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General
With a name like Buckingham and situated in a county called Buckinghamshire you would expect it to be the county town, and so it was from the ninth century until Henry VIII bestowed the honour on Aylesbury.
The name Buckingham translates as ‘land on a river bend belonging to the family or followers of a man named Bucca’. By 1086 the town was known a Bochingheham as given in the Domesday Book. Today it is an unspoilt small market town with many fine Georgian buildings including the Old Gaol and the Town Hall. The gaol was built by Lord Cobham in 1748 and is constructed like a castle in appearance. In 1725 there was a major fire in the town and over one hundred houses were destroyed. Reconstruction of the town after the fire has left the townscape we see today. Buckingham is also the home to what was Britain’s first modern independent university.
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Castle House
Castle House in Buckingham has been haunted by the ghost of a priest for nearly one hundred years. He has been seen gliding along a corridor which leads to a priest’s hole, a place which proved to be his grave. In 1908 the house was being renovated when a small chamber was found hidden beneath the floor of the upper stories directly over the Great Parlour. In this tiny chamber were found the bones of a man along with a crucifix, rosary and the other belongings of a priest. It was from the time of the discovery of the body that the haunting started.
The priest is believed to have been Father Thomas who administered mass and confession to Katherine of Aragon who had come to Buckingham in the latter part of the 1520s while her husband was seeking grounds for divorce. Thomas also acted as a smuggler of messages to Katherine’s family in Europe. Then one day he simply disappeared never to be seen again till his bones were uncovered in 1908. Castle House was built in the fifteenth century as comfortable accommodation for visitors to Buckingham Castle. It was originally owned by the Barton family until the mid fifteenth century when it was taken over by the Fowler family who owned it when Katherine of Aragon stayed there. In 1725 a great fire swept through Buckingham destroying nearly every house except Castle House.
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High Street
In 1994 a building next door to the Old Market House in the High Street was occupied by a Mr. Georgiou while the Old Market House was being converted to a restaurant. Mr. Georgiou, the restaurant director, used to sleep in an annex at the back of the property. Several times, as he was going to bed, he would hear the sounds of footsteps which emanated from the room he was in. He would listen as the footsteps approached, but each time he turned the light on they would stop and nothing was visible.
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See also - Buckinghamshire - Buckingham -
Old Market House
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Local House
The house involved in this tale may not actually be in Buckingham as the only location information we have is Buckinghamshire but we had to put it somewhere.
The house in question was a three hundred year old property lying eighty kilometres north of London and, at the time, occupied by a family. Shortly after they had moved in, the stereo in the dining room woke up the family by turning itself on and generating white noise. At first the family thought it was a fault with the stereo, so they turned it off and went back to bed. Unfortunately it turned itself on again, and again, and again. The radio was not the only thing affected. One night the family had gone to bed leaving a vinyl record player switched off but with a record on the turntable and the needle at the start of the track. In the middle of the night the family was woken up by the sound of the Carpenters played at full volume. Again they thought it was an electrical fault, but each time they left the needle at the start of the track they would be woken by the sounds of loud music in the middle of the night.
A further event was to affect the stereo. One Saturday night at about 23:00 two members of the family were upstairs whilst the third, the mother, was asleep on the sofa. All of a sudden there was an almighty crash. They all rushed into the dining room to discover the stereo on the floor a metre away from the cabinet on which it had been standing. The stereo was sitting upright on the floor with the turntable cover split in two.
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Old Market House
The Old Market House stands in the High Street and is one of the few buildings to have survived the fire which devastated Buckingham in 1725. In 1994 the building was being converted to a restaurant and a considerable amount of redecorating had to be done. At the time the building was occupied by a Mr. Georgiou who was the restaurant director and who saw the resident ghost several times.
Upstairs there is a landing, at the end of which was Mr. Georgiou’s bedroom. To the right of this there was another door and it was here that he saw the ghost. Mr. Georgiou said that he would leave his room in the evening only to see a lady coming out of the other door. He could not see her face as it was turned half away from him and then she would turn and walk away along the landing in the direction of the bathroom. He described her as wearing a long black dress with a large collar. He usually saw her around 23:00 and she would always repeat the same motions. The bathroom has two small curtained windows set high in the wall but he never closed the curtains as the windows were not overlooked. Nevertheless he would quite often find that the curtains were closed when he entered the bathroom.
When he first joined the company which owns the restaurant he visited the site with his wife to show her where he was going to work. As they walked round the side of the building, to where the bathroom windows could be seen, he noticed a figure looking down through one of the windows, at the time the building was empty. He reported that the figure looked like a shadow and even though he told his wife she could see nothing.
A chef who worked at the restaurant would quite often be alone in the kitchen clearing up. Sometimes he would hear a bell, which hung at the foot of the stairs, ringing, but when he went to investigate there was never anyone there. The ghost has also made several appearances in the gents’ toilet when she would tap a customer on the shoulder resulting in a piddly type accident.
Mr. Georgiou believed that the ghost was that of a Quaker woman, a belief that was supported when a local historian reported that there had been a Quaker Meeting House at the back of the building along with a Quaker cemetery.
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See also - Buckinghamshire - Buckingham -
High Street
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The White Hart
It is said that the White Hart in Buckingham is haunted but no further details are yet available.
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