The author Coxe relates an account of a young boy witnessing the apparition of a woman in a hammock near the summerhouse at this location. The incident occurred in the 1920’s, and it was later in life that the witness discovered that this was his aunt who had died at that spot years before.

The Fellow’s Garden within Christ’s College has a mulberry tree that is said to be the haunt of Christopher Round. His apparition is described as a stooping figure with his head bent and walking slowly around the tree. This act is said to be a display of remorse for his murdering of a Fellow of the university.

According to accounts, St. John’s College is inhabited by a number of ghosts. In 1706, four fellows exorcised some ghosts from a house opposite the College by the simple method of threatening to fire their pistols at the positions the moans and groans were coming from!

Second Court is apparently haunted by the ghost of the former undergraduate, James Wood (1760-1839). Wood was born in Holcombe where his father ran an evening school and taught his son the elements of arithmetic and algebra. From Bury Grammar School he proceeded to St. John’s College in 1778, graduating as senior wrangler in 1782. On graduating, he became a fellow of the college and in his long tenure there produced several successful academic textbooks for students of mathematics.

Wood remained for sixty years at St. John’s, serving as both President (1802-1815) and Master (1815-1839) on his death in 1839 he was interred in the college chapel and bequeathed his extensive library to the college, comprising almost 4,500 printed books on classics, history, mathematics, theology and travel, dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Wood was ordained as a priest in 1787 and served as Dean of Ely from 1820 until his death. Whilst an undergraduate, Wood was so poor that he could not afford to light his room, and would often do his work in the well-lit stairway. As a result, that staircase is reputedly haunted by the spectre of this great man.

The work of wonderful fictional story-telling by Arthur Gray, Master of the College in 1922, has led to the following tale becoming believed as factual. Jesus College is the setting of a fabricated ghost story about the Everlasting Club and Charles Bellassis. However, Coxe does not provide any further details.

Visit the New Court area of Trinity College, and you may witness the apparition of a person dressed in hunting kit that has been reported.

Corpus Christi appears to be the most haunted of the Cambridge University campuses. A room in the upper parts of the old court is said to be haunted by the following apparitions.

Firstly, Dr. Butts, the Master from 1626 until 1632, and hero of the plague of 1630. He hanged himself with his garters in the then Master’s Lodge on Easter Sunday, 1632. The apparition was been described as “terrifying” and Butt’s ghost was subject to an attempted and reportedly unsuccessful exorcism by three students in 1904. Butts was allegedly sighted in 1967 as a half-length figure of a man in the passage between New Court and Old Court.

The other apparitions are of Dr. Spencer’s daughter, Elizabeth, and that of her suitor. The unfortunate young man hid from Dr. Spencer, who was another of the Masters from around the same period as Dr. Butts. He secreted himself in a cupboard, only to be suffocated in the process. Elizabeth, in a fit of grief, committed suicide by throwing herself from the roof of Old Court. Their ghosts are said to walk on Christmas Eve.

The building is said to be haunted by the apparition of either a Grey or White Lady. It is believed to be a nun that came from St. Radegund’s Convent to share an illicit affair with an Austin friar living at the house. Other reported phenomena include bedclothes being ripped off sleeping persons and poltergeist-type activities.

The author Coxe recounts a story dating back to the 1890’s when a property came up for sale in Trumpington Street. The prospective buyer was shown into a room in which he noticed hung a portrait of a lady “with an odd expression on her face, and wearing a vivid green dress and a hat with a red feather” hanging on the wall. After viewing the rest of the house, the buyer was informed that a woman in green with a red feather in her hat haunted the house. When the buyer stated that this must have been the figure in the portrait he had seen hanging in the house, the owner informed him that no such portrait hung in that room!

The Old Addenbrooke’s Hospital was said to be haunted by an apparition that appeared when morphine was to be administered, but Coxe does not provide a description of its appearance. Since the building is no longer a hospital, does the apparition still have cause to appear?

The Cambridge University Press site has a claim to be the oldest bookshop in the country, books having been sold there since 1581. Since the closure of Sherratt & Hughes in 1992, the site has been the home of the Cambridge University Press bookshop.

It is reputedlty haunted by a number of apparitions, which include a White Lady, and a man in Victorian evening dress. Filing cabinets have been known to open and close of their own accord.

Pictured left is Cambridge University Press Bookshop courtesy of The Wub.