Tulloch Castle Hotel, Dingwall in Ross and Cromarty, has a ghost which rattles door handles, and a green lady, who is the ghost of someone who died falling down a spiral staircase.
Ruthin Castle, Ruthin, Denbighshire, has a grey lady who is the ghost of a woman who killed her lover with an axe.
Raynham Hall in Norfolk had a brown lady, believed to be the ghost of Lady Dorothy Townsend, wife of Turnip Townsend, but she has never appeared again since the famous photograph of her, which appears below, was taken in the 1930s.
Gwydir Castle in the Conwy Valley has a north wing which is haunted by the ghost of a servant girl murdered after becoming pregnant. It also has a phantom dog and crying children.
The Talbot Hotel, Oundle, has a staircase which was once part of Fotheringay Castle, and which Mary Queen of Scots still haunts as she re-enacts her walk down those stairs to her execution.
The most haunted house in England, according to some ghost hunters, is Roos Hall, a mansion on the outskirts of Beccles in Suffolk, which has a hanging tree in its grounds - an oak tree which once served as a gibbet on which many local criminals ended their days.
Hanging men are a common means by which trees are haunted. The shade of a man hung for stealing a branch from the laird's favourite tree at Careston Castle, Angus, is often seen dangling from trees in the neighbourhood.
A man whose master killed two soldiers at the village mill at Fordill in Fife, and then fled to escape the consequences, was hung in his place, and now is sometimes to be seen hanging from trees in the neighbourhood, with his eyes bulging from their sockets.
The ghost of a man who tried several times to hang himself on trees at Stoke Hall, Grindleford, Derbyshire, and then hung himself successfully from a beam in a barn, when the branches kept breaking under his weight, can be seen running around the trees searching for a suitable one again.
One of the most haunted buildings in Wales, The Skirrid Inn at Llanfihange, has a beam on the staircase which once served as a gibbet, and on which over 180 people, some of whom still haunt the place, have been hanged over the years.
The most haunted house on the National Trusts' list of their properties in Britain is said to be Blickling Hall in Norfolk, which includes Ann Boleyn, her brother George, and Sir John Fastolfe among its impressive list of the ghosts who put in an appearance there.
Not on the same day as Anne is haunting the Tower of London, of course, along with Henry IV, Thomas Beckett and the Countess of Salisbury, whose ghost is pursued and hacked to death by the ghost of the axe man who gave chase when she fled from the scaffold.
Anne and her family didn't have their deaths foretold by trees in the grounds of the houses they owned, but some people do. A lime tree in the grounds of Cuckfield Park, at Cuckfield in Sussex, drops a branch whenever a member of the family in the nearby house dies, and a farm at Stalybridge in Lancashire is home to a tree with leaves which shake violently just prior to the death of any member of the family who lives there, regardless of wind or weather conditions.
It probably isn't a yew tree, because they don't have the type of leaves to shake like that, but they do often have the reputation of being haunted in some way simply because of their appearance of antiquity.
The yew grove at Cholderton in Wiltshire was sacred to the druids, and is still haunted by a sad and oppressive atmosphere because of the rites they once carried out there.
The second yew tree on the right after entering the church yard at Nevern in Dyfed is known as the bleeding yew, because blood is said to drip from a stump where a branch was severed.
Brockdish Hall, near Harleston in Norfolk, is haunted by a ghost with a connection to another of the druid's sacred plants. Known as the mistletoe bride, she is the ghost of a girl who, whilst playing hide and seek with her husband on their wedding night, hid herself in a chest which could only be opened from the outside. The riddle of her strange disappearance wasn't solved until fifty years later, when the chest was opened, and a skeleton wearing a bridal grown was found clasping a sprig of mistletoe.
Harleston was where I used to spend my holidays as a child, and where there was an old house with a boarded up window in the upper story, behind which was a bedroom which the owners wouldn't use because it was so badly haunted. I was fascinated by that house and its boarded up window, and would stand looking at it for hours whenever I was staying in the village, hoping that the ghost would put in an appearance, but it never did.
Nor did the ghost of one of the Bishops of London, who was supposed to come up behind unwary gardeners working at Fulham Palace and tap them on the shoulder if they weren't working hard enough. Of course, that might have because when I was there I was never idle enough to draw his attention.
I have written three ghost stories now, and if you are interested in ghosts they ought to appeal to you.
Why Weeps the Willow - The north Norfolk
coast in the autumn of 1917. A teenage girl tries to find her way through the
pitfalls of her first love affair, a ruthless woman determines to hold on to
her family's estates at any cost, a restless ghost searches for the means of experiencing physical love again, a soldier is invalided home from the battlefields of France suffering from amnesia. Add incest, espionage and murder, then try to answer the question posed on a suicide's grave. Why
Weeps the Willow?
Let Sleeping Evils Lie – a
midnight vigil in a churchyard by students trying to contact a ghost said to
haunt it, and some impromptu dabbling with an Ouija board in a youth club a few
days later, awaken a sleeping evil it would have been better to leave
undisturbed.
Murder out of
Memory - A compelling tale of love and murder, told by the ghosts of the two
people involved. Or were they ghosts?
Even after battling to put right the grave miscarriage of justice he’d
discovered had followed the murder, Peter was still not completely sure about
that.
