The owner of a £6m country pile in West Sussex is blaming Adele for his failure to sell the property, says Sophia Money-Coutts on Substack. “Poor old” Nicholas Sutton rented out the Grade II listed, 10-bedroom house to the singer back in 2012, but she left after six months because she thought the place was haunted and it “gave her the creeps”. She even made her bodyguard stay overnight, though I do wonder what she thought he might do. “Stick his fist through the ghost’s neck?” Either way, Adele evidently didn’t realise that living in a house full of ghosts is in fact “very grand”.

The Duchess of Argyll once told me her castle in Scotland has five of them, as if she were listing the number of bathrooms. They included a murdered harpist, a kitchen maid, and a bagpipe player who sometimes performs in the library. Ham House in Richmond supposedly has 15 or 16 ghouls, including a King Charles Cavalier (“incredibly posh”) and a duchess, whom the staff still greet on entering her old bedroom – a much more sensible approach than “getting your bodyguard involved”. Lady Shaw-Stewart of Ardgowan House in Scotland once gushed that the countless ghosts in her home were “charming”. Francis Fulford (of The Fucking Fulfords TV fame) has had a “gung-ho attitude” towards the spirits ever since he tried to punch one that appeared on his bed in his Tudor manor house when he was five. Clearly, every aristocrat has “at least one” ghoulish companion. So if you’re tempted to buy Adele’s former home, go for it. It would be frightfully middle class to “worry too much about the ghosts”.

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