Ghost
The Flying Duchess
Doors that open themselves, and a lost duchess in her summer house.
Check opening times
- What's there
- A stately home, closed for restoration
- Legend from
- 1960s
- Best time
- When the house reopens
- Tone
- Eerie
Woburn Abbey is close by, where a duke once told a ghost-hunter that his lost grandmother still visited her summer house.
Woburn Abbey, seat of the Dukes of Bedford, stands on the site of a Cistercian abbey. When the ghost-hunter Peter Underwood visited in 1963, the Duke told him of bedroom doors that opened by themselves one after another, even after new locks were fitted, until that part of the wing was rebuilt. Underwood felt an uneasy atmosphere in the Wood Library, and the Duke believed an isolated summer house was haunted by his grandmother, the Flying Duchess, who took off alone in her aeroplane in 1937 and crashed into the North Sea; her body was never found. Others tell of phantom monks around the old crypt.