Ghosts in the Castle!

October 31 2018 | Castle History

Hever Castle is entwined with ghost stories following Anne Boleyn’s fateful death. One such episode caught the attention of Lord Astor (owner of Hever Castle 1962 to 1983) and the ghoulish investigations went on.

In 1976, a man named C.W.Bamford contacted Lord Astor proclaiming his connection with Anne Boleyn (formerly Bullen). What followed were a series of peculiar letters, meetings and encounters. 

Bamford’s grandfather, H Bullen of Cromer, spent a considerable amount of time trying to trace his ancestry. He had a theory that he was in some way connected with the Bullen family of Salle, the origin of Anne’s Grandfather. Whenever possible Bamford and his grandfather would pursue their quest with the most remarkable result. Bamford noted that ‘all of my Grandfather’s predecessors back to the early 1700s all came from within fifteen miles of Salle’. 

Bamford became convinced by his own connections, by ‘an inner interest and instinct that could not be explained or understood’. He began visiting sites known to have been frequented by Anne in an effort to establish some form of contact with the past. Lord Astor was intrigued by Bamford’s letter, admitting that ‘I seem to have indulged in the same sort of pleasures of the interests as you have in trying to gain personal experiences of the environments in which my ancestors moved’.

As such, Bamford felt it necessary to visit Hever Castle in an attempt to make contact with Anne Boleyn’s ghostly ‘vibrations’. On one visit to the Castle Bamford suggested that the guide book which depicted Anne witnessing her father greet King Henry from a first floor window was wrong. He later stood in a certain spot overlooking the courtyard, and felt certain that this is where Anne Boleyn had stood.

In Anne Boleyn’s bedroom he said, ‘for some reason I remained on a step just below the small window with my hands on the window sill. I received impressions generated by considerable force. These impressions were of a young woman, some 25 or 26 years of age in some distress – fists beating on the window sill – scrabbling of finger nails on the surrounding walls… I can definitely draw Anne’s spirit within reach’.

Lord Astor was not so favourable of Bamford’s more vivid impressions, but could Anne’s ghost have been trying to make contact with whom may be her present day ancestors?