The palace of the Knights of St John in Valletta, Malta. The one ghost story we found is a phantom cat told at second hand, with no witness named and no date.
The story
The Grandmaster's Palace, officially simply The Palace, is the largest palace in Valletta, Malta. The Order of St John ruled Malta from 1530 to 1798, and Valletta was founded in 1566. A house of the knight Eustachio del Monte, dated 1569, was later absorbed into the palace; in 1571 Grand Master del Monte moved in, and work to enlarge it followed in 1574. In the 1740s Grand Master Pinto made the alterations that gave it its present layout, and the clock tower dates from 1745. A Waymarking entry speaks of construction beginning in 1579, which disagrees with Wikipedia.
The French occupied Malta in 1798 and called it the National Palace. In 1800 it became the residence of the British governor. It served as the seat of the Maltese Parliament from 1921 to 2015, was the home of the governor general in 1964 and the office of the president from 1974, and the Parliament moved out in May 2015. A large restoration ended with a reopening to the public in 2024, according to a Times of Malta article cited by Wikipedia (not read directly).
The legend
This is a palace with one small ghost story, not a place with a haunted reputation of its own. It is the tale of the phantom cat. An Englishwoman staying at the palace during the British governors' time is said to have heard cats and dogs fighting in a room, but found nothing when she went in. On one occasion, in the tellings by MaltaToday and Waymarking, she saw a large cat jump through a window into the yard, and workmen said they saw no cat at all. A second woman is said to have felt a presence while sleeping at the palace. No one is identified as the ghost, no witness is named, and no date is given.
The oldest trace we found is a book, Joseph Attard's The Ghosts of Malta. Wikipedia cites it for the cat story, at pages 19 to 20 of a fifth edition of 1997. One bookseller listing and one review blog seen in search results, which we did not open, give a first edition in 1983 from Gulf Publishing in Valletta, so the story may be older than 1997. We did not read the book in any edition, so the pages and the wording are unchecked.
After that, the cat story appears in a MaltaToday article by Juliana Zammit on 31 October 2024, which calls it a well-known story without naming a source or date. A 2019 Waymarking entry on the Grand Masters' Palace Ghost Cat cites a Times of Malta article, Malta's most haunted, credited to Mr Attard; we could not date it or read the original. These pages appear to repeat one another, so in effect there is one source. We found no skeptic and no hoax, only an absence of evidence. The official Heritage Malta page we read mentions no ghost.
The palace thus has plenty of real history and almost no documented haunting. Anyone repeating the cat story as a fact is passing along a single, second-hand anecdote.
What remains today
The President of Malta's office is still in the building. The building reopened to the public in 2024, and the State Rooms and the Palace Armoury are run as a museum by Heritage Malta, according to Wikipedia, which says the armoury has been a public museum since 1860. At the time of research, Heritage Malta's page announced a tapestry restoration (a title dated 12 October 2026).
Visiting
The State Rooms and the Armoury are the public parts; the rest is the president's working building. We could not confirm opening hours because the page we read pointed to another page, so check the Heritage Malta website. No ghost tour is described by the official site.
The ghosts
Animal
The phantom cat
Sounds of cats and dogs fighting in a room, with nothing found inside, and on one occasion a large cat leaping through a window into the courtyard before workmen say they saw nothing. No witness is named.
- Apparitions
First reported: Attributed to Attard's The Ghosts of Malta (first edition 1983 per a bookseller listing not opened; Wikipedia cites the fifth edition, 1997). Reported by: An unnamed Englishwoman, via Joseph Attard
Photographs
Where it is
The circle shows the general area only. Open on the full map
Sources
- Wikimedia Commons category : Grandmaster's Palace — Wikimedia Commons
- Grand Masters' Palace Ghost Cat — Waymarking, 2019
- Grandmaster's Palace, Valletta — Wikipedia (en)
- The Blue Lady, a headless bride and the vanishing cat — MaltaToday (Juliana Zammit), 2024-10-31
- The Palace State Rooms — Heritage Malta
- Valetta: Grandmaster's Palace — State Archives of Baden-Württemberg via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
- Valetta: Grandmaster's Palace — State Archives of Baden-Württemberg via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
- Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.
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