Ballygally Castle — The Lady in the Turret
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 the child taken from her.
Case File No. 242
FILE 01 The Legend
James Shaw of Greenock built the castle at Ballygally in 1625, one of the earliest Scottish stronghouses on the County Antrim coast, and the building has been continuously inhabited longer than almost anything in the province — a distinction the hotel that runs it now wears as proudly as its sea views. The haunting is the house's founding tragedy retold: Shaw's young wife, Lady Isabella, is said to have been imprisoned in a corner turret room by her husband — and, in the crueler tellings, to have fallen or been thrown from its window to the rocks below, her infant kept from her before she died. Her ghost has walked the castle ever since, by the staff's long count: footsteps in the turret, a woman in period dress passing the top-floor corridor, and the sound most cited — a child's cry or a mother's calling, heard in the corner of the hotel where the nursery was. Regional press has twice crowned Ballygally the UK's most haunted hotel in national surveys, and in 2025 the Irish Times spent a night in the turret room and filed the earnest, chilled dispatch the castle has been collecting for four centuries. The hotel's response is the best in the business: the turret room is kept unlet, dressed as the Ghost Room, and open for guests to visit — Northern Ireland's most reliable booking. A second resident, a shrouded old woman said to walk the gardens, comes free with the first.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The house file: Lady Isabella's footsteps and figure in the turret stair and top corridor; the sound of a child crying in the corner rooms; doors opening along the empty top floor; and garden guests reporting the shroubed woman among the castle walls at dusk.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
No record documents Isabella's fall — the tragedy is 17th-century oral tradition written down in the age of tourist brochures, and the hotel's own enthusiasm is the story's chief curator. Castle acoustics do the rest: turrets amplify wind and plumbing alike. What stands is a genuinely rare survival — a 1625 tower house never abandoned, on one of the great coastal roads, with a ghost whose economics the accountants have mastered.