Althorp

His guest, "Mr. (afterwards Archdeacon) Drury", woke to a stable-man with a bull's-eye lantern at the foot of his bed; Lady Lyttelton told him he had described her father's favourite groom, dead a fortnight, whose duty was to enter any room where a light still burned. Her published letters never mention it. Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl, has retold it twice with a different guest and a different earl, and has written that he has never seen a ghost, at Althorp or anywhere else.

Althorp is not primarily a ghost story; it is one of the best-documented private houses in England, and the paranormal material attached to it is small, late and traceable to a handful of printed pages. The Spencers arrived in 1508, when John Spencer, a Warwickshire grazier, bought the estate with money made from sheep. In 1512 he obtained licences to crenellate and to make a park, and built a new house on a new site. Historic England's list entry dates the fabric to c.1508 and records the main later enlargements: the 1630s; the years after 1666, when the mason-architect Anthony Ellis transformed the house for Robert Spencer, 2nd Earl of Sunderland; the remodelling of 1787-90 by Henry Holland for George John, 2nd Earl Spencer; and further work in the 1870s. Holland's is the face Althorp still wears: a severe two-storey block clad in pale buff mathematical tiles (tiles made to look like bricks), with four large Corinthian pilasters carrying a pediment. The house is listed Grade I; the surrounding park, some 250 hectares, is separately registered Grade II*. The Picture Gallery, in the western range, is the room the ghost stories keep returning to. It is 17th-century work with restored bolection panelling, and Thomas Frognall Dibdin measured it in 1822 for 'Aedes Althorpianae', the catalogue he compiled as the 2nd Earl's librarian: one hundred and fifteen feet long, twenty and a half wide, nineteen high. Dibdin opened his chapter on it with Horace Walpole's line from the 'Anecdotes of Painting' (1765): "the Gallery at Althorp, one of those enchanted scenes which a thousand circumstances of history and art endear to a pensive spectator." He also noted, dryly, that the dado of the Gallery had been shelved to hold the books for which there was no room in the library below. That library was the 2nd Earl's obsession and one of the largest private collections in Europe; in 1892 John Poyntz Spencer, the 5th Earl, sold the greater part of it to Enriqueta Rylands for the library she was building in Manchester. Selling has been part of Althorp's history ever since. In the 1930s Albert Edward John Spencer, 7th Earl — "Jack" to his family — sold a small Hans Holbein portrait of Henry VIII for £10,000; it is now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Jack was nonetheless the house's great connoisseur: a trustee of the Wallace Collection and, from 1961 to 1969, chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum's advisory council. He opened the estate to the public in 1953. After his death in 1975 the house passed to his son Edward John, 8th Earl, during whose ownership roughly a fifth of the contents was sold — eleven Van Dycks and almost every religious painting among them — a divestment that drew heavy public criticism, including from his heir. The ghost stories are three, and each has a name attached to it. The oldest was printed in 1886 by John Henry Ingram in "The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain", whose Althorp chapter opens by observing that a house of this antiquity having a ghost "is nothing unusual". Ingram's witness is "Mr. (afterwards Archdeacon) Drury", taken to Althorp by Lord and Lady Lyttelton to visit "Earl Spencer, the lady's father". After a late game of billiards a servant asked the two men to put the lights out themselves, because Lord Spencer "was always uneasy about fire". Drury was woken by light on his face and saw at the foot of the bed a man dressed as a stable-man, in striped shirt and flat cap, holding a bull's-eye lantern turned full on him. Getting no answer to his questions, he told the man to get out; the figure lowered the lantern and walked into the dressing room, which had no other exit, and Drury went back to sleep. At breakfast he mentioned it to Lady Lyttelton, who turned pale: "You have described my father's favourite groom, who died a fortnight ago, and whose duty it was to go round the house after everyone had gone to bed, to see that the lights were extinguished, and with strict orders to enter any room where one was seen burning." Ingram adds that he does not know whether the figure was ever seen again. The second story is a phrase rather than a sighting. In "Althorp: The Story of an English House" (1998) Charles Spencer, 9th Earl, writes that a little door in the Picture Gallery "will always be the home of 'the girl with the grey slippers'". The door is real: a small opening cut into the oak between Van Dyck's "War and Peace" and Lely's "Windsor Beauties", giving on to a staircase and a guest bedroom. The English-language Wikipedia article on Althorp, citing that page, attaches the only name the story has ever carried — Lady Margaret Douglas-Home (1906-1996), daughter of the 6th Earl and sister of Jack, who according to the same article lived at Althorp from 1910 and for whom the Gallery was a favourite room. The third is recent. Joan Forman devoted part of "Haunted Royal Homes" (1987) to Jack Spencer, the 7th Earl, and wrote that "the Althorp haunting is unusual in that the ghost was of a person very recently dead, who made an appearance not to warn or to say farewell (both common motives for immediate post-death apparitions) but to carry out duties which had been highly meaningful to him in life." John and Anne Spencer's "The Ghost Handbook" (1998) reports that the figure "smiled by way of response" and that "shortly afterwards a workman in Althorp also saw the same ghost". Nigel Dempster, in "Behind Palace Doors" (1993), went further: the family, he wrote, "became convinced that the ghost of the seventh Earl was somehow to blame when the eighth Earl's condition inexplicably began to deteriorate".

Althorp is the Spencer family's private house and opens to the public for a summer season. On 24 September 2026 the estate's visitor page read: "Althorp House is now closed. We look forward to welcoming you in 2027." The estate's travel page, last revised in September 2024, gives two entrances. Visitors use the West Gate, postcode NN7 4HQ, where parking is free and the ticket office sells tickets on the day; the page gives the car park's GPS position as 52.277380, -1.010271. The East Gate, postcode NN7 4HE, is on the A428 and takes coaches and minibuses, and cars that arrive there are sent round to the West Gate. The same page lists the approaches from junction 18 of the M1 and from junction 1 of the A14, trains to Long Buckby or to Northampton with a taxi from either station, and the estate telephone, 01604 770006. Althorp Park station, on the Northampton loop line, closed in 1960. The booking page captured on 11 May 2026 set the rules for that season. Photography was allowed in the grounds but not in the house, and drones were not permitted on the estate. Dogs were not admitted apart from guide and assistance dogs. The walking route through the grounds was described as fully accessible to wheelchair users but with large sections of gravel, and since the house had no wheelchair access to the first floor, visitors with limited mobility saw the ground floor only. Prams, pushchairs and large bags were not allowed inside. The page put the house at a 15-minute walk from the West Gate car park and the Princess of Wales memorial at the Oval at about 30 minutes, and it recorded that the "Diana: A Celebration" exhibition closed in August 2013. Diana, Princess of Wales, was buried in 1997 on the island in the Oval, which Historic England's register entry describes as a 150 m long, shallow, tree-fringed pool whose island already appears on the 1778 plan; a plinth with a memorial urn stands at the island's south-west end. On the bank at the north-east end is a late 18th-century temple with a portico of four columns, brought from the garden of the Admiralty in London by the 5th Earl and furnished in 1997-98 with inscriptions and memorials to the Princess. The estate's walking route leads to the memorial on the bank; the island in the middle of the water holds her grave.