It seems likely that two ghosts haunt the old Dundridge Manor. One of the ghosts is said to be that of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury. She walks along a short corridor upstairs then up a couple of steps onto a landing outside a bedroom and a bathroom. As she moves you can hear her skirts rustling, hence the name she has been given, ‘Silkie’. The only time she is heard is late on a warm afternoon from between August to October. At first she was only heard but more recently her ghost has been seen wandering the grounds of the manor and the surrounding fields and lanes in the summer.

Margaret Pole was married to the Earl of Salisbury who owned huge tracts of land in Hampshire and Wiltshire as well as Buckinghamshire. On her husbands death she inherited his lands. It is said that she stopped at Dundridge on her way to the Tower of London after she had been arrested. Margaret had sent numerous letters to the continent and it was for these ‘conspiracies’ that she was arrested and executed. It is very unlikely that she ever stayed at Dundridge or stopped there on her way to London so the ghost may be that of one of the previous (and future) occupants, the Baldwin family.

The second ghost makes its presence known in the winter when the sound of creaking steps and the rattling of a door are heard. The door lies at the bottom of a narrow, steep flight of steps beneath the corridor and landing where Silkie walks. The door makes a sound like a latch rattling and then the door can be heard banging as if it is moving in the wind, yet the latch is stiff to lift and the door does not rattle. Each time the sound occurred it would last for a few seconds and be repeated twice in a span of about thirty seconds. Around the 1940s to 1950s an elderly lady lived at the house and she said that two young boys had a fight on the stairs and one killed the other with a ploughshare. She believed that this occurred sometime around the middle of the 1800s. More recently the ghost of a small boy in Victorian clothes has been seen playing in the main hall and on the staircase, though it is now claimed he died after tumbling down the stairs while playing with a friend.

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