Is Peterborough Museum haunted? City's spookiest building with poltergeist ghost tales and paranormal activity

"There’s an eerie feeling in the museum and it’s vaults,” Laura Hancock, heritage engagement manager at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery, in Priestgate, said.

“Moments in history and the continuous stories of the building’s past have undoubtedly left an imprint and had a lasting legacy.”

There’s a reason Peterborough’s museum is considered to be the city’s most haunted building.

First built in 1816, the museum is steeped in history – with the vaults beneath and the building’s foundations dating back to Tudor times.

It was a private residency during the Georgian era, before later becoming Peterborough’s infirmary – which is where its most famous ghost story emerged.

"The most famous ghost is Sgt Thomas Hunter – the lonely Anzac,” Laura said.

“Born in Durham, but emigrating to Australia early in his life, Sgt Hunter was a soldier in the First World War who suffered serious spinal injuries during the Battle of the Somme, in 1916.

"Brought back from the battlefield to this country by rail, he was diverted to Peterborough when his condition worsened while on the train.

"The evocative story goes that there was an unmistakable smell of sweetness in the carriage, which was the smell of gangrene.

"After being brought to Peterborough, he didn’t recover as surgeons had hoped and died at the infirmary.”

The first known sighting of the ghost of Sgt Hunter is said to have come in the 1930s when the wife of the museum’s caretaker saw him in the building.

"She heard footsteps on the stairs, which she assumed to be her husband’s,” Laura said.

“It turned out to be a gliding ghostly figure of a man in a grey uniform, who then mysteriously vanished. He has been regularly seen ever since.”

And, Sgt Hunter isn’t the only ghost to haunt the museum.

Paranormal activity has been reported in the vaults beneath the building as well, with a figure of a “scruffy-looking hooded monk”, nicknamed ‘Baldrick’, being said to roam the dimly-lit former mortuary and cellar below.

"People have said they have seen Baldrick and there have been things which have moved and thrown around the rooms,” Laura said.

"There’s an eerie presence and you get the feeling you are intruding on his space. It’s like he doesn’t want people to be down there.”

Laura has worked at the museum for over a decade and said it is at the top of a narrow staircase where most people feel a particular presence of the supernatural.

"The staircases, corridors and passages would’ve been used as routes for servants and maids,” Laura added.

“There is one staircase in the museum where people, particularly women, feel uneasy and uncomfortable at the top.

"Many have said they have felt like there has been a hand trying to push them down. There was once a pregnant maid and the father was not interested in her or the baby. One day, she ‘fell’ from the top of the stairs, killing both her and her unborn child.”

To hear more creepy stories, Peterborough Museum offers tours of the vaults and candle-lit ghost walks. To find out more, visit Peterborough Museum.