Tens of thousands have toured Buckingham Palace to see Kate Middleton's wedding dress, and soon tourists will get the chance to poke around Kate's part-time home at Kensington Palace for a Halloween ghost tour.
The Daily Mirror is reporting, and the Kensington Palace website confirms, that the palace where Prince William of Wales and his bride, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, live when they're in London will be open for ghost tours for four nights on the Halloween weekend, Oct. 28 to 31. Kensington is where William lived with his mother, the late Princess Diana, along with an assortment of other royals over the centuries, some of whom are said to haunt the 400-plus-year-old palace.
The Eerie Evening Tours of the Enchanted Palace will last an hour and half each evening and cost about $33 per person. Kensington is open every day for tours.
But there's no guarantee the palace ghosts will cooperate. Many crumbling English palaces and estates are said to be cluttered with spooks; Kensington is said to be haunted by the spirit of (among others) the formidable figure of Queen Mary, the consort of George V and William's great-great grandmother.
"Stories collected in the warders' log book over the years include numerous reports of screams, bumps and ghostly sightings," the Mirror reported.
Even if tourists see ghosts they will not get to see William and Catherine's apartment. Most of the time, the couple live in a rented farmhouse in Wales near his Air Force base where he is a helicopter rescue pilot. For their London residence, they were assigned an apartment cottage on the grounds of the palace, which was acquired for the crown by the Stuart Queen Mary II and her husband King William III, in 1689.
Meanwhile, Kate's wedding gown, on exhibit at Buckingham Palace, has drawn scores of extra visitors (and raised millions of dollars in tour fees) to the already popular palace tour, which takes place annually in late summer when the royal family decamps to their Scottish estate for holiday.
