Berry Pomeroy Castle
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.
Case File No. 112
FILE 01 The Legend
The Pomeroys raised the castle in the late 15th century and sold it in 1547 to the Seymours, who began a grand Elizabethan house inside the old walls and never finished it. By 1701 it was already a ruin. Its two legends: the White Lady is Margaret Pomeroy, imprisoned in the dungeon by her jealous sister Eleanor and left to starve; the Blue Lady is older and worse — a Norman lord's daughter said to have killed her own child and now seen by the road, beckoning for help so that those who follow her to the tower fall to their deaths.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
English Heritage's own guidebook calls the castle 'reputedly be one of the most haunted in Britain'. Visitors report a woman in white in the dungeon level, sudden dread on Margaret's Tower, and the sound of a child crying near the gatehouse; paranormal groups hold regular night investigations on the site.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The castle's documented record is about property and decline, not murder: no historical Margaret-or-Eleanor imprisonment exists in the family papers, and the two ladies are stock figures of Romantic-era ghost-making. The ruin became a celebrated 'picturesque' tourist destination in the 19th century — exactly when its hauntings entered print. A dramatic ruin acquired dramatic stories, as dramatic ruins reliably do.