There are many ghost stories of Grey Ladies that haunt certain places. It’s interesting that most of these ghosts wish to warn the living about something or other. The Grey Lady of Malta’s Fort St Angelo is no exception.
Long before the famous Knights arrived in Malta, the Spanish crown of Aragon ruled over Malta. On 5 July 1469, the lord of the Fort St Angelo (known as the Castellano del Castello di Malta) was the Aragonese Giovanni di Nava. He inherited this title and role from a family member who was the castle lord before him1.
At the time, Fort St Angelo was nothing like the imposing structure we see today.
Read my article about the fortifications of the Fort to see how they evolved.
Since the Knights had yet to arrive, it was just the original castle on top of this promontory.
He married one of the noble ladies of Malta, Isabella di Mazara1. It wasn’t long before he took a mistress. She wanted to have the same status as Isabella and be treated as her equal2. (Some sources claim the mistress’ attention was unwanted. This suggests either di Nava tired of her, or his wife put pressure on him3.) This was not something di Nava was prepared to accept. He was afraid the affair would become public so he ordered his guards to get rid of her.
The guards killed her and sealed her body in the castle dungeons2. Di Nava was furious because he only intended them to send her away. In his anger he had the guards killed too. This sounds like English King Henry II’s, ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ story so I wonder if it is true. Rumour has it that when the authorities were restoring the dungeons, they found three bodies in a sealed dungeon. These were 2 men and a woman. Yet there is no record of anyone making such a discovery, so my guess is this part is apocryphal.
A ghost started to haunt the Fort from that point on and linked to di Nava’s mistress. At first, the stories described her as being vulgar and aggressive. Yet, children who saw her always described her as ‘the nice lady’. Upon the initiative of a Maltese lady, married to a British captain3, priests held an exorcism in the Fort. The hauntings stopped2.
Fast forward to World War II. The British military used Fort St Angelo for many things. They kept injured soldiers in tunnels inside the fort. These patients suffered from mild things like pneumonia or appendicitis. Patients with severe injuries were at the nearby Fort Bighi which was a naval hospital. One day, a group of men reported their room turned cold, and a lady floated into their room. She waved her arm at them indicating she wanted them to leave the room with her. They followed her; as they left, a German bomb hit the room4. The women disappeared and the soldiers told the story of the Grey Lady of Fort St Angelo saving their lives from certain death.
No one has seen her since the war.
Maybe it’s because no one’s been in mortal danger in Fort St Angelo. A more likely explanation is the British military. The British always used Fort St Angelo for military purposes and were keen to keep people away. As one of the curators explained on Maltese daytime television5, a ghost story would have been an excellent way of keeping curious people from pottering around a prime military installation.
Comment below with any ghost story you have!
- Geneology of the Nava Family; Malta Geneology; (Retrieved 2018-04-21) [↩][↩]
- Malta’s most haunted; The Times of Malta; 2009-03-16[↩][↩][↩]
- Valletta Ghost Walk; Malcolm Hanson; ISBN 978-99909-91-26-0; (c) 2006[↩][↩]
- Lady of the Castle; The Horror Movies Blog; 2013-09-25[↩]
- TVAM; Television Malta; (As observed 2017-10-31) [↩]