The Royal Museums Greenwich website tells us about the ghost sightings in the Queen's House:
On Sunday 19 June 1966, the Rev. and Mrs R.W. Hardy, a retired couple on holiday from Canada, were visiting the Queen’s House. Having previously read about the Tulip staircase, they were interested to see it for themselves. Whilst there, standing at the foot of the staircase and looking upward, Mr Hardy took this photograph.
Following their return to Canada, the photograph was developed to reveal a shrouded figure, on the staircase. On closer inspection, the figure appears to be ascending the stairs in pursuit of a second and possibly a third figure.
Unravelling the mystery
In a letter dated 8 May 1967, to Brian Tremain the Museum’s photographer, Mr Hardy describes the conditions under which the photograph was taken.
Time Between 5.15 and 5.30pm on Sunday 19 June 1966
In a postscript to the letter, Mr Hardy goes on to explain that while he was taking the photograph, his wife watched the stairs to ensure that no passers by were in the way. He also notes that the stairs were barred by a 'barrier and no admittance sign’.
Later that month, the Hardys visited the Museum again. They met with Brian Tremain and confirmed that the staircase was bare when the photograph was taken. In fact, Mrs Hardy 'was paying special attention to this point’.
During this visit, Mr Tremain helped them to try and recreate a photograph of the scene with figures appearing on the staircase.
The Ghost Club had also taken an interest in Mr Hardy’s photograph after the relative of a member was shown the transparency. Following correspondence with the Hardys and further examination of the photograph, the Ghost Club had satisfied themselves that 'this picture is genuine and therefore would be most interested to investigate the area of the staircase.’
Seven members of the Ghost Club spent the night of Saturday 24 June 1967 in the Queen’s House. Their purpose was to see the ghost(s), to 'film them, record them, or make contact with them by holding a séance in the vicinity of the staircase.’
Detailed instructions were issued to the participants. They had to wear soft-soled shoes, synchronise watches and carry a working torch, notebook and pencil at all times.
Everything was to be noted down:
'…any whiff of odour or scent…any noise, however slight,…any feeling of a presence, or of being touched…NOTE ANYTHING UNUSUAL – with the TIME.’
One of the participants scribbled their observations down:
22.54 Bell ring
23.12 Luminous stone
23.15 Smell of wet stone at stairway ground floor.
23.22½ Bell one ring…
The handwriting becomes illegible and then stops abruptly.
In spite of these and similar observations, the vigil and séance produced no conclusive evidence of the paranormal.
The story doesn’t end here. In 2002, one of our Gallery Assistants, Tony Anderson, had an unsettling experience in the Queen’s House:
'On Monday 20 May 02 at 9.45am, myself and two colleagues were talking about which breaks we were on, when something caught my eye. One of the doors (double) from the Bridge Room closed and I thought at first it was the girl who does the talks at weekends, then realised the woman just glided across the balcony and went through the wall, west side.
'I could not believe what I saw. I went very cold and the hairs on my arms and neck were on end. We went into the Queen’s Presence Room and looked down towards the old Queen’s Bedroom, and something passed through the ante-room and out through the wall. My two colleagues did also feel cold at that time.
'The lady was dressed in a white-grey colour, old-fashioned, something like a crinoline-type dress.'
So what was it that Tony saw disappear through the wall, and that Mr Hardy captured on film? In a letter to Brian Tremain dated 27 July 1967, Mr Hardy concludes that the mystery 'remains as deep as ever.’
Wikipedia has an article about the Queen's House that tells us:
The Queen's House, Greenwich, is a former royal residence built between 1616–1619 in Greenwich, then a few miles downriver from London, and now a district of the city. Its architect was Inigo Jones, for whom it was a crucial early commission, for Anne of Denmark, the queen of King James I of England. It was altered and completed by Jones, in a second campaign about 1635 for Henrietta Maria, queen of King Charles I. The Queen's House is one of the most important buildings in British architectural history, being the first consciously classical building to have been constructed in Britain. It was Jones's first major commission after returning from his 1613–1615 grand tour of Roman, Renaissance and Palladian architecture in Italy.
Some earlier English buildings, such as Longleat, had made borrowings from the classical style; but these were restricted to small details and were not applied in a systematic way. Nor was the form of these buildings informed by an understanding of classical precedents. The Queen's House would have appeared revolutionary to English eyes in its day. Jones is credited with the introduction of Palladianism with the construction of the Queen's House, although it diverges from the mathematical constraints of Palladio and it is likely that the immediate precedent for the H shaped plan straddling a road is the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano by Giuliano da Sangallo. Today it is both a grade I listed building and a Scheduled ancient monument, a status which includes the 115-foot-wide (35 m), axial vista to the River Thames. The house now forms part of the National Maritime Museum and is used to display parts of their substantial collection of maritime paintings and portraits. It was used as a VIP centre in the 2012 Olympic games.
The Queen's House is located in Greenwich, London, England. It was built as an adjunct to the Tudor Palace of Greenwich, previously known, before its redevelopment by Henry VII as the Palace of Placentia, which was a rambling, mainly red-brick building in a more vernacular style. This would have presented a dramatic contrast of appearance to the newer, white-painted House, although the latter was much smaller and really a modern version of an older tradition of private 'garden houses', not a public building, and one used only by the queen's privileged inner circle. However, the House's original use was short – no more than seven years – before the English Civil War began in 1642 and swept away the court culture from which it sprang. Of its interiors, three ceilings and some wall decorations survive in part, but no interior remains in its original state. This process began as early as 1662, when masons removed a niche and term figures and a chimneypiece.
Paintings commissioned by Charles I for the house from Orazio Gentileschi, but now elsewhere, include a ceiling Allegory of Peace and the Arts, now installed at Marlborough House, London, a large Finding of Moses, now on loan from a private collection to the National Gallery, London, and a matching Joseph and Potiphar's Wife still in the Royal Collection.
The Queen's House, though it was scarcely being used, provided the distant focal centre for Sir Christopher Wren's Greenwich Hospital, with a logic and grandeur that has seemed inevitable to architectural historians but in fact depended on Mary II's insistence that the vista to the water from the Queen's House not be impaired.
From 1806 the House itself was the centre of what, from 1892, became the Royal Hospital School for the sons of seamen. This necessitated new accommodation wings, and a flanking pair to east and west were added and connected to the House by colonnades from 1807 (designed by London Docks architect Daniel Asher Alexander), with further surviving extensions up to 1876. In 1933 the school moved to Holbrook, Suffolk. Its Greenwich buildings, including the House, were converted and restored to become the new National Maritime Museum (NMM), created by Act of Parliament in 1934 and opened in 1937.
The grounds immediately to the north of the House were reinstated in the late 1870s following construction of the cut-and-cover tunnel between Greenwich and Maze Hill stations. The tunnel comprised the continuation of the London and Greenwich Railway and opened in 1878.
The House was further restored between 1986 and 1999, not always sympathetically: an editorial in The Burlington Magazine, November 1995, alluded to "the recent transformation of the Queen's House into a theme-park interior of fake furniture and fireplaces, tatty modern plaster casts and clip-on chandeliers". It is now largely used to display the Museum's substantial collection of marine paintings and portraits of the 17th to 20th centuries, and for other public and private events. It is normally open to the public daily, free of charge, along with the other museum galleries and the 17th-century Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which is also part of the National Maritime Museum.
The "Queen's House" was also the name used for Buckingham House, later to be rebuilt as Buckingham Palace, when it was Queen Charlotte's residence during the reign of George III.
The grounds behind the Queen's House were used to house a stadium for the equestrian events of the Olympic Games in 2012. The modern pentathlon was also staged in the grounds of Greenwich Park. The Queen's House itself was used as a VIP centre for the games. Work to prepare the Queen's House involved some internal re-modelling and work on the lead roof to prepare it for security and camera installations.