Haunted Castles of Europe
From Bran to Houska, Glamis to Predjama — Europe's fortress canon, castles that kept their dead.
Edinburgh Castle & the Vaults
S · Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom — A fortress on volcanic rock above haunted underground vaults — home to the best-controlled ghost experiment ever run.…
Leap Castle
A · County Offaly, Ireland — Ireland's most feared castle — an 'Elemental' spirit guards an oubliette stuffed with human bones.…
Charleville Castle
B · Tullamore, County Offaly, Ireland — A Gothic revival fortress where a little girl who fell down the stairs in 1861 still plays.…
Moosham Castle — The Witches' Castle
B · Unternberg, Salzburg, Austria — Austrian witch trials sent women to this castle's dungeons — where instruments of the executions are still displayed.…
Frankenstein Castle — Darmstadt
B · Mühltal, Hesse, Germany — The ruined castle that may have given Mary Shelley her name — where an alchemist allegedly dug up corpses in the 1600s.…
Dragsholm Castle — The Earl, the White Lady and the Pillar
B · Odsherred, Zealand, Denmark — Denmark's oldest castle kept a mad earl chained in its tower for decades — and in the 1930s, workmen found a skeleton in the walls.…
Houska Castle — The Castle Built on a Hole
A · Blatce, Central Bohemia, Czech Republic — A 13th-century castle with no fortification value, no water, no kitchen — built, legend says, to seal a bottomless pit of demons.…
Bran Castle — Dracula's Castle
S · Bran, Transylvania, Romania — The mountain castle the world calls Dracula's — though Bram Stoker never saw it, and Vlad the Impaler may never have either.…
Berry Pomeroy Castle
B · Totnes, Devon, United Kingdom — An ivy-strangled Tudor ruin in a Devon valley, home to two of England's most spiteful ghosts — a starved sister in white and a fatal blue lady who beckons from the tower.…
Château de Trécesson
B · Campénéac, Brittany, France — A red-schist moated castle on the edge of Brocéliande forest, keeper of Brittany's grimmest printed legend: a bride buried alive at her own wedding night, and card players who neve…
Mikhailovsky Castle
B · St Petersburg, Russia — The engineered palace where Emperor Paul I lived just forty days before being murdered in his own bedroom — and where St Petersburg's sentries still claim to see him walking.…
Ogrodzieniec Castle
B · Podzamcze near Ogrodzieniec, Poland — Poland's grandest castle ruin, on the highest hill of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland — and the certain home of a huge black dog that drags a heavy chain across the courtyard on moon…
Niedzica Castle — The Inca Princess of the Carpathians
B · Niedzica, Poland — A 14th-century Dunajec castle where an Inca princess is said to have been murdered — and whose lost testament may still point to a treasure of the Incas.…
Čachtice Castle — The Blood Countess's Ruin
A · Čachtice, Slovakia — The roofless ruin where Elizabeth Báthory was walled in until her death — and where Slovak folklore says the girls she killed still wait.…
Chillingham Castle — The Blue Boy's Chamber
A · Chillingham, Northumberland, England — England's most continuously inhabited border fortress, dungeon of the wars with Scotland — where the Blue Boy, the torturer and the grey lady share the guides' script.…
Voergaard Castle — Ingeborg Skeel's Moat
B · Dronninglund, North Jutland, Denmark — A moated Renaissance fortress in northern Jutland whose reputation was built on its most capable owner — a 16th-century noblewoman remembered as a witch instead.…
Glamis Castle — The Monster and the Grey Lady
A · Glamis, Angus, Scotland — The Bowes-Lyon family seat, Shakespeare's 'Thane of Glamis' — keeper of Victorian Britain's favourite aristocratic secret and two ghosts, one of them still checking the accounts.…
Orava Castle — Nosferatu's Rocky Throne
B · Oravský Podzámok, Slovakia — A limestone-crag fortress that played Count Orlok's castle in the 1922 film Nosferatu — and provides its own white lady on All Souls' Day, per the regional tourist board.…
Warwick Castle — The Ghost Tower's Poet
B · Warwick, Warwickshire, United Kingdom — England's medieval showpiece castle, where the tower now officially branded the Ghost Tower belongs to a Jacobean poet-statesman stabbed there by his own servant in 1628.…
Margam Castle — The Gamekeeper's House
B · Port Talbot, Neath Port Talbot, United Kingdom — A vast Tudor-Gothic country house in Welsh parkland, branded one of Britain's most haunted buildings — anchored by the documented 1898 murder of the estate's gamekeeper.…
Muncaster Castle — Tom Fool's House
A · Ravenglass, Cumbria, United Kingdom — Eight centuries of one family on the Cumbrian coast, and a haunted reputation built on a real court jester — Tom Fool — whose cruel jest is said to have ended in murder.…
Corvin Castle — Transylvania's Other Castle
B · Hunedoara, Transylvania, Romania — The largest medieval castle in south-eastern Europe — towers, drawbridge, and a knight's legend of three prisoners who dug a well for a freedom they were never given — now branded …
Fyvie Castle — The Green Lady and the Weeping Stone
B · Fyvie, Turriff, Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom — Five towers raised by five families in Aberdeenshire, held by the National Trust for Scotland — and haunted by a Green Lady whose name a grieving husband carved in stone, beside a …
Ballygally Castle — The Lady in the Turret
B · Ballygally, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom — A 1625 Scottish baronial castle on the Antrim coast road — Northern Ireland's most haunted hotel, whose corner turret is kept as a ghost room for the lady said to be searching for …
Haapsalu Castle — The White Lady in the Wall
A · Haapsalu, Lääne County, Estonia — A 13th-century bishop's fortress on Estonia's west coast whose baptistery window shows a woman's white figure each August — a legend of a girl walled up alive that the town's own t…
Iulia Hasdeu Castle — The Castle a Dead Girl Designed
B · Câmpina, Prahova, Romania — A small folly castle in Câmpina built 1893–96 by Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu to plans he said were dictated from beyond the grave by his dead teenage daughter — now a county museum th…
Bánffy Castle, Bonțida — The Versailles of Transylvania
B · Bonțida, Cluj County, Romania — The Bánffy family's seat from the 1430s — looted and burned in 1944 after serving as a German military hospital, then half-collapsed under communism — now a half-ruin under restora…
Predjama Castle — The Robber Knight's Cave Fortress
A · Predjama, Inner Carniola, Slovenia — The Renaissance castle built into the mouth of a cave where robber baron Erazem of Lueg defied a Habsburg siege for a year — supplied in secret through a vertical shaft — until, le…
Kórnik Castle — The White Lady of the Dining Hall
B · Kórnik, Greater Poland, Poland — The neo-Gothic castle near Poznań whose 18th-century chatelaine never checked out: Teofila Działyńska (1715–1790), whose white-gowned portrait steps down at midnight to walk the ha…
Špilberk Castle — The Dungeon of Nations
A · Brno, South Moravian Region, Czech Republic — The hilltop fortress above Brno that Emperor Joseph II turned in 1783 into the Habsburg Empire's prison of last resort — where Baron Trenck died in chains, the Italian poet Silvio …
Rozafa — The Mother Walled Into the Mountain
A · Shkodër, Shkodër County, Albania — The Illyrian fortress rock above Shkodra carrying the Balkans' most famous immurement legend — three brothers whose walls fell each night until the youngest bride was walled in ali…
The Buda Labyrinth — Dracula's Cell Under the Castle
B · Buda Castle, Budapest, Hungary — The natural cave system threading Buda Castle Hill — prehistoric shelter, prison and torture chamber, Ottoman harem, wartime refuge — where tradition says King Matthias Corvinus he…
Wawel — The Castle Where the Dead Queens Walk
A · Kraków, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland — Poland's royal castle above the Vistula, where the grieving king Sigismund Augustus had the sorcerer Pan Twardowski summon his dead queen Barbara Radziwiłł from the grave — and whe…
Siesikai Castle — The Duchess in the Tower
B · Siesikai, Ukmergė District, Lithuania — A lakeside Renaissance castle begun in the 1490s by a family descended from the duke who killed Lithuania's first king, whose White Lady — a young wife bricked alive into the tower…
Kuressaare Castle — The Knight in the Sealed Cellar
A · Kuressaare, Saare County, Estonia — The best-preserved medieval convent castle in the Baltics, where — by the story that gives the cellar its name — an engineer opening a walled-up room in 1785 found a seated skeleto…
Turku Castle — The Elf on the Museum Payroll
B · Turku, Southwest Finland, Finland — Finland's largest surviving medieval building, keep of the western half of the country for five hundred years — and home of the Tonttu-ukko, the grey-bearded house-spirit who is in…
Nesvizh Castle — The Black Lady of Barbara Radziwiłł
A · Nyasvizh, Minsk Region, Belarus — The Radziwiłł palace where, by Belarus's most famous ghost story, King Sigismund II Augustus broke the one rule of the séance — do not touch the spirit — and condemned his dead wif…
Gjirokastër Castle — The Princess on the Wall
B · Gjirokastër, Albania — The stone fortress above Albania's UNESCO city of stone, carrying a three-layer canon — the princess who leapt from the wall with her child, the bride turned to rock on the cliff b…
Pidhirtsi Castle — The White Lady and the Golden Lady
A · Pidhirtsi, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine — A Renaissance residence of Polish magnates and kings whose white-lady legend was investigated on national television, whose park and cellars are said to be patrolled by spirits, an…
Hohenzollern Castle — The Family Omen in White
A · Bisingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany — The ancestral seat of the Hohenzollerns, rebuilt as a nineteenth-century neo-medieval crown above Swabia, keeps the dynasty's own omen: a woman in white whose appearances, recorded…
Dudley Castle — The Grey Lady of the Zoo
A · Dudley, West Midlands, England — The Norman castle above the Black Country, whose grounds became Dudley Zoo in 1937 — and whose Grey Lady has been reported by staff for a century and a half: Dorothy Beaumont, dead…
Cardiff Castle — The Marquess at the Fireplace
B · Cardiff, Wales, Wales — Two thousand years of fortification in central Cardiff — Roman walls, a Norman keep, and the Gothic fantasy the Bute coal fortune built — where the 2nd Marquess still walks: a red-…
Bodelwyddan Castle — The Grey Lady and the Moved Portrait
B · Bodelwyddan, Denbighshire, Wales — The castellated house of the Williams family on the north Wales coast, rebuilt in the 1820s-30s and made a convalescent hospital for the wounded of the Western Front in the First W…
New Slains Castle — The Castle on the Cliff that Wrote Dracula
B · Cruden Bay, Aberdeenshire, Scotland — The roofless ruin on the clifftop at Cruden Bay where Bram Stoker, holidaying in the village through the 1890s, found the architecture of Castle Dracula — the octagonal hall of the…
Czocha Castle — The Ghost Fortress and its College of Wizardry
B · Sucha (Gmina Leśna), Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland — A thirteenth-century fortress above a Silesian lake that Poland calls one of its most haunted castles — a White Lady in the halls, two ghosts of lovers said to walk together, a Wel…