Paranormal Pajama Party

Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy. When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.

This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as graphic depictions of executions, mentions of miscarriage and sexist language. 

Throughout tonight’s episode, we’ll be talking about the wives of King Henry VIII: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr. Here’s an easy way to remember them: Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, Subscribed?! Girl, what?! Thank you so much, Catherine Parr!

Suppose you, like Henry’s only surviving wife, have already subscribed to Paranormal Pajama Party and are enjoying it so far. In that case, I’d love it if you could give it a five-star rating and review on your favourite podcast app. It helps other people find the show and learn why they probably shouldn’t marry kings. Thanks!

“The Ghost Of Anne Boleyn: What A Traveler Beheld At The Scaffold On Tower Hill”, author unknown, published in 1912.

It was moonset, a blood-red crescent sinking into a band of yellow just over the roofs of London. The day had been a holiday, for King Henry VIII had divorced his queen, Anne Boleyn, not by process of law, but by the axe.

The young Earl of Emberton, who since childhood had been in France, had just returned and was passing over Tower Hill. Before him against the yellow strip loomed the silhouette scaffold, the sinking moon at the moment standing above it, its lower horn seeming to rest upon the block where that had been bowed the head of the young queen.

“Singular,” muttered the earl, “that the red crescent should be in that position.”

As he drew near the scaffold he heard a low moan and then noticed for the first time, seated on the lowest step, a woman, her head bent to her knees, her face buried in her hands.

“Madam,” he said, greatly surprised, “I marvel to find you in this gruesome place at such an hour. How came you here?”

The woman raised her head, and Emberton saw that she was young and comely. She was not weeping, yet on her face was a strange distress. Her costume was rich, denoting that she was of high degree, her robe being of silk, though without any adornment whatever. Around her neck was a broad black velvet band, but even from this no jewel or trinket was suspended.

“Oh, sir,” she said, “take me away! I was here with the crowd today, and when it was over all went to their homes but I. It was cruel to leave me here alone.”

“But your menials? If your friends deserted you, surely those dependent upon your bounty —“

“They all went together, and I, dazed by the multitude, the solemn words of the man of God, the grim figure of the executioner, the glitter of the axe in the sun, must have fallen into a swoon, for I have only just now come to consciousness.”

“I cannot imagine,” said the earl, perplexed, “how your friends and servants could have been so brutal.”  

“Brutal! Can you expect tenderness from a people whose king’s divorces are written in blood?”

“Come away,” said the young man. “You are trembling; you are faint.”

“Where shall I go?” she asked, fixing despairing eyes upon him.

“To your people.”

“Oh, my people!” she said, a wail in her voice. “Do you think that they would welcome me after what occurred today?”

“Then you must come with me,” said the earl. “To stay here another hour would drive you to a madhouse.”

In Emberton’s heart suddenly, without requiring time to develop, there was born a great love for this desolate being who had passed through so strange an ordeal. Since she did not move he sat down beside her. A chill wind made her shiver, and he folded his cloak about her, leaving his arms about the cloak. His eyes fell upon the band at her neck, and as his hand rested upon her shoulder he took the ribbon in his fingers and moved it just so far that in the dim light, he saw what he thought was a fine red line. She drew his hand away. Hers was as cold as ice.

“Go with me,” he pleaded. “You are cold and desolate. I will warm your heart with mine. I will make you forget this dreadful place. I will take you to sunny France. This dreary town is not fit for one so delicate, so sensitive. In France, there are no troubles. The court and the nobles live in bright Paris, with its gardens, while the peasants tread the purple grapes in the wine vats, singing gayly. I came from there only today. We will go back together.”

She turned her eyes upon his and seemed to drink in every word. He fancied a colour coming into the pale cheek; that the icy hand he held in his was less cold.

“I will go with you,” she said, “and love you forever, but first let me take one last look at the block.”

“No, no,” he cried; “no more of death! Come rather into life.”

Despite his pleadings, she moved up the steps, looking back at him wistfully. He held her hand, but it seemed to slip from his as if it were unreal. He caught at her robe, but it was fluttering in the wind and eluded his grasp.

“Listen,” she said, pausing.

[CROWD TALKING]

Steph: It seemed that he could hear a low murmuring of many voices. Then all was still.

She moved on, mounting each step heavily, as if weighted with lead, till she had reached the platform. Then, waving her hand to him as if in adieu, she kneeled and placed her head upon the block.

Emberton fancied he heard something moving swiftly through the air, a thud as of steel entering wood.

[Axe chopping into wood]

Steph: The next morning at daylight as the watch moved across Tower Hill he discovered the Earl of Emberton lying in a stupor at the foot of the scaffold. He was taken to his home, where he lay for months with a diseased brain, and when his reason returned he left London forever. Even in his beloved France, he found neither health nor happiness. No one save a menial was ever admitted to his bedroom, and after his death, a portrait was discovered above his mantel — his sovereign’s beheaded queen, Anne Boleyn.

[MUSIC]

Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.

We’re still at the Tower of London tonight, face-to-face with ghost bears, ghost children, and ghost privateers; and face-to… uh… neck-stump with the ghosts of the noblewomen executed on the Tower Green because they lived in dangerous proximity to the British throne and the absolutely insane people who sat on it.

Last week, I shared the stories of three women whose ghosts supposedly still walk the Tower’s passages: Countess of Salisbury Margaret Pole, Lady Arbella Stuart, and England’s nine-day queen, Lady Jane Grey.

We also talked a bit about why the Tower of London has captured the public’s imagination and gained a reputation as one of the world’s most popular haunted locations.

As a little recap, a writer named William Henry Ainsworth hopped on the historical novel trend of the 19th century and wrote a book called “The Tower of London”, about Lady Jane Grey, depicting the castle as a grim prison chock-full of torture devices, and sparking fascination with its dark history. His next book, “Windsor Castle”, was also about the Tudor dynasty, and included some gothic, supernatural elements.

The rise of Spiritualism around the same time coincided with increasing interest in Tudor-era horror associated with the Tower, and people were very intrigued by communicating with spirits, especially those who had died in mysterious or tragic circumstances.

And there’s one historical injustice in particular that has enthralled people for nearly 500 years now: The execution of Anne Boleyn.

I’m not going to get too into Anne’s life story, since this podcast is more concerned with what happened in her afterlife, but I do think it’s important to humanise our ghostly guests, especially since patriarchal bullshit often means their real stories go untold.

Anne Boleyn was born in either 1501 or 1507. Her father was an English diplomat, so she was raised in France and the Netherlands, only returning to England to marry her cousin. Luckily or unluckily, these marriage plans were broken off and in 1522, Anne instead became a maid of honour to King Henry VIII’s wife, Catherine of Aragon. I think that means she would’ve been working to support Catherine alongside Margaret Pole, but Margaret had a higher standing as a lady in waiting.

Anne gained a name in the English court for her stylish French clothes, pretty face, and accomplishments. Here, accomplishments don’t mean, like, inventing the first dishwasher or successfully running an international spy ring. It just means Anne was good at the stuff that women in court were supposed to be good at – singing, dancing, playing the lute. But she was also smart and clever, and people were drawn to her. She knew it, too.

A few years earlier, Anne’s sister, Mary, had started an affair with the king. (Mary, by the way, also had an affair with the King of France when she lived there, and subsequent historical accounts have been very cool and nonjudgmental about her sex life. NOT.

Sick burn on historians, Steph.

So after Anne showed up and started doing her thing, Henry was apparently like, “How you doin’?”. Anne wasn’t into it. Maybe she’d seen what being a royal mistress got her sister and was holding out for a position with more perks, or maybe she just didn’t want to be her boss’ husband’s sidepiece. She refused to let him seduce her and would sometimes leave the court for her family castle just to get him to cool his jets. But around 1526, he proposed and she accepted. There was just that tricky business about him having a wife, but Henry was pretty sure he could clear that up quickly.

Seven years passed. Long story short, Henry left the Catholic church, kicked off the English reformation, and traumatised the hell out of his oldest daughter, Mary Tudor, causing her to possibly become a vengeance-obsessed mirror-witch – see episode three of Paranormal Pajama Party.

Finally, the couple married in secret and had a second, official ceremony a few months later. Their relationship wasn’t physical until shortly before the first wedding, something I normally wouldn’t point out because it’s none of my business, except that Anne’s posthumous reputation is as a highly sexual seductress. We’ll talk more about that in a moment.

Anne was already six months pregnant when she was crowned Queen Regent, and both parents were confident it was going to be a boy. Henry kind of needed it to be a boy. A big part of his argument about divorcing Catherine was based on their not having any male heirs, so he had to make it work with Wife #2.

Besides, England had never had a female ruler – remember, Lady Jane Grey came later – and Henry didn’t think it could. Something about a woman not being capable of holding the highest office in the land? We’re too emotionally unstable and worried about our appearances, you see. Unlike some other very stable geniuses I could mention.

Anyway, their first child sucked because she was a she, and they tried to save face when all the scheduled activities for the birth of a male heir had to be awkwardly cancelled. They named her Elizabeth. Maybe you’ve heard of her. She successfully led the Empire for 40 years and left an incredible legacy.

The marriage hit a rough patch after that. All of the qualities that Henry loved in Anne when she was his mistress – witty, cheeky, politically strategic – were not the qualities that were socially acceptable in a wife at the time. Her subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriage or stillbirths (and they also may have been false pregnancies, which can happen to women trying to prove their fertility). None of this helped their relationship, and as she was losing popularity with her husband, the same thing was happening outside the house – or Windsor Castle, in this case.

Most English subjects thought Henry had been pretty terrible to his first wife, Catherine, and stayed loyal to her. Some called Anne the king’s whore, and as Henry became more tyrannical and the couple failed to produce a male heir, public opinion got worse.

When Catherine of Aragon died in January of 1536 – probably of heart cancer – rumours spread that Anne or Henry had her poisoned, which wasn’t helped by him wearing bright yellow the day after her death and arranging a big celebration. Please picture poor Mary in the corner, getting angrier and angrier.

Anne was getting angrier, too, because Henry had started to pay a whole lot of attention to one of her maids-of-honour, Jane Seymour, and it was pretty clear what was going on. Anne was pregnant, though, and if it was a boy, she knew she’d be safe. Unfortunately, after Henry had a scary horse accident and then Anne caught Jane sitting on his lap a few days later, she miscarried. A contemporary at the court said the baby appeared to be male.

While she was recovering from the miscarriage, Henry started telling everyone that he’d been seduced into the marriage through deception. The French word he used also implied there might have even been spells involved.

Starting in April, seven men were arrested on charges of adultery committed with the Queen. Only the first man confessed, and that’s probably because he was the only one tortured. The last man arrested was Anne’s brother, George, who was also charged with treason and incest.

On 2 May, Anne was taken to the Tower of London. She wrote Henry a letter that included the line, “To speak a truth, never prince had wife more loyal in all duty, and in all true affection, than you have ever found in Anne Boleyn.”

She also begged him for a fair trial, without her sworn enemies acting as accusers and judges: “For my truth shall fear no open flame; then shall you see either my innocence cleared, your suspicion and conscience satisfied, the ignominy and slander of the world stopped, or my guilt openly declared.”

On 15 May, she had her trial, but it was far from fair. She was baselessly found guilty of adultery, incest, and high treason. A man who’d previously been betrothed to her was on the jury, and when the verdict was announced, he collapsed and had to be carried from the room. The punishment for a queen who’d committed high treason was being burnt at stake.

Five men – including her brother – were executed on 17 May. Two days later, it was Anne’s turn. Henry commuted her sentence from being burned at the stake to beheading, and even sent for an expert French swordsman to do the deed so that she wasn’t killed by a common axe. He wasn’t present at her execution, but he controlled every aspect of it from behind the scenes.

Tudor historian Leanda de Lisle says that Henry and his father saw the Tudor dynasty as a successor to Camelot. That made him King Arthur, and Anne the adulterous Guinevere.

“The choice of a sword—the symbol of Camelot, of a rightful king, and of masculinity—was Henry’s alone,” de Lisle wrote.

Before Anne was taken to the scaffold, she joked with the Constable of the Tower, “I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck.”

On the scaffold, she gave a short speech to the crowd in which she complimented Henry as gentle and merciful, and asked them to pray for him. She probably did it to keep her toddler daughter, Elizabeth, and the rest of the Boleyn family safe. She never confessed to any guilt.

Her execution was completed with one stroke of the sword. 

Anne Boleyn left behind a complicated legacy, and a lot of that is because her death was so terrible, so shocking, and so puzzling. Why would Henry court a woman for seven years, fight the enormous machine that was the Catholic church and torch his popularity with his subjects to marry this woman, only to have her brutally executed – an unprecedented event – three years after finally tying the knot? It’s such a crazy event, with such a horrible ending, that we still know it, and still feel things about it, almost 500 years later.

I read this fabulous article that I’ll link in the show notes. It’s called, “At the Border of Life and Death – The Ghost of Anne Boleyn” by Dr Stephanie Russo. I’m not just saying it because she’s a fellow Stephanie, but she does a really good job of outlining the many ways we’ve tried to fill in the blank parts of Anne’s story to make it make sense and why we’re so desperate to do so. So big hat tip to Dr Russo, because she’s going to be all over the rest of this episode.

Anne is the most famous of Henry VIII’s six wives, and that’s partially because of the horror of her story, but also because there have been so many fictionalised versions of her created to tell and further explore that story. They’ve made two versions of The Other Boleyn Girl, there was that Tudor series with Natalie Dormer from Game of Thrones, and she’s in a squillion other books and stories. The story I read at the start of the episode was published in 1912 by some rando on the funny pages equivalent of a newspaper in Washington state. She’s everywhere!

And every version of her is different. She’s a witch, or she’s a sexpot, or she’s a political mastermind, or she’s a feminist icon, or she’s a ghost!

Some of these traits were given to her, as we just discussed, before her death. She was infamous as soon as public opinion turned against Henry for his treatment of Catherine (and of course, the new woman cops the blame, not the chronic philanderer). It certainly didn’t help that to be with Anne, Henry had to break with Rome and basically burn down the Catholic church in England (and I kind of mean that literally – just because Anne wasn’t burnt at the stake doesn’t mean other people weren’t).

So in the years after her death, Catholic writers were eager to paint her in a bad light. A really bad light. If you’ve ever heard that Anne Boleyn had a secret sixth finger and was a practising witch… that came from a Catholic propagandist, who also claimed that she had a giant cyst under her chin that she covered with high-necked dresses. There’s no evidence that people thought she was a witch during her lifetime, despite Henry’s suspicious choice of French to describe his seduction during her downfall.

Speaking of seduction, Anne is often portrayed in stories about her as a kind of 16th-century Marilyn Monroe – slinky, sexy and sex-obsessed. Where Marilyn usually gets painted as a ditz, though, Anne is often depicted as more shrewd and ambitious. Maybe it’s a blonde, brunette thing. Both are icky, but we’ll have to talk about the Marilyn brand of ick some other time.

Beyond reducing women to an archetype instead of recognising each of us as individual humans, the idea of the seductress generally is problematic. A seductress, in patriarchal pop culture, anyway, uses her sexuality to gain control over men, rather than just, you know, because flirting is fun and sex is enjoyable. The seductress archetype also perpetuates the idea that women are inherently deceptive and untrustworthy. These versions of Anne have her using her allure as a weapon aimed at an innocent man who didn’t know any better, which lets Henry – who had her legally murdered – off the hook in a way that is, uh, total bullshit.

But Anne Boleyn is a crazy historical figure because somehow she is simultaneously an object of lust for misogynists and a protofeminist symbol. In life, she was well-educated, witty, and knew what she wanted – to be a wife and not a mistress. Fictional versions of her are often the same – bold, clever, and independent. And if the shockingly unfair nature of her downfall and execution doesn’t raise your feminist hackles, I don’t know what will. I know I went too far into Freud in the Coraline episodes, but, um… Henry’s sword was a figurative penis, you guys. He was swinging his dick around. Or some French guy was swinging it around for him, I guess. 

Because we don’t know much about her, it’s easy to fill the outline we have with any colour we like – feminist, seductress, witch, whatever. And we can’t get the answers from the historical record… because there nearly isn’t one. There are few records from her trial remaining, and even though she was a prolific letter-writer, not many of these remain either. It wasn’t a good look to hold onto a letter from someone who had supposedly betrayed the King. Her portraits were destroyed or lost to time as well. There’s speculation about the involvement of Henry or his chief minister Thomas Cromwell in this suspicious purge.

But that’s no problem because, for the last four-plus centuries, people have been learning about Anne from a much more primary source. In basically every building Anne Boleyn ever set foot in – and some she probably didn’t – people claim to have seen her ghost.

She shows up at all three of her father’s former castles and, of course, the Tower of London. Soldiers and guards stationed at the Tower have claimed to see the spectre of a headless Anne leading a procession of ghostly knights and ladies through the Tower chapel.

Another well-known story goes that one night in 1864, the captain of a regiment stationed in the Tower noticed a guard in the courtyard acting strangely. The guard, who was stationed in front of the rooms that Anne had occupied, seemed to be challenging someone, and the captain saw what, quote, “looked like a whitish, female figure sliding towards the soldier”. The guard charged the figure with his bayonet, ran through it, and fainted. The captain’s testimony saved the guard from going to prison for fainting on duty.

My favourite Ghost Anne story isn’t from the Tower, though. She may have been born at Blickling Estate in Norfolk, and every year on the anniversary of her death, a ghostly carriage driven by a headless horseman pulls up to the estate. Anne sits within, holding her head in her lap. For the rest of the night, she carries her head through every room in the building. The Estate is owned by the National Trust now, so I assume no one’s there to see all this go down, or to get startled by the headless queen while rummaging around for a late-night snack.

Dr Russo writes, “The story implies that the ghost of Anne Boleyn will endlessly restage her own death, trapped in a liminal state between the possibility for an alternative ending to her story, and knowing that she cannot escape the reality of her execution.”

In her article, Dr Russo points out that we often associate ghosts with murders or violent and untimely deaths. And as the subject of one of history’s biggest mysteries with a sudden and horrible death to boot, Anne Boleyn is kind of the perfect ghost candidate. The Victorians certainly thought she’d be around to pop into a seance or two – one spiritualist at the time even claimed to be both Anne’s descendant and a vessel for her spirit.

Then and now, people wanted to talk to Anne’s apparition because it’s the only one who can fill in the gaps in our knowledge about her life, downfall, and death. But Russo thinks some of Ghost Anne’s popularity can be ascribed to a sense of unresolved historical guilt.

Historic guilt is multifaceted, but there are a few possibilities at play here. It could be that Anne’s story prompts us to reflect on moral or ethical issues of the past, and feel some discomfort or concern that we may be facing – or worse, perpetuating – similar injustices today.

It may also be that because she’s a blank slate, we can colour her story any way we like – make her a seductress, a schemer, a feminist, or a flirt. If we’ve harmed others in our past, or have been part of a relationship dynamic that’s similar to Anne’s and Henry’s, we may project our feelings about that onto her spectre, too.

But more than that, when we learn Anne’s story, we feel bad. Our natural empathy for others extends beyond here and now – we feel sadness and fear for her and her plight, and anger towards Henry for his blatant misuse of the system he controlled.

These days, Anne’s ghost is doing pretty well for herself and England. She has a line of merch, available right now at the Tower of London gift shop. I’m not kidding, there are 35 Anne Boleyn-related items you can buy on the gift shop website, and her name comes first under the “Royalty” subheading – above Henry’s and Elizabeth’s, and even ahead of Princess Di. Poor Bloody Mary doesn’t even make the list. The Christmas tree ornaments seem to be popular.

She’s also responsible for a pretty impressive paranormal tourism industry surrounding the Tower of London. Every year, 3 million people visit the Tower, and dozens of companies offer twilight ghost tours, teasing the idea that you might catch a glimpse of the disgraced queen. 

Sure, people want to see Guy Fawkes, the ghost bear, and the mysterious glowing tube in the Jewell Room. But they’re really there for Anne.

Even after her death, everybody wants a piece.

[MUSIC]

Steph: Well, gang, this episode is lucky number 13, and that seems like the perfect place to wrap up season one of Paranormal Pajama Party.

This podcast is a one-woman show, so I need to take a few weeks off to research, write, record and edit Season 2 – I’ve got some good ones for us!

I may re-release some of this season’s earlier episodes as a bit of an encore and to keep feeding the podcast platform algorithms, but I’ll be back with brand-new spine-tingling tales and critical discussion very soon!

To learn more about the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, dig into her complicated legacy, and pick up a Henry VIII Christmas tree ornament of your very own, check out my sources in the show notes.

Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.

I’ll be back with new episodes in a few short weeks. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.