The Gentle Ghosts: The Spiritual Habits of The Beaulieu Monks

The ‘Gentle Ghosts’: The Spiritual Habits of The Beaulieu Monks

By Mr Ghaz, February 24, 2011

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The ‘Gentle Ghosts’: The Spiritual Habits of the Beaulieu Monks

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Michael Sedgwick, who was research director of the Montagu Motor Museum at Beaulieu Abbey, England, had been working into the small hours one night before Christmas in 1959. His office was thick with tobacco smoke. Throwing open a window to clear the air; he heard the chanting of a Catholic mass.

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“It came in uneven waves, as if from a faulty wireless,” he said. “It was so beautiful that I tried to find it on my own wireless…and I couldn’t.”

The Monks of Beaulieu Abbey Singing a Mass

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That same evening, Bertha Day, the abbey’s catering manager, also heard the singing. “I knew that Mrs. Mears, a local lady, had died,” she said. Later both Sedgwick and Mrs. Day realized that they had heard the monks of Beaulieu Abbey singing a mass – their custom when one of the inhabitants of the nearby village had died. But no monks had lived in Beaulieu Abbey since 1538.

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Founded by Cistercian monks in 1204, the abbey flourished until Henry VIII dissolved it. But the monks, it would seem, had really never left.

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The Ghosts of Beaulieu

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To local people, the Ghosts of Beaulieu are just another part of life in the village. One vicar, the Reverend Robert Frazer Powles, was on such good terms with the Ghosts that he knew several by names; at Christmas he would hold services for tem in the village church. A parishioner at one Sunday service remarked on how small the congregation had been that day. Replied the vicar: “It’s bigger than you can see.”

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Not everyone has accepted the Beaulieu ghosts so readily. One member of a film crew working at the abbey heard someone following him down a flight of stairs. When the footsteps overtook him, he terrified: whoever was there was invisible. Other people have been unnerved by noises at night that appear to come from the former graveyard of the monks. The sounds have been likened to those of a burial taking place.

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A Brown Clad Monk

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The monks have also been seen as well as heard. They are always dressed in brown, the garb of the lay brothers of the abbey who, unlike the white-robed choir monks, did not take holy orders. Dame Margaret Rutherford, the English actress, once saw a brown clad monk reading in the ruined cloister, as did a member of the abbey staff in 1965.

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During World War II, officers from a nearby antiaircraft unit saw a group of monks near the church. In 1979 a monk was seen pruning the vines in the newly revived abbey vineyard.

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Friendly Ghosts

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Lord Montagu, whose family has owned Beaulieu Abbey since 1673, claims that the ghosts “have never been anything but…friendly.”

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Seeing their beloved abbey still so well tended after so many centuries, perhaps the monks feel they have no reason to be anything else.