North Yorkshire

Sheriff Hutton is a small hamlet which lies north of the city of York and is the resting place of Prince Edward, Prince of Wales who died in 1484 at the age of ten, the only son of King Richard III. Edward was buried before his parents could return from Nottingham, where they were at the time, and there must have been a time of great sadness when King Richard and Queen Anne first visited their son’s tomb.

In 1974 Joan Forman, a dramatist and writer of many books on ghosts and the paranormal, was researching a play on the life of King Richard and visited the tomb at Sheriff Hutton. She stresses that she was not trying to provoke a paranormal experience but was concentrating on the tomb in an attempt to understand intuitively the feelings of the parents as they themselves had presumably stood there many years before. As she placed her hands over the stone image of the Prince of Wales carved on his tomb she heard the church door open.

Footsteps were apparently coming down the stairs into the church (which was irritating to Ms Forman as she hoped to have some time alone). When no one approached her she assumed that another visitor to the church was politely waiting for her to finish her studies. Miss Forman believed that whoever was there was out of sight behind a large pillar and although she heard one or two mumbled words she couldn’t make out any actual phrases.

She felt riveted to the spot for a time but eventually felt that it was unfair to monopolise the most interesting part of the church. She left the tomb and walked up the aisle to apologise to whoever was there for keeping them waiting. In fact there was no one in the church and no one around. The church door was closed rather than open as she had expected from what she had heard. Ms Forman also checked the clock mechanism to see if that could have caused the noise she had heard but the clock was stopped. The only person she could see was some 250 yards away, a gardener mowing the lawn.

Ms Forman suggests that by touching the child’s effigy she might have caused a replay of an earlier incident, perhaps when Queen Anne, the boy’s mother, had first visited her child’s grave.

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