Duchess refused to visit Charles’s ‘haunted house’
The Duchess of Cornwall has disclosed that she refused to visit the Prince of Wales’s Dumfries House after sensing the building was haunted before its renovation. The Duchess said: “I remember leaving and thinking I don’t want to come back here again and I didn’t for a few years.”
SHE is usually her husband’s most devoted champion, providing quiet support behind the scenes and by his side in public.
Even the Duchess of Cornwall, however, drew the line on one occasion, when she refused to visit the Prince of Wales’s landmark Dumfries House project after sensing it was haunted.
The Duchess, who has allowed a documentary team to follow her through the year, has told of her initial reaction to the Scottish stately home, saved from a dilapidated state for the nation by the Prince a decade ago.
It has since gone on to become a masterclass in restoration, hailed as preserving not only a Georgian “time capsule” for the public to visit but providing jobs for the community and training in dwindling traditional skills.
The Duchess gave an insight into the transformation in a frank exchange.
“If you could have seen it when the Prince first spotted it, you wouldn’t have believed it was the same house,” she told an ITV documentary.
“It was so sad and unlived in, unloved and neglected. And it had a really eerie feel about it. There was definitely a ghost. Without a shadow of a doubt. I remember the first time I walked up the steps, got into the hall and I thought I can’t go any further. I literally froze. If my hair could stand on end, it would have done.
“I remember leaving and thinking I don’t want to come back here again and I didn’t for a few years.”
After the Prince’s team began work on the house, opening it to the public in 2008, she said she had walked in to find a “completely new house”.
“Whatever was there had disappeared,” she said. “The whole thing seemed to be smiling again.”
Of the idiosyncrasies of staying at Dumfries House, the Duchess added: “I love hearing clocks striking together. We’ve got 10 or 11 grandfather clocks that were collected by the Queen Mother. They are all supposed to strike at the same time but they never do. However much you wind them, they’re always out of sync.”
In 2007, The Daily Telegraph revealed that Dumfries House had been saved by the Prince at the 11th hour after the building was put on the market and its unique contents already on their way to an auction house ready to be sold off.
A group convened by the Prince secured the property and its furniture for £45million, with £20million personally guaranteed by the heir to the throne himself.
The ITV documentary, to be broadcast tonight, will tell the story of the Prince and Duchess’s relationship and marriage. Ben Elliot, the Duchess’s nephew, relays how the Queen expressed her approval at their 2005 wedding, saying: “It was a really happy day because clearly these two people had been in love for a long time.
“This was the end of a journey. I think it was the Queen who said something in her speech about, I think it
‘I remember leaving and thinking I don’t want to come back here and I didn’t for a few years’
was the same day as the Grand National, that they had got over Becher’s Brook and that her son was with the woman that he loved.” He added: “As we’ve seen with our current Queen, she’s been a great Queen because she’s been assisted absolutely brilliantly by her husband the Duke of Edinburgh. And when the Prince of Wales eventually becomes our king, with my aunt next to him, he will be a great king.”
♦ The Real Camilla: HRH The Duchess of Cornwall airs tonight at 9pm on ITV.