Peter Underwood: Britain’s Ghost Hunter and Investigator of the Haunted

Peter Underwood was one of Britain’s most respected and prolific investigators of ghosts, hauntings, and paranormal phenomena. During a long career that spanned decades, he investigated hundreds of reported hauntings, wrote extensively on ghost lore, and became closely associated with some of the most famous haunted locations in Britain.

He was formerly president of the Ghost Club and later founded the Ghost Club Society. Known in the media as “Britain’s Number One Ghost Hunter,” Underwood represented a careful middle path between scepticism and belief. He did not accept every ghost story at face value, but neither did he dismiss the possibility that some hauntings were genuine.

For Underwood, the study of ghosts required patience, discipline, open-mindedness, historical research, and a willingness to separate folklore, misinterpretation, fraud, psychic phenomena, and genuine mystery.

Early Life and First Paranormal Experience

Peter Underwood was born on 16 May 1923 in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire. He came from a deeply religious family. His father was an elder in the Plymouth Brethren, and the atmosphere of his early life was shaped by religious seriousness and moral discipline.

Underwood’s first major paranormal experience occurred when he was only nine years old. Shortly after his father’s death, he awoke during the night and saw an apparition of his father standing at the foot of the bed. He woke his mother, who later admitted that she too had seen the ghost. However, she refused to discuss the experience afterwards.

This childhood encounter left a deep impression on him. It was not a distant ghost story told by someone else, but a personal experience connected with grief, death, family, and the possibility that the dead might somehow return.

A Childhood Fascination with Haunted Houses

From an early age, Underwood was fascinated by ghost stories and haunted places. His grandparents lived in a haunted house in Hertfordshire, and he would take visitors to the haunted room and tell them the story of the ghost said to appear there.

Many of these visitors responded by saying that they too had ghosts or strange phenomena in their own homes. This sparked Underwood’s interest in collecting and investigating reports of hauntings.

He began occasional investigations on his own and with friends. Over time, these investigations became more frequent and more serious. What began as childhood fascination developed into a lifelong vocation.

Early Career and Family Life

After a private education, Underwood began working at the printing and binding works of J. M. Dent and Sons, the well-known publishing company. After three years, he moved into the firm’s publishing office.

In 1942, he was called to join the Suffolk Regiment, but was later discharged on health grounds because of a weak chest. In 1944, he married Joyce Elizabeth Davey. They had two children: Chris, born in 1946, and Pamela, born in 1949.

Although Underwood worked in publishing for many years, his true passion remained ghost investigation, psychical research, and the study of haunted places. His publishing background also helped prepare him for the writing career that would later make him one of Britain’s best-known authors on the paranormal.

Joining the Society for Psychical Research

Underwood joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1947. The SPR was one of the most important organisations in the history of psychical investigation, founded to examine claims of telepathy, mediumship, apparitions, hauntings, and other paranormal phenomena with seriousness and discipline.

Underwood was especially interested in spontaneous phenomena: apparitions, hauntings, ghostly sounds, deathbed visions, crisis apparitions, and unexplained disturbances that occurred without deliberate séance conditions.

However, his interests soon broadened. After witnessing flying trumpets and other apparently supernormal phenomena at a séance at the College of Psychic Studies, he also became interested in mediumship and induced psychic phenomena.

He participated in the first official SPR investigation of a haunted house in Buckinghamshire. The investigation was featured on television news and strengthened his commitment to paranormal research.

Borley Rectory and Harry Price

In 1947, Underwood visited Borley Rectory for the first time. Borley was famously called “the most haunted house in England,” largely because of the work of ghost hunter Harry Price.

Underwood did not encounter anything obviously paranormal during that first visit, but he did hear distinct footsteps in the direction of the Nun’s Walk, where the ghost of a nun was said to appear.

That same year, Harry Price invited Underwood to join the London-based Ghost Club. This began Underwood’s long association with Borley and with Price’s legacy.

After Price’s death in 1948, Underwood became literary executor of the Harry Price estate. His interest in Borley continued for many years, and he interviewed almost everyone involved in the case. With Paul Tabori, he co-authored The Ghosts of Borley, published in 1973.

The Borley Bell

One of the more curious objects associated with Borley Rectory was the Borley Bell, which had hung in the rectory courtyard and was said to ring by itself.

In 1973, the bell was given to Underwood by the Harry Price estate. He placed it at the door of his cottage. Unlike its haunted reputation at Borley, the bell did not ring by itself in Underwood’s possession.

This detail reflects Underwood’s cautious attitude. He was fascinated by haunted objects and ghostly traditions, but he did not exaggerate phenomena when nothing occurred. His approach was rooted in observation, not blind belief.

President of the Ghost Club

In 1960, Underwood became president of the Ghost Club, one of Britain’s most famous organisations dedicated to the study of ghosts and hauntings.

The Ghost Club had a long and unusual history, attracting writers, investigators, spiritualists, sceptics, and seekers fascinated by the paranormal. Underwood’s leadership helped keep ghost investigation visible, organised, and connected to both historical research and field investigation.

In 1966, he joined the Savage Club, a prestigious London gentlemen’s club with literary and artistic associations. In 1987, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

By the early 1970s, Underwood had left his publishing career at Dent’s and devoted himself to writing, lecturing, media work, and paranormal investigation.

Britain’s Number One Ghost Hunter

By the 1970s, Peter Underwood had become widely known in the media as “Britain’s Number One Ghost Hunter.” This title reflected not only his investigations, but also his ability to communicate ghost lore to the public through books, lectures, interviews, and television appearances.

He investigated hundreds of reported hauntings. These included famous cases such as the Queen’s House Ghost of Greenwich, which produced one of the best-known alleged ghost photographs, and the hauntings of the church and manor house at Langenhoe, Essex, which he investigated over a twelve-year period.

Underwood’s reputation rested on his wide experience. He had studied hauntings, séances, apparitions, poltergeists, ghost photographs, precognition, clairvoyance, hypnotism, ESP, and psychic impressions. His work bridged ghost lore, psychical research, folklore, and popular paranormal investigation.

The Ghost Club Society

In 1993, Underwood left the Ghost Club because of internal disagreement and formed the Ghost Club Society. He became its life president and chief investigator.

The Ghost Club Society continued his approach to ghost investigation: serious, historically aware, open to paranormal possibilities, but not uncritically credulous.

Although the Ghost Club Society is now inactive, it forms an important part of Underwood’s legacy. It reflected his belief that ghost investigation should be organised, respectful, and rooted in both evidence and tradition.

Underwood’s View of Ghosts

Peter Underwood did not believe that all hauntings were the same. He argued that there were different types of ghosts and ghostly manifestations, and that many reported hauntings had natural explanations.

This is one of the reasons he remains important. He did not reduce every ghost to one simple theory. Instead, he recognised that different cases may arise from different causes: memory, atmosphere, psychic energy, human perception, trauma, place, spirit survival, or misinterpretation.

For Underwood, the serious ghost hunter had to ask not only whether a ghost was present, but what kind of ghost or phenomenon might be involved.

Elemental Ghosts

One category identified by Underwood was the elemental ghost. These manifestations were, in his view, primitive, ancient, or connected with racial memory and the deeper atmosphere of the land.

Elemental ghosts were most often associated with rural places and particular sites. They were rare, but when encountered they were often frightening, hostile, and difficult to understand. Unlike traditional apparitions, they did not always appear human. They might carry symbolic, magical, or deeply unsettling qualities.

Underwood believed that exorcism did not always work in such cases, perhaps because these phenomena were not ordinary ghosts of the dead but something older, more instinctive, or more deeply rooted in the place itself.

Poltergeists and Psycho-Activated Phenomena

Underwood also recognised poltergeists and what he described as psycho-activated phenomena. These included disturbances that might be triggered by intense emotion, crisis, trauma, death, or psychological pressure.

Poltergeist activity is usually physical and disruptive: noises, object movement, knocks, raps, breakages, and other disturbances. Underwood, like many psychical researchers, understood that some such cases might be linked to living persons rather than independent ghosts.

He also placed deathbed visions and crisis apparitions within the broader field of psychic phenomena connected to death, trauma, and emotional intensity.

Traditional and Historical Ghosts

Traditional or historical ghosts are the kind most commonly associated with old houses, castles, inns, churches, and historic buildings.

These apparitions often appear in period clothing. They may glide through rooms, walk corridors, descend staircases, or follow paths that correspond to older floorplans rather than the current structure of the building. They rarely speak and often seem unaware of the living.

Underwood believed that many such ghosts appeared to be connected with suffering, tragedy, or strong emotion during life. They might not be intelligent communicators, but rather lingering figures caught in a pattern.

Mental Imprints and Atmospheric Photographs

Another type of ghost identified by Underwood was the mental imprint or atmospheric photograph.

These hauntings seem less like conscious spirits and more like recordings. A scene, figure, sound, or emotional impression appears to have been imprinted on the atmosphere of a place. Sensitive individuals may then perceive the imprint under certain conditions.

These ghosts often appear from particular angles or at particular times. If the conditions are not right, the apparition may vanish or fail to appear. Unlike an intelligent ghost, an imprint does not interact. It simply repeats.

Underwood suggested that such imprints may fade over time, though repeated sightings by the living might somehow revive or reinforce the psychic energy that sustains them.

Time Distortion and Cyclic Ghosts

Underwood also wrote about time distortion and cyclic ghosts. These are phenomena that seem like replays of the past breaking into the present.

He described them as a kind of “hiccup in time.” In such cases, witnesses may appear to glimpse people, scenes, buildings, or events from another era. The famous Versailles ghosts have sometimes been discussed in this context.

When these scenes recur periodically, they become cyclic ghosts. They do not necessarily appear to be spirits of the dead. Instead, they may be moments of time replaying themselves under unknown conditions.

Ghosts of the Living

One of Underwood’s most intriguing categories was the ghost of the living. These may be projections of a double, connected with bilocation, telepathy, clairvoyance, or errors in perception.

Underwood himself may have been the subject of such a projection. In his autobiography No Common Task, he described an incident from the 1950s involving a coffee house in Goodwin’s Court, London.

He often stopped there in the morning. One day he arrived with the poet and author James Turner, only to be told by the proprietor that he had already come in half an hour earlier, alone and wearing a different suit. The earlier “Underwood” had smiled and nodded, but disappeared before the coffee could be served.

Whether this was a case of mistaken identity, bilocation, or a psychic double remains open, but Underwood considered such possibilities seriously.

Haunted Objects

Underwood was also interested in haunted objects, especially those associated with poltergeist phenomena. Objects may acquire reputations for bringing disturbances, noises, movement, misfortune, or ghostly phenomena into homes.

The idea of a haunted object is ancient and widespread. It suggests that psychic energy, spirit attachment, memory, trauma, or symbolic force may cling not only to places but also to physical things.

Objects such as screaming skulls, bells, furniture, mirrors, portraits, and relics often appear in ghost lore. For Underwood, such cases deserved attention, but also careful scrutiny.

Books and Writings

Peter Underwood wrote more than 45 books on haunted places, ghost investigation, the supernatural, and related subjects. His work helped shape modern British ghost lore and made many haunted locations known to wider audiences.

His best-known books include A Gazetteer of British Ghosts, Into the Occult, Haunted London, A Gazetteer of Scottish and Irish Ghosts, The Vampire’s Bedside Companion, No Common Task: The Autobiography of a Ghost-Hunter, The Ghost-Hunter’s Guide, Dictionary of the Supernatural, Queen Victoria’s Other World, Exorcism!, Death in Hollywood, and Borley Postscript.

His writing was accessible, atmospheric, and rich in case material. He combined the instincts of a storyteller with the discipline of an investigator.

Later Life and Legacy

Underwood’s wife Joyce died in 2003 after living with Parkinson’s disease for many years. In later life, his companion was Marlena Sypniewska, a native of Poland.

He donated some of his personal and professional items from ghost investigations to Troy Taylor. These objects were displayed at the History and Hauntings bookstore in Alton, Illinois.

Peter Underwood died in 2014, leaving behind a major body of work and a reputation as one of Britain’s most enduring ghost investigators.

His legacy is not that he proved every ghost story true. It is that he took the subject seriously. He listened to witnesses, visited sites, gathered accounts, compared theories, and tried to understand the many forms that haunting may take.

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Why Peter Underwood Still Matters

Peter Underwood still matters because he represents a thoughtful and balanced approach to the paranormal. He understood that most hauntings may have natural explanations, but he also believed that some experiences cannot be easily dismissed.

He knew that ghosts are not all the same. Some may be spirits of the dead. Some may be emotional imprints. Some may be moments of time replaying themselves. Some may be projections of the living. Some may be products of fear, folklore, or misperception.

This range of possibilities is exactly what makes ghost investigation so compelling.

Underwood’s work reminds us that the haunted world is not simple. It is layered with memory, grief, place, history, atmosphere, psychic impression, and human longing.

He was not merely a collector of ghost stories. He was a mapmaker of the haunted imagination.

And through his books, investigations, and legacy, Peter Underwood remains one of the great names in the history of British ghost hunting.