Chillingham: A Castle of Secrets

One of the starkest contrasts between outside and in is the immaculately laid out Elizabethan topiary garden with its intricately shaped and close-shaved hedges of box and yew. Unlike many such homes Chillingham's gardens do not offer the traditional vista from the front, preferring instead a more private viewpoint with the main driveway coming up at right-angles. And while in the gardens it is worth recalling one or two of the catalogue of strange events recorded by Leonora Tankerville in the early l900s. Lady Leonora was very receptive to psychic phenomena, and even before she visited Chillingham she was treated to a tour of the grounds by the dead brother of her future husband.

After coming to live in the castle she was sitting one day enjoying the view of the topiary garden when an altogether more worrying scene superimposed itself, accompanied by the sound of distant cannon fire. A woman in the clothes of a Dominican Abbess looked anxiously towards the hills of Scotland before kneeling in prayer; a man also scanned the horizon and sentries paced back and forth. When Lady Leonora spoke the man turned towards her; he had the face of her husband but the clothes of four centuries ago. She assumed, therefore, that the Abbess was herself, but why was she praying, and what was happening? A short time later came the announcement that the First World War had begun. Leonora had 'tuned in' as she put it, to a similar moment way in the past.

Personal experience aside, in her account The Ghosts of Chillinghom, Lady Leonora tells the curious story of the family portrait that walked. 'Not only' she writes, 'had our own nursery been disturbed by the restlessness of this picture but the children of friends, and their nurse, declared that she stepped out of her frame and frightened them by following them about.' A well-known psychologist visiting Chillingham expressed an interest in this and decided to sit and watch the portrait; he obviously saw someone but she was not the woman in the picture. The following day he suddenly recognised the woman he had seen from another portrait in the castle and it transpired that it was the same person, but the portraits were painted at different times in her life.

She also mentions a frail figure in white, in what was then the silver store, desperately in need of a glass of water, who vanishes before she can be served; the voices of two unseen men talking in the library; a lady's maid who fled her bedroom to sleep on a sofa in the dining hall because of the oppressive atmosphere. None of this appears to have disturbed Lady Leonora with her total acceptance of such things. When she arrived at the castle as a new bride she says she asked 'Have you any ghosts?' only to be told, 'We do not allow them' Sir Humphry might have asked the same thing, although he appears to have known the answer all along.