The ghosts of the British royal family: Séances with Elizabeth II and Queen Camilla’s haunted mansion

Prince Harry confessed in his autobiography Spare that he had turned to a spirit guide to invoke his late mother, Princess Diana of Wales, who had a great interest in the mystical world and turned to her personal psychic, Sally Morgan, up to three times a week. But an inclination and interest in paranormal events and esotericism is not exclusive to the youngest son of Charles III and Lady Di, but shared by the British royal family in general. Biographer Robert Hardman, in the latest episode of the Daily Mail podcast Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things, released on August 7, recalled a story related to the royals and the paranormal: it occurred one night in 1953 when Queen Elizabeth II attended a seance to connect with her deceased father, King George VI.

The story begins at the royal residence of Sandringham, in the county of Norfolk, England, where the staff of the estate where the Windsors traditionally celebrate Christmas were frightened by unexplained phenomena occurring in the bedroom where George VI had died in 1952. The situation escalated to the point where they decided to appeal to the Queen Mother. To address the situation, Elizabeth II’s mother contacted a local parish priest in 1953 to perform a “religious cleansing ceremony” inside the room, inviting her daughter and her lady-in-waiting, Prue Penn, to attend.

“It wasn’t a conventional exorcism. There was no dramatic expulsion of demons, as you see in the movies. The room was said to house a tormented spirit, and the parish priest was supposed to bless the space,” Hardman explains in his conversation with his co-host, Kate Williams, about an anecdote first reported in 2000 by the late Kenneth Rose, royal biographer and journalist. During the service in the haunted room, Communion was taken and special prayers were said, aimed at dispelling the wandering spirit of George VI. Although, as Rose speculated at the time, “No one was quite sure who the ghost was supposed to be.”

Whether or not the British royals who participated in the 1953 séance believed the palace staff’s fears about paranormal phenomena remains a mystery. As Hardman and Williams explain in their podcast, they believe the Queen Mother decided to conduct the séance to show her servants that they took their concerns seriously. And Harman adds her own impressions of the attendees: “It was particularly odd that Elizabeth II attended, given her cynicism about this kind of wild theory. The late Queen had a strong faith, but she wasn’t superstitious. She didn’t have time for such theories, but she did have a strong sense of the spiritual, as King Charles III does.”

This séance wasn’t the only one the Queen Mother and Elizabeth II participated in. The documentary The King of UFOs (2024) features some of the most interesting ones. Among them, one starring Lilian Bailey, the royal family’s trusted medium, stands out after she forged a friendship with George VI’s speech therapist, Lionel Logue. On an unspecified date, the psychic was contacted to conduct a private session with clients who, at first, remained anonymous. Bailey was taken blindfolded from her home in Wembley to a house in Kensington, where she entered a trance and shared various messages from the beyond. Reports claim that when she emerged from the trance, she was allowed to remove her blindfold and was surprised to see Elizabeth II, along with her husband, Prince Philip of Edinburgh, her mother, her sister, Princess Margaret, and her first cousin, Alexandra of Kent, and her husband, Angus Ogilvy.

The British royal family’s ties to the esoteric and the paranormal began with Queen Victoria. During the Victorian era (1837-1901), it was fashionable to turn to spirit guides, and the monarch was no exception. According to The King of UFOs, she turned to medium Robert Lees to help her communicate with her late husband, Prince Albert, after the Birmingham psychic impressed her with a reading when he was 13. He later channeled the monarch’s former husband through one of his trusted aides, John Brown, whose ghost was later perceived by Elizabeth II. “Our dear late queen always said that there were ghosts and she said ‘I never go to Allt-na-giubhsaich (Glassalt, the cottage on the lake in Balmoral) without the corgis because the corgis sense it before I do. Their hackles go up and they start to growl so I never go without them and I never stay the night there,’” former royal butler Paul Burrell told the Daily Mirror newspaper on January 22, 2024. He added the fact that he believed troubled the sovereign: “Queen Victoria would stay the night there with John Brown.”

The list of paranormal occurrences at British royal residences goes on. Paranormal historian Richard Felix claims in the aforementioned documentary that “all of their properties have ghosts, they know it, and they’ve witnessed it. The late Queen saw her namesake, Queen Elizabeth I, in the library at Windsor Castle. The King [Charles III] has seen the same ghost, and his grandfather George VI saw Queen Elizabeth I eight times in the library before the start of World War II.” Other ghosts sighted at Windsor include George III muttering “what” over and over again, and Henry VIII moaning and groaning because of his ulcerated leg, British royal expert Hilary Fordwich told Vanity Fair in an October 30, 2024, piece.

Of the current British royal family, Queen Camilla is the biggest believer in ghosts. According to her son, Tom Parker Bowles, the Wiltshire mansion where he grew up was haunted. “As a child, he found the rooms frightening. It was always cold. There were a lot of very rational people who, in the middle of the night, would get in a car and drive back to London because something had gotten into their bed, and it was a spirit,” he recounted on Gyles Brandreth’s Rosebud podcast on September 26, 2024. The ghost even appeared to the house’s owner: “My mother says she woke up in the middle of the night and a presence pinned her to the bed.” Camilla has also spoken about her fear of Dumfries House, an 18th-century retreat that the current British monarch had restored. “There was definitely a ghost,” she recalled in the documentary The Real Camilla, HRH the Duchess of Cornwall (2018). “I walked up the stairs, into the hall, and thought, ‘I can’t go on.’ I froze… I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to go back,’ and I didn’t for years.”

And, as John West writes in his book Britain’s Ghostly Heritage, Charles and a staff member fled Sandringham Library in terror. Felix claims that Anmer Hall, the current residence of William, Prince of Wales, and Kate Middleton, is haunted: “There was a ghost of a Catholic priest who had his residence there, and he was hanged, drawn, and quartered for high treason, and for some reason, he has now returned home.”

As long as ancient castles and monarchies exist, stories of hauntings will continue to intrigue and appear in the media. In July 2024, a royal follower shared footage with Radar Online of what appeared to be the ghost of Elizabeth II holding her iconic Launer handbag in a room at Windsor Castle.

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