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Sept. 30, 2011 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
52:23
Edition 69 - Ghosts and Hauntings

Edition 69 comes direct from what is claimed to be the most haunted place in Britain –Hampton Court Palace near London... We talk to ghost researcher and author of new book Haunted Surrey,Rupert Matthews.

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is the Unexplained.
Well, the world continues in overdrive, doesn't it?
Weird events everywhere, not only to do with the economy, but politically and every other way.
And as I record these words, it is October the 1st, and it is a really hot and beautiful day.
And in parts of Europe, we've had an unseasonal heat wave.
Nobody can really explain why it is, but if I look out of the window now, I can catch a glimpse of an absolutely clear blue sky.
The only thing up there right now are a few jet trails going backwards and forwards to the airport and a couple of birds.
And it's a beautiful day.
And we've had a few of them and we've got a few more to go.
And nobody can really quite explain why we're having a run of weather like this, but nature seems to have been foiled or fooled by this.
The newspapers in the UK yesterday, Friday, were talking about how some flowers are blooming again because they think it's spring.
In August, we had frost in parts of the UK, so nature thought it was winter time.
The flowers are beginning to bloom.
And this morning, I can tell you, at 4 a.m., just like springtime, the birds were singing.
So it's all very weird, but it's nice to have some sunshine here in London, England.
I don't like the winter.
I'm not a guy for the cold.
If I could, I'd live in California or somewhere where it gets warmer than here.
But, you know, life is life, isn't it?
And we have the hand we are dealt, as they say.
And this one ain't too bad.
Especially as I get to do a show like this one on my terms and my way.
Thank you so much for supporting it.
Thanks for the great emails.
I'm going to finally, and I know it's taken some time, get around to some of those shout-outs now to a lot of you.
And I'm not even going to be able to scratch the surface, but there are some people I do want to say hello to.
And I will get around to all the rest.
And if you have emailed, thanks so much for the suggestions, your thoughts on the show, whatever they may be, always glad to get them, and your donations too.
Please go to www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
If you have any problems getting the shows, updates for the shows will always be on the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
Thanks to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, my talented, gifted young webmaster who gets this show out to you.
Thanks to Martin for the theme tune, and thank you to you for being there.
Tell your friends.
Hello to Phil.
Rediscovered the show after a long time.
Used to listen to it on the radio, wondered where it went, and now has found it.
Phil, good to hear from you.
David, liked Al Beerlik and was glad that I'd rediscovered the lost edition.
Well, that's all down to Patrick.
Thank you, Patrick, again.
Louis in New York City, good to hear from you in the last few days.
Jodie, yes, Jody, message for you.
Still trying to get hold of Graham Hancock.
I'd love to get him on here.
You know, I've said to his publisher that I believe he lives in Bath, which is about 120 miles, not even that really.
I think about 100 miles from where I live.
I'll get in the car and go to him.
Problem is being able to get a window of opportunity on his part.
Daniel, thank you very, very much for your great email.
Mark, thank you for yours.
Justin, thank you.
William, Simon, Susan, I'll be in touch with you about what you suggested.
Life has just been so crazy, but I will make time and get in touch about that.
And Doug in Brooklyn, Doug, good to hear from you as well.
Thank you so much for your emails.
And many, many, many more people have emailed.
And I do see them all.
And everybody gets a response.
Thank you very, very much for those.
And if you want to email, like I say, go to www.theunexplained.tv and you can email there directly.
Now, special edition of the show today on this gorgeous summer day, we are going to go to what is reputed to be the most haunted building in the UK.
Also one of the most famous buildings in the world.
It's called Hampton Court Palace.
And it's not too many miles away from where I live.
And on a gorgeous summer day like this, I think it'll be nice to go there.
So, as they used to say through the miracle of radio, we're going to cross now for a full live stereo walk around Hampton Court with a ghost expert.
We're going to talk about ghosts there and ghosts in the ancient nearby county of Surrey.
There's a new book out about them and we're going to meet the author of that book.
So let's flash across to Hampton Court Palace on this gorgeous summer day, even though it is in autumn.
Let's get to it.
This is the unexplained.
And I'm standing by the banks of the sparkling River Thames on the very first day as this is of October 2011.
And the River Thames here at Hampton Court is where I am, one of the most famous historic locations in the world.
Perhaps second only to Buckingham Palace if you live in the US.
It is the base of Henry VIII.
Was for a time.
Many famous historical stories tied to this building here.
It is also reputed to be one of the most haunted buildings on the planet.
There are many haunting stories here, and if you look at the internet, if you look at YouTube, it's probably still there because around the façade of Hampton Court Palace here, a few years ago, I think probably seven or eight, there was a very famous ghost video, I think produced from the Hampton Court CCTV produced, of a man in some kind of uniform or cloak, dark figure, classic ghost.
Now, a lot of people said this is the real deal and it's here on video.
And an awful lot of people said this is just a fake.
And that is the nature of the beast, I guess.
It's been a while since we've done a ghost program, so I thought let's bring the show out on this day, beautiful day, and let's see what we come up with.
Now, there's another reason for doing this because with me now, walking by Hampton Court, we're going to walk towards Hampton Court Palace, which adjoins the river.
We're going to walk from the river right to the palace now and through it and to the gardens here.
I'm joined by Rupert Matthews, who is from Surrey, which is just across the river.
You can't see this, but I'm pointing across the river here.
One side of the river where the palace is is Middlesex.
The other side of the river, from where I'm standing right now in the heat across the Shining River, is Surrey.
So it's the border of two counties.
So we're going to walk into Middlesex now with Rupert Matthews.
I guess I really literally could call you Rupert a ghostwriter.
You could, yes.
I've written about 25 books on ghosts and the paranormal now, so done fair bit.
All right, now, and you're a local man too, you're born and bred around here.
Surrey born, surrey-bred, strong in arm, thick in head.
Surrey is the county that's one of the counties that adjoins London, and it's reputed for being, if you don't know the place, a little posh.
Parts of it are, aren't they?
Oh yeah, some of them very posh.
Some of them not quite so though.
Some of them very posh.
Here we are standing, Rupert and I, in front of the big facade of Hampton Court.
If you're near a computer, Google it right now and you'll see how impressive this is.
It wasn't a building that was built at one time though.
The history will tell you if you Google it.
This place was built, added to, refined, unrefined and changed and they're still working on it now.
And as we look here on this first day of October 2011, we have one of the tourist guides here.
They do it very well.
You know, they have those, I think they're probably resting actors who do marvelous tours here.
I'm not sure about that, Rupert, but it all looks very impressive.
Do you remember that video, the one that I was talking about?
Well, I do actually, yes, because, you know, being a local boy, I lived with it all my life.
And we were absolutely amazed when it came out.
One, because it was so clear, but also because the dark man that the video was showing isn't actually one of the more active ghosts here, nor was he best known, yeah.
So everyone was really quite surprised.
I mean, one of the more active ghosts, actually, over to you our right, as we stand looking at the facade, there's a wing projecting out called the Woolsey Wing.
That's where a famous Victorian general retired to in the 1890s.
I think he'd been out fighting in Africa a lot.
Anyway, that's where he retired too.
And he did some alterations when he moved in, which of course back then you were able to do to ancient buildings.
And he took down a partition wall.
And as soon as he'd taken down the partition wall, the haunting started.
And the haunting was of a middle-aged lady in a long dress at a spinning wheel who used to, you know, spin.
As with most of these ghosts, of course, she was only ever seen for a few seconds at a time.
But she was seen very, very often.
And it was as soon as he'd taken this wall down.
Of course, the old boy wasn't very happy sharing his nice palatial lodgings with this ghost.
And it turns out that she was a lady who'd lived there, well, I think it was in about 1680s when Hampton Court Palace was beginning not to be used so much by the royal family as being given out for grace and favour for well-known people to live in.
And he got really fed up with her and made all sorts of complaints and so on.
And she's still seen now, I suppose about two or three times a month, I forget the lady's name, if anyone knows it, the spinning lady she's known as.
But that is just one, you know, you're jogging my memory now, of many, many ghost stories here.
There are loads.
There's also poor Catherine Howard who was Henry VIII's, let's get this straight, fifth wife.
He had a few.
Who executed after he found out she'd been having too much fun with one of the courtiers, shall we say.
But they were here at Hampton Court Palace when he decided that he wanted to get rid of her.
And they were in the back half of the palace, the other side from this facade.
And he was at morning service and she'd been arrested in her bedroom that morning, just as she woke up, which as you can imagine came as a very unpleasant shock to her.
And she knew, of course, she was very likely to end up being executed as Anne Boleyn had already got the chop.
But at one point her guard got distracted and she burst out of her bedroom and ran the whole length of the long corridor, screaming to Henry to, you know, let her speak to Henry, that she wanted to prove her innocence and so on.
And she got as far as the door to the chapel where Henry was and was hammering on the door when the guards came and took her away screaming.
And she was seen several times over the next hundred years running down the corridor, screaming, tears pouring down her face.
And as you can imagine, was a very startling and shocking apparition for those who came across her.
She's probably the best known ghost here, but as far as I know, nobody's seen her for about 100 years.
Great story, though.
Great story, but sadly, nobody's seen her.
Unlike the spinning lady, people see a lot.
And there's a chap from, we think probably the 17th century.
He's certainly wearing the sort of clothes that cavaliers wore during the English Civil War back in the 1650s with a big broad-brimmed hat and a feather and lovely silk jacket and so on.
He's seen in the Fountain Courtyard, which is sort of more towards the river from where we've walked now.
I think we started off closer to it.
So the Fountain Courtyard would be, I mean, this is a big estate here.
It's got the river on one side.
It has in the middle of it some wonderful ornamental gardens that were restored comparatively recently to the condition that they were in.
They look exactly like Henry VIII's time.
They're manicured like that.
And then beyond that, you've got more rolling greenery.
And that's where we're talking about.
And he, you know, unlike the other ghosts here, he really doesn't do anything.
He just stands there in the garden.
And recently, since, as you say, they started getting these actors here in costume as guides, he's very often mistaken for a guide.
Because, of course, and he just stands there, he doesn't do anything.
Of course, if anyone goes to talk to him, bang, he vanishes.
And that's a classic ghost tale, isn't it?
I've talked to a number of people.
There's a guy up in the northeast of England who writes a lot of books and does a lot of stakeholders investigations up there.
And from the stories he's told me, it seems to me that sometimes apparitions' presences like to have a bit of a joke with people.
That's right.
I mean, it is, I think, a moot point whether they are actually interacting with the humans or whether it is that the presence of the human sort of affects the apparition in some way.
But certainly, yes, I mean, there are a whole class of ghosts that do like to interact with humans and, as you say, can sometimes have a bit of a sense of humour about it as well.
Well, they can.
I mean, this man's told me stories about having his bottom pinched and that sort of thing by ghosts, which is fairly common, I think, from stories that I've heard.
Now, you can hear that Today is very busy because it's a blue sky day, very unusual for this time of year.
There are thousands of tourists here, a lot of Americans come here, a lot of Japanese people.
You can hear the sound of that.
Plus, of course, as you can just about hear, I think.
This is on the flight path from Heathrow Airport.
So, although this was at one time in Henry VIII's time, it would have been in the middle of the country.
Now it's very much part of the London scene, but it's very much part of the tourist trap.
But the majority of tourists who come here probably, unless one of the actors' turn guides tells them, they don't get to hear the ghost stories.
They don't get told those.
In fact, Hampton Court doesn't really like for itself anyway.
It doesn't mind the stories being told around it, but doesn't really publicise that itself, does it?
No, it doesn't do a huge amount about it, which as a local boy has always surprised us because we all know it's haunted.
And whereas some stately homes and so on actually do ghost tours and you can stay overnight in the haunted chamber and all that sort of stuff.
Here they don't do it.
They're mentioned in the guidebooks, but that's about it.
If you visit here, it's all a lot more about the history.
It's all about Henry VIII and the Tudors and the Stuarts that followed them on, of course.
We have to explain to our American listeners, mostly, maybe you know this anyway, you probably do, so I'm sorry if you do.
But this is one of the historic royal palaces.
In other words, it is part of the whole royal thing here in the UK.
This is one of theirs.
In fact, the likes of Prince Charles will be here periodically.
All the royal family will come here.
They won't necessarily publicise the fact that they're here.
And it's run as a charity, effectively, is it not?
And they do concerts here.
It's a marvellous venue.
Oh, it is.
It's fantastic.
Yes, they do, as you say, concerts and son de l'umieres.
And you can hire parts of it if you want to get married here and you've got enough money.
I remember I once had to do a charity auction when I worked at Capitol Radio in London here.
It was a marvellous place to do it.
Back to the ghosts.
There are many, many here.
Do you know any more about Hampton Court before we talk about your other ghosts?
The only one that I'll jump in was actually an group of apparitions, so about eight of them.
It was only ever seen once.
There is some dispute as to whether it's properly a ghost or whether it's some sort of mass hallucination and so on.
But it was towards evening, back in the 1880s, I think, and the garden gate, which we're now walking up through the gardens towards the tilt yard, and it was at the gate, the far side of the tilt yard.
And there were a group of people walking along the path we're walking along now who were seen by several of the people who were in the gardens in formal evening wear in black tie, a tuxedo they call it in America, for the gents and the ladies in beautiful long gowns, all with their jewellery on, looking very posh, very smart.
And they were, letting everyone thought, well, this is a bit odd.
Didn't know there was an event on this evening, but never mind, you know.
And then they just vanished into thin air.
They were seen by about half a dozen people, not been seen before, not been seen since.
And it's the sort of thing where if only one person had seen them, it would just be discounted as some sort of hallucination and so on.
But because a whole group of people saw them, then it shifts into the unexplained.
Well, it does, I mean, literally.
And those are the best sightings of all if it's something that a number of people see.
Sometimes, as you will know, because you've done more of this than I have, there will be apparitions that are seen by one person and seem to focus on one single person.
That's right.
But the real special ones are ones like that, aren't they?
Yes, absolutely.
And this, I think, is one of the reasons why it is difficult to explain hauntings and ghosts just in terms of hallucinations and waking dreams and so on.
Is that very often somebody who doesn't know the property and doesn't know the story will visit a place and see the ghost and the description they give of the ghost is exactly the same as the description given by everybody else.
So you think if you go down the hallucination route then something's causing him to have exactly the same hallucination that everybody else had.
Well how does that work?
And how do you think it works?
I don't know to be honest.
I mean I've travelled around this country hunting down ghosts.
I've written a number of books on it.
I've probably interviewed six or seven hundred people who have had a ghost or poltergeist experience.
And while I'm convinced it's a real phenomenon in that people actually do experience this, it's not something they're making up for the newspapers.
I have no idea what the explanation for it is.
I mean there are different theories that come out but I don't find any one of them totally convincing because however much you might think, oh yes it's a form of psychokinetics, you know, it's mind power making things move when you're dealing with poltergeists and so on.
You think, yeah, okay that works.
Well how does PK actually work?
Well nobody knows.
So I don't think there's an explanation that's absolutely convinced me what's causing it but I've spoken to enough people and seen enough evidence to accept that it's real.
And what about you?
Have you ever seen a ghost?
No, never, I'm afraid.
And like most ghost researchers I know you're dying to.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean I've done the whole thing, you know, I've stayed in the haunted bedroom at hotels, I've visited haunted pubs, I've been to haunted state homes like Hampton Court.
I spent a lot of my time in and around haunted places.
So you do it vicariously through other people?
Yeah.
Yeah, afraid so.
But yeah, I grew up with it.
I grew up in a village called Isha, which is, I suppose, about five or six miles away from here.
And one of the houses in the High Street, which is now a takeaway food place, had one of the most famous examples of a crisis apparition.
And that's where, you know, the lady of the house, Mrs. Porter, I think it was, was just sitting reading a book and in came one of her neighbours, ignored her completely, walked across the room, looked out the window, said, it's a damn shame, and then walked off again.
And she thought, well, that's a bit odd.
He didn't talk to me.
He didn't, you know, so she went down to his house.
Well, he wasn't there.
He was actually supposed to be in Kingston, which is the nearest market town.
And it turned out that this poor man had had a heart attack and died that afternoon.
And he died at about the time that she saw him come into her house and look out the window.
And of course, he wasn't there.
He was about 10 miles away in Kingston.
So, you know, that's a whole class of haunting and a whole type of apparition and ghost that there are lots of reports of.
There are lots of attestations to.
But it's because, you know, there were so many unanswered questions because she knew this guy as a neighbor.
They said hello in the street.
Why did he Appear to her?
Why did he not appear to his son or his wife?
It's incredibly common, and it's very hard to know why those things happen.
We've had those on this show many, many times, including quite recently.
And I'm always left thinking: is there some power of mind?
And some people are more sensitive on a mental level than others, and that's why those people see these things.
But there are so many, as you say, unexplained facets to it.
Like, very, very commonly, somebody who has died will be seen around the time of their death or seen very shortly after their death, as much as to say to the person who's witnessing this, well, here you are.
Here's the proof that we go on.
Well, that's right.
But I mean, again, there are different explanations for it.
It could be that what's happening is that as a person suddenly realises that they're dying, they want to get a message out, perhaps to their loved one, or to get an important message across to somebody or whatever it is.
And so what you're dealing with is not survival of death.
It might actually be an expression of telepathy.
And that, you know, yes, you want to send a message to your wife, say, you know, I hid the money behind the sofa, darling, or whatever it is.
But because maybe she's busy, her mind's focused on what she's doing, you can't get through to her.
So you get through to your neighbour instead, and she doesn't understand what you're trying to get at, and, you know, the whole thing falls apart.
It's like you've got to have the mobile phone turned on for it to receive a call.
That's right, absolutely.
All right.
Before we get into the subject of Surrey, which as we say is just across the river from where we're sitting now, we're in the ornamental gardens at Hampton Court.
It is a beautiful, beautiful day.
That is going to be no solace for you if it's pouring with rain or snowing, whatever it is where you are, but it's a fabulous day.
Tell me about you.
What's your background?
Oh, I'm a historian.
My background, if you like, is in Dark Age history.
That's the period of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire for about 200 years after that.
That's where I come from.
But I've written a number of history books and I actually got into the whole paranormal thing quite by accident about 12 years ago now, I think it was.
One of my publishers wanted to do a book on ghosts and didn't know anyone who knew anything about ghosts and phoned me on the grounds that ghost stories are history stories.
You're talking about, you know, the wicked Victorian squire or you're talking about the cook that was run down by a bus in 19th.
They're all history stories.
Somebody who was married to Henry VIII.
Someone married Henry VIII.
They said, you know, they're all history stories.
You're historian.
You write it.
Well, at the time, I really wasn't interested, but I was a bit short on work, so I thought, okay, so I did it.
And once I'd written one, then other publishers came to me and said, oh, you know about ghosts, Rupert, you do it.
And then once I'd written a couple on ghosts, I said, well, Rupert, you know about this sort of thing.
What do you know about flying saucers and UFOs?
And now I'm spending probably about a third of my time doing the paranormal and about two-thirds of my time doing what I'm supposed to be doing, which is being a historian.
So it's growing and taking over my career, as it were.
Very strange, isn't it, how sometimes that happens.
Okay, the book.
Surrey, born and bred, you were, so you know the area as I know the area.
And it is an area of great contrast, but it's an area of fantastic history, great place for a historian to be.
And also, I would imagine, a great place and a great fund of ghost stories there.
Oh, yes, there's absolutely stacks of them.
Like I say, I grew up in Ayesha, just down the road from us is a pub called the Marquis of Granby.
Now, Marquis of Granby himself, you know, was an 18th century soldier who led the British cavalry during the, I think it was a war of the Austrian Succession, I can't quite remember.
Anyway, he was a totally good soldier and his men all absolutely loved him.
And when they retired, quite a lot of them started up pubs that they named the Marquis of Granby.
But this particular pub has got an interesting story.
And it's generally put down to be a ghost, but I actually think it's a poltergeist, because when you read what this ghost was supposedly doing back about 80 or 100 years ago, it sounds a lot more like what today we categorise as being a poltergeist than what we today think of as a ghost, in that it was said to be the ghost of a serving maid, but she was never really seen.
But she moved things about, she smashed glasses, she locked doors when people were in the room and then they couldn't get out.
All the typical sorts of things that poltergeist do.
And as you said earlier, you know, with a bit of a sense of humour as well.
And then you can imagine in a busy inn as the Marquis of Granby is, there's lots of potential to play tricks on people.
Marquess of Granby is, for those who don't know it, very famous actually in and around London.
It's sort of gateway into Surrey.
It's very close to a very, very busy roundabout near Esha.
It is a large and imposing place and I know all about it because I did a radio show from there, an outside broadcaster, remote, for the Chris Tarrant show on Capitol Radio.
And we got hundreds and hundreds of people there and we met the owners of the thing.
And the last thing I would have thought that that place is haunted.
I know, it just, as with so many haunted places, it doesn't look haunted.
I mean, living in an old country like England, you know, yes, we do have 400-year-old palaces like Hampton Court where we are now, and yes, they are haunted.
But you also get ghosts in houses that were only built 20 or 30 years ago.
You get ghosts by the roadside.
You get ghosts on village greens.
And so the ghosts are just as mixed bag as the humans, in my experience.
True.
And, you know, in your book, which has just come out, in the process of coming out of the mode, it's called Haunted Surrey.
Great title.
Easy to remember by Rupert Matthews.
Got a plug to say on the cover.
But it says on the cover, I got one of the first copies off the press here.
Nice book.
Plenty of photographs.
Very neatly written.
Very neatly illustrated, if I may say so.
But all right, let's cherry-pick some of the stories in the book.
Tell me how you research them.
First of all, there's a very, very famous motor racing circuit here that's now used for other things, technology, and I think conferences and things, called Brooklyn's.
Brooklyn's is enormously famous.
Look it up.
That's haunted?
It is haunted.
I mean, Brooklyn's was, I think I'm arting saying, the first purpose-built motor racing circuit in the entire world.
It was built about 1902, remained in action up until the Second World War when it was taken over by an aircraft factory.
A lot of the racing facilities were torn down.
And after the war, It never got going again.
But back in the early days, there was a racing driver named Percy Lambert who wanted to break the world speed record.
And back in those days, of course, the world speed record was only about 70 miles an hour.
And so he was looking for somewhere where he could get his specially adapted car up to speed with a clear track and everything.
And he chose Brooklyn's because, of course, it was long, straight track, it's got banked corners, and you could go very fast on there without bumping into a farmer driving his pigs the other way.
So that's where he did it.
He did break the world record.
Unfortunately, he decided that his car could actually go faster than it had gone on the first run.
He went out for a second run and as he was just entering one of the corners, his tyre blew and he got round the corner, but just as he came off the corner onto the straight, the car flipped over.
He was thrown clear.
He was doing about 65, 70 miles an hour at the time and unfortunately hit his head into a brick wall and it killed him.
And since then, the figure of a man dressed in the old-fashioned sort of racing gear with a leather helmet and goggles and so on has been seen quite a lot wandering around that corner.
It's always assumed to be Percy Lambert and as far as I'm concerned that's because one of the first people to see the ghost was only about two or three years after Paul Lambert was killed and recognised him and said that is Percy Lambert.
Lord.
Whereas you know with a lot of ghosts of course you know as with it there's the dark man.
Well nobody knows who he is.
But this was Percy Lambert.
Yeah and a man who knew him saw him and gave it an absolutely definite visual identification and he is still seen down by that now abandoned corner because the racetrack's not in use anymore.
Just standing, walking about.
So that adds to the theory that ghosts appear where sudden traumatic events imprint themselves.
They're somehow recordings.
Yeah, that does seem to be the case, but of course sometimes ghosts also appear where someone lived for a long time.
There's down in Guildford, one of the shops in the High Street, which is now a ladies' fashion shop, when I was a kid was a gunsmith's.
It's where you went to buy your shotguns if you're going out hunting and so on.
And it had been a gunsmith's, oh, I think for about 80, 90 years, all owned in the same family.
And the old boy who, when I was a kid, was running the shop, had been the owner for 40 or 50 years since his father died.
Towards the end of his life, they weren't really making money.
And when he passed away, the son sold up the property and so on.
But he's seen that.
Now, nothing dramatic ever happened there.
It's a very nice shop in a very nice town and nothing's happened.
But I suppose because he worked there for so long and was happy there for such a long time, his ghost is attached to the place and people still see it.
Though bizarrely, it's only ever seen down in the cellar, not actually in the shop.
And that's, yeah.
Well, it's good news for customers, isn't it?
Absolutely.
Well, I don't know, really.
I'd rather like to see.
I used to live in Guildford, what, 20 years ago, very beginning of my career.
I worked for a radio station there called County Sound.
I know exactly where you mean.
And loads of history in Guildford, and I guess quite a few ghosts.
Absolutely.
I mean, it is one of the...
It's been there since, oh, let's think, Saxon time.
So it's been there about 1,700 years, I think.
And there are lots of ghost stories attached to Guildford.
When you start trying to investigate them, it's slightly different because as with a lot of ghost stories, the people who own the property either don't want to talk about it, which is fair enough.
Or as far as they're concerned, well, the ghost is no longer seen.
And again, one of the famous ones is seen at the old almshouses at the top of the high street.
And that's where the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth was imprisoned there on his way to London for execution.
This is back in 1685.
And it said he haunts the place.
And there's a very, very good eyewitness account from the 1920s of someone who was staying in the almshouses and saw the ghost and gives a very good description of it.
Well, I was down there when I was doing the research for this book and I spoke to the gentleman who now lives in the haunted almshouse, where the ghost is meant to appear.
He's been there 14 years, never seen a thing.
May mean the ghost doesn't appear anymore, but going back to what you said earlier, it may mean that he's not susceptible to seeing ghosts because there are some people who are more likely to see ghosts than others.
And we're going off at a slight tangent here, I know.
But there's a pub in Wannish, another village in Surrey, which is said to be haunted by a fairly jovial fat chap who wears Victorian-style clothing.
I spoke to the landlady who was there until a few years ago, not there now, and she said that she saw the ghost several times a year.
When she was there, she'd see him eight, nine, ten times a year.
Her husband never saw him once, and yet they were in the building at the same time, living there for a number of years.
So quite clearly, she was open to viewing ghosts, whatever that means.
But he wasn't.
So whether this means the poor old Duke of Monmouth no longer haunts the almshouses or whether just the chat there can't see him.
So it's the old mobile phone being switched on analogy once again.
Of course there are going to be people, and I want to ask you this because you've interviewed so many people who have seen phenomena, ghosts, whatever, apparitions.
There will be people listening to this who say this is all from the mind.
It's either a delusion or an illusion.
It's an interesting one.
I think it's fair to say that apart from poltergeists, which are a special class of haunting in themselves, there is no physical evidence that ghosts exist.
Ghosts do not leave footprints.
Ghosts do not move objects about and poltergeists do.
And the most frustrating thing is that they will not present themselves to order.
They won't come to you when you want them to.
No, no, no.
And even when you're dealing with an active ghost, you know, like I say, the pub in Wannish, if the ghost is seen once or twice a month for five or six seconds at a time, that's it.
And that's a fairly active ghost.
So the chances of you capturing something on camera Or with the sound recording is very, very unlikely.
And yet, you know, when you talk to people, and I have spoken to hundreds of people who have seen ghosts, some of them you could think, yeah, okay, you saw it out the corner of your eye, it was at dusk, it won't vacuum light conditions, and so on.
But other people who see a ghost see it in broad daylight, in good light conditions, 10 feet away.
Well, you're not going to mistake what you're seeing.
If you're seeing a man in a blue jacket and a red tie 10 feet away, then that's what you're seeing.
Quite what's causing it, of course, is another question entirely.
But no, I don't think it's in the mind.
I think people genuinely experience it somehow.
And do you believe, and this is a completely different subject really, but it's interesting to get your take on it, that sometimes when people pass and go, if there is another side, and that's another debate altogether, that just like those death experiences where people appear shortly after they've died, but sometimes somebody who've passed over, who's passed over, will make an effort to come back in some form?
Some of the people I've spoken to, yes, their experiences would seem to indicate that there was a family in a place called Cranley, and they didn't want their names put about, so I won't tell you who they were.
But the grandfather of the family died just before Christmas, back in the early 1990s.
And they were convinced that he was trying to join them for Christmas.
He was seen in the garden a couple of times, not by family members, by other people, but he was seen in their garden a couple of times.
And they experienced unusual things.
Some of the things that he particularly liked were moved about the house.
Some of the things that he particularly liked went missing.
And they interpreted that as the fact that Grandpa's spirit was trying to come back and join them for Christmas.
Now, you know, you can interpret it different ways, but there's certainly some indication that might be going on.
When you look at, we've had recently, and we did a show on it here, and it's thousands of miles from where we're sitting right now, 3,000 miles to be exact.
9-11, ground zero.
So many people died in traumatic circumstances, and yet you would think that place would be replete with ghost stories.
I think there are some, but not much from what I hear.
Yeah, I mean, ghosts are a funny bunch, to coin a phrase.
Sometimes, yes, a dramatic incident can spark off a haunting.
But at the same time, I mean, my researches have shown me that sometimes ghosts that are associated with dramatic happenings aren't necessarily ghosts at all.
And I'll use an example, which isn't actually from Surrey, it's from up in Leicestershire, an unfortunate young lady named Bessie, it'll come to me, was murdered.
And it was a particularly unpleasant murder.
It was in the 1920s.
It was very violent.
It was very gruesome.
But her murderer was caught.
And there have been numerous stories about the ghost of this young lady being seen in the lonely country lane where she was attacked and where she was murdered.
And if you buy, you know, the sort of books I write, Ghosts of Sorry, if this was Ghost of Leicestershire, I'm quite sure that the story of the unfortunate murder victim would be in there.
But when I went and investigated it and I spoke to people in the village and I tried to track it down, nobody had ever seen her.
And even when I went back to the time of the murder and started looking at newspaper accounts of the hauntings and so on, again, there were no eyewitnesses.
It was all talk.
It was all third hand.
It was all...
You know, the poor unfortunate girl, it was a terrible murder.
I bet she comes back as a ghost.
And then.
That is appropriate.
What about that?
That's the bell chiming 3 p.m.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, a lot of ghosts are associated with dramatic happenings.
And I think it's if you want to go down the route that ghosts are caused by the emotional psychic energy of something deeply unpleasant or something very happy happening to a person and imprinting itself on the surroundings and then sort of playing it back.
Yes, absolutely.
But as I say, my own researches also indicate that people remember a dramatic happening and sometimes remember it in the form of a ghost story.
Sifting through all the stories then, tell me one from all those stories that you've collected locally here.
One really scary one.
A ghost that can scare the proverbial from you.
Oh my gosh!
Now you're asking me.
In Surrey a scary No, they're not polite.
He's just...
And perhaps inevitably, of course, it's haunted by a monk, one of the medieval monks who comes back and so on.
But the person there wasn't frightened because it was a ghost.
They were frightened because they shouldn't have been there.
It was after the place had shut that they'd gone there just because they wanted to have a look around, found it had shut early on a Sunday, shut at three o'clock or something, popped over the fence and went in, you see, and were having a look around and came round a corner to see this figure right in front of them, dressed as a medieval monk.
One, it gave them a shock because they thought they were there alone.
Second thing, they immediately assumed it was one of the costumed guides, like you get to Hamilton Court, someone dressed up, and thought, they're going to put me in trouble, they're going to arrest me for trespass, I'm going to be in all sorts of trouble, and so on.
And then this figure turned around and walked around the corner and vanished.
Right.
So it wasn't until that point they realised that this was not the warden.
And strangely, actually, when they realized it was a ghost, it was a bit of a relief.
But that is the only time anyone's told me that they were positively frightened by a ghost.
The normal reaction I come across is puzzlement rather than fright.
Because like that case, it isn't something that you rationalise until later.
Exactly.
So they don't scare you because at the time you may not know what they are.
That's right, yes.
And of course, the vast majority of ghosts, when they appear, do appear to be perfectly normal people.
They're not headless, they're not waving blood-stained rags, you know.
Tell me the story that I've longed to ask you about.
Because we're close to the end here, I want to ask you about this one: the haunted 747 jet.
Oh, that's down at Dunsfold, which was a small aerodrome.
It was opened up during the Second World War as an emergency landing ground.
That was for our aircraft that had gone out bombing Germany if they got shot up by German night fighters and so on and couldn't get all the way back to their base.
Dunsfold was a place where they could land and there was medical facilities and hospitals where the wounded could be taken off and looked after.
Anyway, it's now used for all sorts of things.
It's also used for top gear, that's a television program if anyone knows it.
But they've got part there, a Boeing 747, which isn't airworthy but can taxi about.
It's used for film work.
It appeared in a James Bond movie and that sort of thing.
Anyway, on board there is the ghost of a lady who suffered, I think it was a heart attack or stroke and died during a flight back in the day when it was used as a commercial jetliner.
And she is seen quite often.
I mean, certainly I spoke to one person who was a technical bod who was working on this James Bond movie.
And he saw her quite clearly when they were getting ready for film.
And he said, you know, he thought, well, we've cleared the area.
You know, there aren't meant to be any people here apart from the actors and the sounder, of course, and there's this flaming woman, so we'll have to stop the filming now, you know.
But of course, it wasn't someone who was trespassing or someone who'd got in there when they shouldn't.
It was the ghost.
So she's seen, I think, reasonably often for a ghost, you know, two, three times a month.
She's no trouble, as most ghosts aren't.
You know, she's just seen standing in the aisle inside the aircraft near where the seating is, doing nothing in particular, really.
Handing out drinks.
Well, it would be nice, wouldn't it?
But this is the frustrating thing, as we said before, top of this.
You couldn't go there right now on this lovely sunny day and expect that phenomenon to present itself because, as we said, the big frustration is it doesn't work that way.
No, that's right.
And this is, I think, why scientists always shy clear of a lot of the paranormal.
You can't make it happen on demand.
If you want to study what happens if you mix copper and hydrogen sulphide, you get a jar of copper, you get a jar of holder, you put two together and off you go.
But with all the paranormal, it is impossible to do that.
You cannot take it into a laboratory and study it.
It is a spontaneous phenomenon every single time.
And I liken this to meteorites.
You can't say, I want a meteorite to fall now.
And back in the day, up until the mid-19th century, these flying rocks, rocks that fell from the air, were treated as just as much part of the paranormal as we now view ghosts and UFOs.
So maybe at some point in the future, we'll find a rational explanation, some power that we have within ourselves, perhaps mentally, that will explain how we can decode whatever it might be.
Well, that's right.
I mean, there are all sorts of explanations for ghosts and for UFOs and cryptids and all the rest of it.
But I'm quite sure that while it is a genuine phenomenon, once we know what's causing it, it may not actually be frightening.
It may not actually be particularly weird.
It might just be a very unusual set of circumstances coming together that then manifests itself as a ghost or a flying source or whatever.
Of course, it might be the spirits of the dead coming back and it might be something really bizarre that we can't even understand.
But as I say, I think meteorites are a good analogy.
They were treated as a paranormal until someone worked out what they were and now they're just treated as part of the scientifically respectable world.
But because you cannot take the paranormal into a laboratory and study it, scientists steer away from it.
Because they steer away from it, the paranormal isn't taken seriously as a respectable subject by politicians and television channels and all the rest of it.
And therefore it doesn't get the attention that in my view it warrants.
And what do you say to people who laugh at all of this, who scoff at it?
Well, my attitude really is quite straightforward.
If someone says they don't believe in ghosts or they don't believe in flying sauce, that's absolutely fine.
But what they're really saying is that they don't believe in one particular explanation.
You have a whole mass of data.
Even if you think people are making it up, then you have to explain why do people make it up?
People don't get paid a lot of money for this.
You know, if you go and say, I saw a flying sauce or I saw a ghost, you don't get paid a huge amount of money for it.
Quite often you're ridiculed and laughed at.
So why do people make it up?
So why would anybody want to do that?
And the easiest explanation is because someone actually has seen a ghost.
Then the question becomes, what is it they have seen?
Yeah, sure, it might be an hallucination.
What caused the hallucination?
Why does everybody who goes into Hampton Court hallucinate seeing a lady at a spinning wheel?
Why do they not hallucinate seeing the ghost of the soldier who used to live there, the old general?
And these are people who don't beforehand know the story.
We have to say that.
These are people who've not been primed for it.
Because if you tell people they're suggestible, they might well see something they're told to see.
Absolutely.
We're talking about people here who haven't been primed for the story, who don't know the story.
That's right, yes.
So, you know, it's all very well saying I don't believe in ghosts, but what does that actually mean?
You think that everybody who reports seeing a ghost is a liar?
I think that's probably just as unlikely.
So what's the percentage then?
There must be some people who delude themselves or deliberately fake.
Oh, sure.
I mean, when I've been going around doing research, on quite a few occasions, I've stopped off at a hotel or a pub or a stady home and I've come away convinced that there is no ghost, that nobody has ever seen a ghost there.
They've made the story up.
Because it's good for business.
Absolutely.
And that does happen.
Likewise, talking to other people, you know, the conditions in which they claim to have seen a ghost, the light was very poor.
They saw it at a distance.
They only saw it for less than a second.
They could have been mistaken very easily, they could have seen, oh, I don't know, a large goose in the mist.
You know, it's very easy to make mistakes.
So, what I try to do when I'm doing research and when I'm writing things up is to make that clear distinction.
Sometimes I will recount a story because it's a very good story, even though I then go on to say, Well, actually, he didn't see it in very good conditions.
I'm not convinced this is a real ghost.
But as I say, other occasions, people see ghosts in such clear conditions and see them so well that, as far as I'm concerned, they genuinely did see what they are reporting seeing.
And then you've got to explain what it was that they saw.
And it must be that that keeps you, Rupert Matthews, going.
Absolutely.
It's great.
Can't wait.
All right.
Now, is there a story that I've missed out from this book that needs to be?
There are hundreds of stories in the book.
And we don't want to spoil it for people, do we?
And we don't want to sit here for the next 10 hours going on about it.
Oh, I don't know.
I don't know.
The only one I'll chuck in, which, and I'm only going to mention it because it is such an unusual ghost.
We mentioned about Brookwood earlier.
It was used as an aerodrome during the 30s and during the Second World War.
There is a ghost aircraft seen heading towards it, flying over the nearby town of Wakebridge.
Now, we have to say, because this was used, wasn't it?
Was it in World War II, World War I, planes were flown from there?
That's right.
It was used in World War II by the Vickers company.
They made the Wellington bomber, which did a lot of bombing during the war.
And an aircraft is seen going to it.
And I only mention it because ghost aircraft are very, very rare.
So we're quite proud of that one.
You know, the one I'd love to be able to experience, obviously being called Howard Hughes, I've had to live with that all my life.
I want to go to America.
I've never been to the Spruce Goose.
I want to sit there and see if I can sense anything, if anything appears to me, because I would think that if Howard was going to appear to anybody, I'd like to think he would reserve it for me first.
You're absolutely right.
You've got to get a payback, haven't you?
Well, I would hope so.
It's been lovely talking to you here on this beautiful sunny day.
And I guess by the time you hear this, the weather may not in the northern hemisphere be quite this good, but at least this is capturing a little snapshot of a clear blue sky day at a time of year when you don't expect this in the UK.
And the nearest I can equate this to is if you've ever been to a place like South Africa, Perth in Australia, somewhere like that, days like this, they're ten a penny.
Here in the UK, it's a bit of a gift.
What's your next project, Rupert Matthews?
My next project is nothing to do with ghosts.
It is a biography of an Anglo-Saxon king called Kiolin, who was the king of Wessex in about the year 680.
So something completely different.
Right.
Well, as I say, it has been a pleasure talking to you.
I know one of the things you do is you guide people.
Don't you?
You work as a guide?
Yeah, yes.
I mean, I don't do it all that much, but I do do it occasionally.
I take people on coach trips and stuff like that, which gets me out of the office and out of the archives because doing historical research, you can get stuck in dusty archives for weeks.
It's a nightmare.
And you told me before we started this that prior to this, the only interview you'd ever done for radio, I think, was seven and a half minutes for the BBC.
And you were wondering whether you'd be able to talk enough to fill the time.
I think we've proved that you can and very, very well.
Marvelous.
It was a bit of a worry, it must be said.
All right.
Now, publicity time.
You have a website.
I do have a website, www.rupertmathews.com.
That's the one.com.
And the book is Haunted Surrey.
By Rupert Matthews, and it's published by History Press.
That's right, yeah.
Right.
Easy peasy.
Find that online.
Rupert Matthews, from here in Hampton Court, thank you very much.
And I've been wanting to find a reason to come here to Hampton Court and do a show, probably about hauntings, maybe about history.
And now we've done the show.
All right, it's not on a freezing cold winter day.
But one thing I do recommend to you, even if it isn't summer, if you're visiting London, you can't go back without seeing Hampton Court.
Last year, year before actually, Richard C. Hoagland, space expert, came here and I brought him for lunch to an Italian restaurant opposite here.
And he and Robin, his partner, were on a really tight timetable.
And I said, if you step across that road, you've got Hampton Court Palace.
And Richard said, Robin and I have no time.
We've got to get back into London to the hotel.
And I said, you're going to miss something fantastic.
So, Richard, if you're listening to this, and I know you do, the invitation to come here to Hampton Court Palace is still open.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been another edition of The Unexplained.
Thank you very much as ever to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for getting this miraculous podcast out to you.
The technology of how he does that always amazes and baffles me, but he does it and he does it so well.
If you want great internet work done, great web design done, then Adam is becoming increasingly busy all over the world these days, but he is available and does that really well.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune.
If you want to contact me, then I would love you to.
Please send me an email.
Go to www.theunexplained.tv.theunexplained.tv.
There you can send me an email, give me feedback, do what a lot of you have done lately, and I'm really grateful for this.
Make guest suggestions there.
Always grateful to hear about what you think of the way that I'm doing this, how it can be improved.
You know, I don't think that anything that is on radio or television or anywhere isn't capable of improvement.
This certainly is.
So your ideas and thoughts about that, I gratefully receive.
www.theunexplained.tv.
Just very quickly, and I might have mentioned this before, and I will certainly mention it again.
Some of you have been emailing me to say that you've had problems with the show on iTunes.
Now, we've checked with iTunes, and the problem seems to have been at their end and seems to have affected only Windows 7 people using iTunes.
If you use Vista, if you use XP, if you've got a Mac and you're using iTunes to get the show, it's not going to affect you.
It has affected people using Windows 7, but I believe that they've now sorted that out, which is great.
But the one thing I'd ask you to do, if you have a problem getting the show through iTunes, step one, always go to the website.
If you're not seeing shows updating on iTunes, go to the website www.theonexplained.tv because the new shows and the updates and everything else are always there first.
Then, if you can't get your shows through iTunes, send me an email first.
And then also, very important, send them an email because they need to know about this.
iTunes, I think, is a little miracle.
It's a great service.
You know, we couldn't have envisaged anything like this 10, 15 years ago, so I love it.
But if it isn't working for us, we must let them know.
Thank you very much for being part of The Unexplained.
From wonderful London town by the banks of the River Thames at Hampton Court Palace on a gorgeous summer day, my name is Howard Hughes and with Rupert Matthews here, we wish you all the very best.
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