The two way staircase, Ashburnham House
Westminster’s Ghosts There are a number of works of fiction that draw on ghostly apparitions in and around the Abbey, and there are many anecdotes of ghosts at large.
ne of the more recent was told by Lilian Carpenter, wife of Dean Edward Carpenter. One evening when she was visiting the Abbot’s Pew that overlooks the west end of the nave she saw in the twilight a solitary figure in the black habit and cowl of a Benedictine monk. He was slowly making his way east, head bowed over his breviary, clearly saying his office. She made her way back through the deanery, through Samaria into the Nave and was in time to see the monk pass under the organ screen. Quite aware now what she was witnessing, she followed the spectre into the Quire. As he moved to a stall in the Quire his form faded. The telling detail that Lilian recorded was that within the Quire the monk was walking some eighteen inches above the black and white pavement. 36
The Elizabethan Newsletter
That pavement, originally laid at the direction of Robert Hooke and paid for by Dr Busby, had been lowered by a similar amount in 1847 when the screens to the transepts had been removed. So the monk would have been walking on a floor that had been in place before the Reformation. Of School ghosts there are a number of stories. In particular, if we think today of the noise of the football in Yard as it rebounds from the walls of College we might reflect on the earlier game of racquets in its particular Westminster manifestation, played in either version, with wooden or wire racquets. The game took over virtually the whole of Yard in front of Rigaud’s, Grant’s, and College. The sound of a spectral racquets ball hitting the wall was said to be heard in quiet moments at the end of the Latin Play The Play used to be held in College, which was previous a vast barn of a
