Wraith of Catherine Howard

Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII and first cousin to Anne Boleyn, married the king in the summer of 1540. In November 1541 word of her earlier attachments reached Archbishop Cranmer: before the wedding she had entered a verbal precontract with Francis Dereham, binding in canon law and never dissolved, made in the household of Agnes Howard, dowager Duchess of Norfolk, when she was about fifteen. As queen she had made him her private secretary. Dereham and Thomas Culpeper, a gentleman of the king's privy chamber, were executed at Tyburn on 10 December 1541.

She was stripped of the title of queen on 23 November, confined all winter at Syon Abbey, and beheaded with an axe at the Tower of London on 13 February 1542, at nine in the morning. She was buried the same day, without a funeral, in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula beside her cousin. This needs saying because almost every version gets it wrong: Catherine was neither seized nor executed at Hampton Court. She left that palace under arrest three months before she died.

What made Hampton Court famous is a scene that probably never happened. The story goes that, on learning she was accused, Catherine broke free of her guards, ran down the gallery to the door of the Chapel Royal where Henry was hearing mass, screamed his name begging for mercy, and was dragged back shrieking. Hence the name of the Haunted Gallery, and hence what is attributed to her, which is not an apparition but a shriek.

Ernest Law was the first to write it down, in 1885, and he did so with a candour worth quoting: he wrote that it would be indiscreet to inquire too particularly after the authorities for a story of this sort. Charles Harper repeated it in 1907, saying that the spirit of the queen wakes the echoes of the galleries with her shrieks, even as she did in that last sad scene of her life here. No source contemporary with the case records the run: not even Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, who never kept quiet about a court scandal. And the palace itself now admits that Catherine's lodgings no longer exist and that the route she would have taken did not pass through that gallery. Add to which the ghost legends of Hampton Court were industrialised in the early twentieth century: the best-selling postcards around 1900 were faked up double exposed photographs, and the gallery was opened to the public on 1 April 1905.

In October 2003 a set of fire doors beside the Clock Court at Hampton Court flew open by themselves on three consecutive days, and on the second day the security cameras recorded a figure in a long robe of sixteenth-century cut closing them. The staff nicknamed it Skeletor. The palace denied any hoax they said they were as baffled as anyone and genuinely did not know who or what it was and nobody has ever claimed the prank. The sceptical explanations most often cited are an employee or an actor in historical costume, or a publicity stunt, and neither is confirmed.

It is constantly repeated that this footage is the ghost of Catherine Howard, and it is not, for three reasons. It appeared in a different courtyard, not the Haunted Gallery. The figure has a head and is covered by a long robe. And the phenomenon tradition ascribes to Catherine is not an image but a shriek, which is precisely what a camera does not record. It should also not be confused with a similar incident in 2015, which was debunked.

This entry was for a time called the headless wraith of Hampton Court, and the error deserves explaining rather than deleting, because it circulates everywhere. There is no documented headless ghost at Hampton Court. Catherine is not one: she appears as a pale figure or a figure in white, and her characteristic phenomenon is the shriek. Jane Seymour is not one: she comes down the Silverstick stairs with a lighted candle, near where she gave birth and died in October 1537. And Sibell Penn is not one: nurse to Prince Edward, dead of smallpox in 1562, whose spinning wheel began to be heard behind a wall in the 1820s, after lightning damaged St Mary's church and her remains were moved.

The headlessness comes from her cousin, and it has a date. The image of the Tudor queen walking with her head under her arm was popularised by a comic music-hall song of 1934 and has stuck ever since to any executed queen. It belongs to Anne Boleyn in truth, and only in some versions: in the Blickling one she arrives with her head in her lap. Catherine Howard was deprived of her head in 1542, and folklore left it on her.