Malling Abbey's Ghosts - and the Real History Behind Them

Day 3 of 15. Malling Abbey in West Malling isn't a ruin - it's a working Anglican Benedictine convent, lived in today by nuns who still pray there every day. That hasn't stopped it becoming West Malling's single biggest source of modern ghost stories, repeated around the town far more often than most of its genuinely documented medieval history. We'll get to both: what people say still happens there, and the real, well-recorded centuries behind it - a fire, a plague, a rebellion, and a forced Dissolution two days before Halloween - that go a long way to explaining why.

West Malling's most-repeated ghost story is set inside the abbey itself: a cleaner working there is said to have watched a monk walk towards her across a floor level that, in the building she was in, didn't actually exist - he reportedly knocked over her bucket of water as he reached her, and she ran. A few doors down on Swan Street, staff at the former Brewery Tap pub, built hard against the abbey's old boundary wall, repeatedly reported a nun who would appear in whichever room needed cleaning next and vanish straight through a wall. Both accounts come from Ghosts of West Malling, a local history pamphlet by Margaret Gadd held at West Malling Library - oral tradition and a self-published local collection, not a parish record or a court file. Treat it exactly as we treated Day 1's Scotney ghost: a story West Malling still tells, not one we can verify.

The documented version is grimmer than the ghost stories. On 27 July 1190, fire tore through the abbey and “nearly all the town”, according to the contemporary chronicler Gervase of Canterbury. A century and a half later, in 1349, the Black Death reached Kent: the bishop appointed two abbesses for Malling in succession, both died, and only four professed nuns and four novices were left in the whole community - so few that the bishop had to split its day-to-day running between two of them, since - in the Victoria County History's own words - "none was fit to be abbess."

Malling's scandals weren't only medical, either. A 1299 visitation found four nuns punished for breaking their vows of chastity, and in 1321 the king had the sitting abbess deposed - she was the sister of Bartholomew de Badlesmere, a Kent baron who rebelled against Edward II that same year, was captured, dragged three miles behind a horse, and hanged and beheaded at Blean in 1322, his head displayed on Canterbury's Burgh Gate. Modern historians treat her deposition as more political than factual - the Cambridge historian Eileen Power called it "probably a political move" in her 1922 study of English nunneries. The abbey's luck ran out for good in 1538: pushed into a change of leadership engineered by Thomas Cromwell's own circle, Malling surrendered to the Crown on 29 October - two days before Halloween.

Malling Abbey isn't a tourist attraction, and the nuns would rather you didn't treat it as one - this is their home and place of worship, not a backdrop. That said, the public genuinely can visit: through Heritage Open Days, and school and historical tours arranged jointly with the nuns and the on-site St Benedict's Centre. Overnight guests can even stay in the Gatehouse itself, in a room named after Thomas Becket, directly above the medieval Pilgrim Chapel - and the abbey's own garden has a labyrinth laid out for quiet walking and prayer. What survives physically from the dark years above is mostly the tower: Norman stonework up to its first two storeys, rebuilt in the Early English style above after the 1190 fire - the same tower in the photo at the top of this story.

Source: Victoria County History of Kent (1926), British History Online, Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries (1922), Malling Abbey, Our History, Malling Abbey, Staying with Us, West Malling Local Shops, citing Ghosts of West Malling by Margaret Gadd