Queen Elizabeth’s Spooky Pastime At Balmoral Castle Is Quite Shocking

Queen Elizabeth is heading to Balmoral Castle soon as she always spends her summers in Scotland. She will be joined later by Prince William, Kate Middleton, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle and other members of the royal family, but as she will be going there ahead of everyone else, she will have to spend a lot of time alone.

The castle in Scotland is the Queen’s favorite holiday home, and it is privately owned by the British royal family. The place is perfect, but there is one flaw — Balmoral Castle is known to be a home for bats too. According to The Sun, the ballroom of the Aberdeenshire estate is infested with pipistrelle bats, and they stay in the rafters.

Royal commentator Adam Helliker said that when he checked the place last summer, a colony of bats was still there. The staff is said to be having a hard time dealing with the mammals that inhabited the castle, but they can't really do anything as sending them away is not an option.

“They can’t get rid of them,” Helliker said. “Lots of the servants want to get rid of them as they defecate all over the place. They are a protected species so they can’t move them. You can’t move bats when it’s their habitat.”

Rather than being afraid of them, it was revealed that Queen Elizabeth developed a hobby or pastime involving these creatures every time she’s in her Scotland home. Adam revealed that for the past three decades, he has been gathering the bats, and the head of the British monarch played with them.

The 93-year-old royal matriarch is said to have a butterfly net, and she uses it to catch the creatures. She is said to be doing this gently as she doesn’t want to harm the bats when she frees them outside of the castle.

Royal chronicler Brian Hoey described the Queen’s interaction with the bats as something that has become her pastime whenever she stays at Balmoral Castle. He said that Her Majesty truly enjoys this activity with her staff.

“In the later afternoon it was quite common to see Her Majesty call for a butterfly net so that she could catch the bats which infest the upper reaches of the castle,” he narrated. “She would catch them in the net, hand them to me and tell me to let them go outside. She was always very strict about them not being harmed.”

Queen Elizabeth really loves animals. And aside from her famous corgis, the bats are the other “pets” she has. It was said that the Queen doesn’t catch them anymore and just watches her staff do it.

The Queen is said to stand at the sides and shout encouragement as she pays attention to the proceedings. The activity is said to be more of a show put on for her by the staff, and this is just one of the things that Queen Elizabeth is said to do to avert her boredom.