To celebrate Halloween, Sarah Perry, Jeanette Winterson, Mark Haddon and other writers put a new spin on the traditional ghost story with tales set in English Heritage properties
In my adolescence, there was no historical figure that I was more intrigued by than Elizabeth I. Her love-affair with the Earl of Leicester was a particular area of interest. So when English Heritage offered up a list of potential sites for a ghost story, which included Kenilworth castle, where Leicester unsuccessfully proposed to Elizabeth, the adolescent in me immediately said “yes”. But the imagination works in strange ways. Once I was at Kenilworth it wasn’t the story of Elizabeth and Leicester that I found myself thinking about – neither the proposal nor the death of Leicester’s wife as told in Walter Scott’s historically inaccurate novel Kenilworth.
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