‘Would I meet the countess Isabella’s apparition?’

Madeleine Howell seeks out the wandering souls of the historic Beaulieu Estate

The eerie sound of Cistercian chanting echoes through the crumbling stone of Beaulieu Abbey, where I commence my amblings among the dead said to still inhabit this corner of the New Forest. Over the years there have been numerous ghostly sightings, stories and legends reported on the Beaulieu Estate. The ancient woodland surrounding the Abbey, founded by King John in 1204, rustles and whispers with mystery. As I attempt to attune my extrasensory perception, and listen closely to the francophone murmurings (the monks came from Cîteaux, and gave the place its Norman French name, Beaulieu) – I realise that the sonorous prayers I hear are, in fact, recorded. And yet the place certainly feels imbued with presence, I think, as I stand before the Purbeck marble grave slab of King John’s daughter-inlaw Isabella, Countess of Cornwall. Poor lady: her heart was sent to Tewkesbury, but her body was buried here and

Can you candle it? Madeleine lights up at the Montagu Arms High spirits outside

Palace House

forgotten for many years, which must have been unsettling for her spirit.

Early in the 20th century, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, held a séance in the Montagu family’s ancestral home of Palace House (a decidedly haunted-looking 13th-century palace, a stone’s throw from the Abbey) and allegedly made contact with one of the ghostly monks said to still pace around the cloisters.

According to newspaper clippings on the walls of the corridors of the Montagu Arms hotel, just across the millpond, the spectral monk directed Doyle to a box buried on the estate, containing bones and two round stones. I saw no monks, spectral or otherwise, at the Montagu Arms or the adjoining pub, Monty’s Inn, but I can tell you that the food and accommodation is hauntingly good.

But there was another countess named Isabella I still hoped to meet during my visit, said to appear as an apparition in blue. A painting of Countess Isabella, who died in 1786, hangs at the foot of the Palace House staircase. In 2013, a Palace House guide took a ghostly picture of a “Lady in Blue” while testing the camera on her new phone in the Lower Drawing Room. I’m keen to encounter the eccentric Belle, but she wasn’t in the mood to hang out (she didn’t even deign to float past me and on through a wall, as she apparently tends to do). I think we’d get on. She regularly took breakfast with her pet parrot, monkey and lapdog while she was alive. Left with no provision in her father’s will, she fought her rivalrous Duchess sister, Mary, for a share of the estate’s revenues when he died. It seems she still hasn’t given up the ghost.

A night at the Montagu Arms starts from £251 per night; montaguarmshotel.co.uk