Chambercombe Manor, near Ilfracombe, is the sort of place that feels like it ought to come with a ghost story. It is a medieval house with Tudor connections through the Champernowne family, whose most famous daughter, Kat Ashley, was governess to Elizabeth I. The building itself, with its thick stone walls and shadowed corners, looks every inch the backdrop for a gothic tale. Over time, it has earned a reputation as one of Devon’s most haunted houses. Visitors talk of cold spots, shadowy figures, and most famously of a skeleton discovered in a bricked-up chamber.
The story is everywhere. Ghost tours repeat it, blogs relish it, television shows have crept through the corridors with night-vision cameras to whisper about it. The version most often told is simple: in the course of roof repairs, a tenant noticed the outline of a blocked window. The wall was opened, and behind it lay a sealed chamber containing a bed, a woman’s dress, and the skeleton of a lady. From there, however, the details splinter.
Some writers say the skeleton was discovered in 1738. Others fix it firmly in the 1860s. One strand even claims that the woman was deliberately sealed in during the eighteenth century by the Oatway family, tenants of the manor at the time. Local folklore gave her a name, Kate Oatway, and spun stories of smuggling and wrecking, the grim reputation for luring ships onto rocks along the North Devon coast. In other tellings, she is a stranger washed ashore in a storm, carried into the house and quietly disposed of.
So what can we really say? The earliest references I can find are not from the 1730s at all, but from the 1860s. In 1869, the story appears in newspapers and in a Horticultural Journal (of all places!), complete with stormy seas and melodrama: a Bristol-bound ship dashed against the rocks, a mysterious woman rescued and brought into Chambercombe, and years later a hidden chamber revealed with a bed, a dress, and a skeleton. The article even insists the tale came from confessional papers among her father’s effects, a very Victorian flourish. The hidden manuscript device was a common trope in gothic literature, giving atmosphere but not evidence. It is noteworthy, however, that for a tale so close to the alleged time of occurrence, these articles read more like a romantic tale than a factual account: no coroner's reports or contemporary recording!
Those who prefer the 1738 date will argue that this was instead a 1700s occurrence, which is why I cannot find contemporary evidence in 1865. It is true that fewer newspapers survive from the early eighteenth century, which makes it harder to check. However, Ilfracombe itself was being reported on in the archives by the 1730s, covering shipping, petty crime and wrecks, and a discovery of a body inside a manor house wall would have been the sort of sensational piece that spread nationally. The silence tells its own tale.
By the 1890s, the story is entrenched. It appears in guidebooks and county histories, retold as part of North Devon’s folklore package. Each retelling adds new twists, new names, and new details, until the story has the patina of age even though its earliest written form is unmistakably Victorian. Here, more often than not, the tale is told that it was, in fact, an "unhappy Frenchman" who became the skeleton!
So, did anyone really find a skeleton in a hidden chamber at Chambercombe? The evidence suggests not (to me at least). What we have instead is a story that arrived already dressed as legend, dressed up with storms, shipwrecks, secret papers, and all the trappings of gothic romance. It is less a Tudor mystery or Georgian scandal than a Victorian invention that has proved too good to let go.
And that is why, more than 150 years later, the tale is still told. Chambercombe may not hold a skeleton in its walls, but it does hold a perfect example of how a good ghost story is built.