Royal Albert Hall: Echoes of Victorian Grandeur
The Royal Albert Hall's own ghost list names 'the girls' in the basement, organ builder Father Willis and a Victorian boy, plus a 1930 Conan Doyle séance.
Yes, the Royal Albert Hall is said to be haunted, and the Hall itself keeps the stories. In October 2018 it published a list of ghost sightings drawn from its own archives and its Duty Security Incident Book. The best known are “the girls”, two Victorian young women heard giggling in the basement near Door 6 in the early hours. There is also the organ builder Henry “Father” Willis, a Victorian boy in the Gallery and a Victorian couple in a second tier box. The Hall also hosted one of the most famous séances in British history, for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, on 13 July 1930.
The building
Prince Albert died in December 1861. His idea of a great hall for the arts and sciences in South Kensington was carried through after his death, paid for in part from the profits of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone on 20 May 1867. The Hall opened on 29 March 1871. The Queen was too overcome to speak, so the Prince of Wales gave the opening address. The engineers Captain Francis Fowke and Major-General Henry Scott designed it, and Rowland Mason Ordish designed the iron and glass dome. It seats 5,272 today.
The Hall’s echo was notorious for nearly a century. In 1969 large fibreglass discs, often called the mushrooms, were hung below the dome to tame it. The BBC Proms have been held there every summer since 1941, after the Queen’s Hall was bombed.
The girls
This is the Hall’s signature ghost story. Two young women, known to staff as “the girls”, are said to appear in the carpeted basement area beneath the Door 6 foyer each 2 November, a little before 2 a.m. Staff describe dark, lace-trimmed Victorian dresses with ruffled sleeves and hair in buns with ringlets. The Hall says the security incident book records appearances in the three years before 1991.
The Hall gives three dated reports. In 1988, at about 2 a.m., two security staff heard female chatter and giggling pass their open door and glimpsed figures. They assumed it was catering staff, until the duty catering manager told them no women had been in the building since it was locked at 11 p.m. A search found no one. In 1989 a porter followed two giggling girls towards the kitchens. They vanished at the double doors. He raised the alarm, a search found nothing, and he handed in his notice that week. In 1990 the duty manager saw two chatting girls walk towards the kitchen after a party. He called out to warn them off the private area, and they disappeared through the doors.
Before the Hall was built, Gore House stood near the site. From 1839 to 1849 it was home to the Countess of Blessington and Count d’Orsay, whose household scandalised Victorian society. The Hall notes that d’Orsay built a basement “studio” of unknown purpose, often rumoured to be a brothel. It suggests that whatever happened there “echoes down the years today in the Hall”. That link is a story, not a finding.
Father Willis
Henry Willis built the Hall’s Grand Organ, which opened with the building in 1871. The story goes that whenever the organ is worked on, a stooped old man in a black skullcap appears. When the organ was being rebuilt in 1924, workmen saw a little old man come down the stairs late one afternoon. Their foreman asked what he was wearing. When told a black skullcap, he decided it was Father Willis, unhappy about the alterations.
In 2018 the Hall’s organ custodian, Michael Broadway, said he had heard the tale from the organ builder Clifford Hyatt more than forty years before. A tuner on the last visit before the 1920s Harrison and Harrison rebuild was said to have seen Willis on the Great passage board, saying “They shan’t take my organ from me”. Broadway called it “a lovely story” and said he had not seen him himself.
The Gallery and the boxes
At 3 a.m. on Christmas Day 2009, a member of the show department setting up for Cirque du Soleil saw a young boy in a high-necked, frilly grey shirt and braces leaning over the Gallery rail near the Door 4 lift. As he walked towards the boy, it vanished and left the spot very cold. A colleague agreed about the cold. On Boxing Day a security guard in the same area felt someone standing behind him. The Hall says another crew member later saw the boy too.
In January 2004 a visitor reported a grey man shrouded in mist appearing and disappearing in the Gallery during a concert. Stewards are said to dislike the Gallery lavatories. One former security guard, an ex-soldier, described opening the door of the women’s lavatory and seeing a pulsing grey mass of light from floor to ceiling.
In 2011 a head steward cleared the second tier and then saw a couple sitting in a box from the auditorium floor. Three times he went up and found the box empty, and once he heard them talking. When he reported it at Stage Door he was asked, “You’ve seen the ghosts, haven’t you?” A staff member had seen a Victorian couple vanish into a box near Door 6 in the 2000s.
Other sightings
During a Jasper Carrott show in May 1990, a stage manager demanded to know who was crossing the stage. Several people saw a man in white walk across it, although stewards insisted no one had passed. On 9 August 1995, a Proms visitor from Whanganui, New Zealand, reported seeing a military man on a chestnut horse in the lighting gantry above the stage. Staff also described a wisp of mist drifting up a staircase in the 1980s.
The Conan Doyle séance
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a committed Spiritualist, died on 7 July 1930. Six days later the Spiritualist Association hired the Hall for a memorial. About 10,000 people came. An empty chair was set beside Lady Conan Doyle on stage. Time magazine reported that the clairvoyant Estelle Roberts looked at the chair and cried “He is here”. She then whispered a message to Lady Doyle. The audience rose and the organ started up, and the rest was lost in the noise.
How to read the stories
These accounts are collected by the Hall itself, which also sells a Halloween ghost tour. That does not make them false. Many come from night security staff writing in an incident book. But the stories have been told and retold among staff for decades, and a big, echoing, half-lit building at 2 a.m. is a good place for ordinary noises to become voices. The stories with dates and job titles are the strongest. Everything else on the internet about Albert Hall ghosts should be checked against this list.
Visiting
The Hall is on Kensington Gore, opposite Kensington Gardens. South Kensington is the nearest Underground station. It runs daytime tours and a seasonal Halloween tour that covers the séance and the sightings.