Haunted place · England, United Kingdom

Althorp

Updated November 202630 sources How to visit

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Althorp, Northamptonshire: Spencer family seat since 1508 and Diana's resting place, where a dead groom is said to check the candles at night.

The story

Althorp is a Grade I listed country house at the heart of an estate of roughly 13,000 acres in West Northamptonshire, about six miles northwest of Northampton, with Great Brington on one side and Harlestone on the other. The Spencer family has owned it for more than five hundred years, and Diana, Princess of Wales, who grew up at Park House on the Sandringham estate, moved to Althorp in 1975 when her father inherited the earldom.

Before there was a mansion there was a village. The Domesday Book of 1086 lists a hamlet called "Olletorp" with ten inhabitants. Twenty-one residents were recorded in 1327, and fifty adults paid the poll tax in 1377. The settlement shrank through the fifteenth century until, by 1505, nobody lived there as a tenant. In 1508 John Spencer, whose family had made a fortune from sheep in Northamptonshire and Warwickshire, bought the land from the Catesby family for £800 and spent around four years laying out a park of grassland, woodland and water.

Royal visitors came early. Anne of Denmark and Prince Henry stopped at Althorp in June 1603 while traveling south from Edinburgh, and were greeted with an entertainment scripted by Ben Jonson. Charles I also came, and the family enlarged the hall and built a drawing room for him. Henry Spencer, made Earl of Sunderland in 1643, was killed by a cannonball at the First Battle of Newbury that September, at 23. His son Robert, the 2nd Earl, built the present house in 1688, the same year his enemies forced him to flee to the Netherlands; he later returned to favor and spent his final years quietly at Althorp until his death in 1702. The park had been redesigned in the 1660s by André Le Nôtre, the French garden designer, and Grand Duke Cosimo III of Tuscany, visiting in 1669, praised a magnificent staircase that he described as walnut.

In the eighteenth century Althorp became a place of parties and political display. John Spencer, later the 1st Earl Spencer, secretly married Margaret Georgiana Poyntz during his 21st-birthday ball in December 1755, and the family threw a party for roughly 5,000 people in nearby Brington. George John, the 2nd Earl, who held the estate from 1783 to 1834, built up a private library that ranked among Europe's biggest, passing 100,000 volumes by the 1830s. When money ran short, the 5th Earl, known as the Red Earl, sold much of it in 1892 to Enriqueta Rylands, who was founding the library now part of the University of Manchester. From 1788 the architect Henry Holland remade the red-brick Tudor exterior, cladding it in mathematical tiles and adding Corinthian pilasters.

Sales continued through the twentieth century to meet debts and taxes. In the Second World War the house escaped requisition because the military was given the stables instead, and furniture and fireplaces from Spencer House in London were sent to Althorp for safety during the Blitz. A Wellington bomber came down close to the ice house, and its whole crew died. The estate first opened to paying visitors in 1953. After her death in 1997, Diana was buried on a small island in the ornamental lake called the Round Oval.

The legend

For a house of its age and fame, Althorp has a modest ghost tradition, and it rests almost entirely on family anecdote. The family's present head has said plainly that no ghost has ever appeared to him, whether at Althorp or elsewhere. Guests are said to have reported many sightings, yet only two stories survive in detail. No reliable report of a ghost of Princess Diana exists, despite what some websites suggest.

The better-known story concerns a servant who seems to have kept working after death. It survives in two versions that disagree about who saw it and when. The older one appears in John H. Ingram's The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain, a Victorian collection first published in the 1880s (the edition quoted by the Mysterious Britain website is dated 1897). In Ingram's telling, the witness was a Mr. Drury, later Archdeacon Drury, who was staying at Althorp with Lord and Lady Lyttelton. He woke to a light shining on his face and saw a silent man standing at the foot of his bed, lantern in hand, wearing a flat cap and a striped shirt. When Drury called out, the figure turned and walked into the dressing room, which had no other way out, and was gone. Lady Lyttelton, a daughter of the 2nd Earl Spencer, recognized the description as her father's favorite groom, who had died about two weeks earlier and whose duty had been to walk the house at night making sure the lights were out. Drury, the story goes, refused ever to sleep alone in that room again.

The later version, retold by the 9th Earl in his 1998 book Althorp: The Story of an English House, makes the witness the Dean of Lincoln, a guest of Frederick, 4th Earl Spencer, in the mid-nineteenth century. Here the figure, dressed as a groom, carries candles and checks that those around the bed have been snuffed out, and it is identified as a former servant of the 3rd Earl. Both versions agree on the essential image, a dead servant still doing his nightly round of the candles, but their differing names, dates and employers are a reminder of how house legends drift as they are retold.

The second presence is quieter. Lady Margaret Douglas-Home, born a Spencer and sister of the 7th Earl, lived at Althorp and was fond of the gallery. She said she sensed there the ghost of a girl in grey slippers. Nothing more is known about who the girl might be or when the experience took place, and the account rests on a single source.

No paranormal investigation or television episode about Althorp was found while researching this page.

What remains today

The house today wears Henry Holland's late-Georgian skin over a much older core. Visitors enter through Wootton Hall, which the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner called "the noblest Georgian room in the county." Beyond it lies the saloon, made in 1650 by roofing over an inner courtyard, with its staircase of the 1660s, described today as oak. The Picture Gallery stretches 115 feet through the west wing's upper floor and keeps much of its original oak paneling, hung with family portraits and works such as Van Dyck's War and Peace. The great dining room, designed by John Macvicar Anderson and built in 1877, still has its faded red damask walls, and a China Museum displays the family porcelain.

Much of the historic collection has been dispersed: about a fifth of the contents was sold between 1975 and 1992, and an auction of more than 700 items from the attics and cellars in 2010 raised £21 million. In 2009 the roof, the stonework and the tiled facades underwent extensive repairs.

The estate contains 28 listed buildings and structures, including a falconry of 1613 listed at Grade I, the mustard-yellow Palladian stable block designed by Roger Morris in the early 1730s, the Gardener's House and the East and West Lodges. Across the water from Diana's island grave stands a Doric temple bearing her name. The stable block held an exhibition about her life from 1998 until it closed in 2013.

Visiting

Althorp is a private family home that normally opens to the public for a short season in summer, traditionally July and August. As of November 2026 the official website states that the house is shut for now, with a reopening planned for 2027, so check the estate's site for dates and tickets before planning a trip. There is no ghost tour, and the guest bedrooms where the groom was seen are not part of any advertised visit.

Diana's grave is on an island in the Round Oval and cannot be reached; visitors on open days view it, and the memorial temple, from the lakeshore. Outside the open season the house and park are private, so please stay off the estate.

The ghosts

Servant or worker

The candle-checking groom

Said to be A favorite groom of an Earl Spencer whose job was to check the lights at night (2nd Earl in Ingram's version, 3rd Earl in the 9th Earl's version)

A silent man dressed as a groom is said to enter a guest bedroom at night with a lantern or candles, checking that the lights are out. In Ingram's version the witness was a Mr. Drury, later Archdeacon Drury, and the figure vanished into a dressing room with no other exit; Lady Lyttelton recognized her father's groom, dead a fortnight. A later version names the Dean of Lincoln, guest of the 4th Earl.

Apparitions
Strange lights

First reported: 19th century; first printed in John H. Ingram's Haunted Homes (1880s). Reported by: Mr. Drury (per John H. Ingram); the Dean of Lincoln (per Charles Spencer, Althorp: The Story of an English House, 1998)

Servant or worker

The candle-snuffing groom

Said to be Believed to be a deceased servant of the 3rd Earl Spencer

While a guest of the 4th Earl Spencer, the Dean of Lincoln said a figure dressed as a groom entered his room at night with candles and checked that the lights by his bed were snuffed out. The figure was thought to be a former servant of the 3rd Earl.

Apparitions
Strange lights

First reported: Mid-19th century. Reported by: The Dean of Lincoln

Child ghost

The girl in grey slippers

Lady Margaret Douglas-Home, sister of the 7th Earl, who lived at Althorp, said she sensed a girl in grey slippers in the gallery. Nothing else is recorded about her.