Appuldurcombe House

Appuldurcombe House is the roofless shell of an English Baroque mansion above Wroxall, on the Isle of Wight, built for the Worsley family from 1702 and gutted by a German parachute mine in 1943. Its best-known ghost story is older than the building it is told about: in 1567 two Worsley boys, John and George, were killed by an explosion of gunpowder at Appuldurcombe, in the Tudor house that Sir Robert Worsley later demolished so completely that he boasted of not leaving one stone standing. The boys' father had been dead two years; their mother had just married Sir Francis Walsingham. The ghosts came much later. Victorian and Edwardian guides describe the house at length and record nothing supernatural; the monk seen in the cellars has a documented ancestor in the hundred Benedictines of Solesmes who lived here from 1901 to 1907; and the reputation of the most haunted place on the island cannot be traced back beyond the ghost-tourism and television of the 2000s. English Heritage now cares for the shell, and admission is free.

Appuldurcombe is not mentioned in Domesday, but in 1090 Richard de Redvers gave the manor to the Norman abbey of Montebourg, and in 1100 a cell of that abbey was founded on the site. The alien priory was suppressed during the French wars and the manor passed to the Minoresses without Aldgate, who leased it in 1498 to Sir John Leigh. Leigh's daughter Anne married Sir James Worsley, and in 1527 the abbess leased the manor to him; the Victoria County History notes that the wording of that grant shows the tenants had already been building on to the priory buildings and meant to build more. Sir James, a younger son who had risen at court as a groom of the wardrobe to Henry VIII, was made Captain of the Wight and Keeper of Carisbrooke Castle; the Worsleys would hold Appuldurcombe for three hundred years. Sir James died in 1538. His son Richard Worsley, in his turn Captain of the Wight, is said to have received Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell at Appuldurcombe that same year. When Richard died in 1565 an inventory was taken of the Tudor house, and it is the best portrait of the vanished building that survives: a hall, great and little chambers, six principal bedrooms with names -- Paradise, The Broad, Sir John's, The Porch, Mr Richard Worsley's and My Lady's Chamber -- then "two smaller, occupied by the children", and beyond them a chapel, the maidens' room, a stillitory, two kitchens, wet and dry larders, brewhouse, malthouse, dairy, servants' bedrooms and the stable. Two years later those two children were dead. The Victoria County History states flatly that "Richard Worsley died in 1565 and his two sons John and George were both killed in an explosion of gunpowder at Appuldurcombe in 1567", and footnotes the statement to Sir Richard Worsley's own History of the Isle of Wight of 1781 and to two inquisitions post mortem, one Chancery and one Exchequer. Their father had been dead for two years when it happened. Their mother, Richard Worsley's widow, had already remarried: the same volume records, while correcting a different claim of Worsley's, that Sir Francis Walsingham -- later Elizabeth I's principal secretary -- obtained a leasehold at Godshill "by his marriage with Richard Worsley's widow". The boys' uncle John Worsley succeeded, and died in 1580. The house those boys died beside no longer exists. In 1690 the estate came to Sir Robert Worsley, 4th Baronet, who pulled the Tudor house down and wrote under his own sketch of it, in a memorandum signed in 1720 and reproduced in the 1781 History, that it was "Appuldurcombe as I found it in 1690 & of which I have not left one stone standing". The present English Baroque mansion was begun in 1702 to designs by John James. Sir Robert died on 29 July 1747 without seeing it finished; the obelisk on Stenbury Down was raised to his memory. His great-nephew Sir Richard Worsley, 7th Baronet, extended the house in the 1770s, commissioned Lancelot 'Capability' Brown to lay out the grounds in 1779, filled the rooms with the collection published as the Museum Worsleianum, and attracted the notoriety of the 1782 court case in which his wife Seymour admitted to twenty-seven lovers. He died in 1805 and the estate passed through his niece to the Earls of Yarborough. By about 1850 Brannon's guide was telling visitors that "strangers desirous of visiting Appuldurcombe must provide themselves with tickets at the office of the stewards, Messrs. Sewell, Solicitors, Newport", on Tuesdays and Fridays between eleven and four. The estate was sold in 1855; a hotel venture failed and the house became a boys' school. Then, between 1901 and 1907, about a hundred Benedictine monks driven out of Solesmes by the French anti-congregation laws lived in it while their new abbey at Quarr was built. A Jarrold picture-guide of about 1905 captions its plate "Appuldurcombe Abbey" and reports that the house "is now occupied by Benedictine monks". The Victoria County History, writing in 1912, says simply that it "has been vacant since 1909". Troops were billeted in the house in both world wars. On the night of 7 February 1943 a Luftwaffe Dornier Do 217 on a mine-laying sortie turned inland, dropped its last mine close to the house and crashed on St Martin's Down; the blast blew in the windows and brought down part of the roof. The hole was never repaired, and after the war most of what was left of the roof and the interiors was taken out and sold. In 1952 the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works took the wreck into state guardianship -- during the negotiations the remaining timber, lead and plaster ceilings were stripped out, the ceilings going into store at Fort Brockhurst -- and consolidated the shell as a ruin. Walter Roberts, writing in the Island magazine Wight Life, recorded that it took the Ministry's men twelve years, and that the public were admitted for the first time in 1964. The front section has since been re-roofed and glazed.

Appuldurcombe House stands at Appuldurcombe Road, Wroxall, Isle of Wight, PO38 3EW, about two miles (3 km) north-west of Ventnor. It is in the care of English Heritage and is run on the ground by the Appuldurcombe Farm estate, which also lets holiday cottages inside the surrounding inner park. Entry to the house and grounds is free. The site opens from 1 April to 31 October, Sunday to Friday, 10am to 4pm, and is closed every Saturday, when the house is used as a wedding venue -- so a Saturday trip is a wasted journey. There is free parking about 150 metres from the house. There are no facilities on site: no shop, no cafe and no toilets, and English Heritage directs visitors to the public toilets in Godshill, about a mile and a half away. Paths across the site are dirt, and English Heritage describes the majority as suitable for wheelchairs and buggies. Dogs are welcome on leads. What you see is a shell. The Baroque east front, the one in most photographs, is the best-preserved elevation and its front section has been re-roofed and glazed, with a small part of the interior recreated; behind it the house is open to the sky, the roof having gone in 1943 and afterwards. The grounds are the eleven acres of Capability Brown's landscape that survive of a park that once ran to three hundred acres. Freemantle Gate, the ceremonial entrance to the old park, stands in the fields north of the house and is reached on foot across farmland. The house is a Grade I listed building on the National Heritage List for England (list entry 1218394), the house and the Freemantle Lodge gateway are also entered on the list of scheduled monuments, and the park and garden are registered at Grade II (list entry 1000926, reference GD1923). Nothing at the site is presented as haunted: there is no ghost tour on the current programme, and the estate's old "spooky ghost walks" page is now empty.