Members of the Royal Family live in fantastic palaces and regal homes filled with immense history. As a result, it's perhaps unsurprising to learn that, back in 2000, Queen Elizabeth II was involved in conducting an exorcism inside the main house on the Sandringham Estate. And according to one royal expert, the Royal Family were allegedly attempting to remove a mysterious presence from the room in question.
Queen Elizabeth II, her mom the Queen Mother, and her lady-in-waiting, Prue Penn, reportedly all took part in the Sandringham exorcism at the turn of the millennium. Speaking on his Daily Mail podcast, "Queens, Kings, and Dastardly Things," royal biographer Robert Hardman said (via People), "It wasn't a conventional exorcism."
He continued, "There was no dramatic casting out of demons, like you see in films. It was said that the room contained a troubled spirit and that the parson was supposed to bless the space."
As for the identity of the so-called "spirit" the royals wanted to exorcize from Sandringham, Hardman explained, "No-one was quite sure who the ghost was supposed to be, despite it appearing in the room where George VI [father of Queen Elizabeth II] had died." The royal biographer further noted that it had been "speculated whether it might be the ghost of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, who had died a few years before [in August 1997]."
Discussing whether or not the monarch would have been in the room for the exorcism itself, Hardman said, "The late Queen had a strong faith, but she was not superstitious." He continued, "She did not have time for these wilder theories—but she did have a strong sense of the spiritual, as does King Charles."
It remains unclear as to whether or not the "exorcism" made any noticeable difference to the house at Sandringham, but it's certainly one of the more unexpected tales from Queen Elizabeth's life.
