waters fled.

Strutting peacocks, shimmering blue, roseate arbour, scented walk

Gladly I left, ’tis strangely true, for pageantry at court.

False vanities my pride hath tricked, this place of damp and anguished stone

By sullen river surges licked, doth mock my hopeless lot

Oh, were I still a child in stature small

To tread the rose-lined paths of Blickling Hall.

Many thanks to Denis Mead for allowing access to his research.

LOCATION

BLICKING HALL