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.