FT264

For decades, popular books on the stately ghosts of England have carried the story of the haunting of Ightham Mote in Kent. In essence, each writer has repeated the claim that it is haunted by the ghost of Dame Dorothy Selby who was responsible for penning an anonymous letter to Lord Monteagle which led to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament on 5 November 1605. In retaliation, Guy Fawkes supposedly bricked Dame Selby up in a secret room. (But when would he have had time? He was seized in the vaults beneath the House of Commons and never walked free again.) A skeleton was discovered in the room generations later, and there had to be an exorcism – apparently unsuccessful.

It would cause hot embarrassment to list by name all the authors who have uncritically repeated the tale of the Guy Fawkes murder story and the pitiful fate of Dame Selby’s bones as “an immured skeleton” within the walls of Ightham Mote in 1605. Even a relatively careful writer such as Anthony Hipp­esley Coxe who physically checked all the locations for his classic gazetteer Haunted Britain (1973) stated of Dame Selby: “Guy Fawkes may have had her bricked up in a secret room.”

For ghost enthusiasts, the truth is neatly established by John Fraser in his book Ghost Hunting: A Survivor’s Guide (2010). On investigating the Dame Selby ghost story, John Fraser visited the site and then undertook one of the most basic checks that a sensible researcher into the life of a historical figure would take. John Fraser looked in the local church to see if he could find any monument or record of the Selby family. In Ightham Church he swiftly discovered Dame Selby’s tomb. This records how she in fact survived some 36 years after the Gunpowder Plot, dying on 15 March 1641. Therefore she was not murdered and buried in Ightham Mote by Guy Fawkes, who was executed in 1606. Thus collapses a legend recycled by ghost authors for years, its demolition achieved by taking the simple step of actually visiting an alleged haunted site and its envir­ons. The message for ghost authors when examining historical cases is quite clear. Go and look!