Ghosts of the British Isles, Part 1

Part one of our Halloween finale on British Isles ghosts features two very classic ghost tales: the brown lady of Raynham Hall and the ghosts of of Ballygally Castle. 

Research:

• Aldridge, Alfred Owen. “Franklin and the Ghostly Drummer of Tedworth.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, 1950, pp. 559–67. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1917046
• “Ballygally Castle Hotel and it’s Ghost Room.” Ballygally Castle Hotel. https://www.ballygallycastlehotel.com/ballygally-castle-hotel-and-its-ghost-room/
• Belanger, Jeff. “World’s Most Haunted Places.” Rosen Publishing Group. 2009.
• "A blow at modern Sadducism in some philosophical considerations about witchcraft. To which is added, the relation of the fam'd disturbance by the drummer, in the house of Mr. John Mompesson, with some reflections on drollery and atheisme. / By a member of the Royal Society.." In the digital collection Early English Books Online. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A70179.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.
• Briggs, Stacia. “The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall.” Norfolk Folklore Society. Dec. 3, 2023. https://www.norfolkfolkloresociety.co.uk/post/the-brown-lady-ghost-of-raynham-hall
• Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Joseph Glanvill". Encyclopedia Britannica, 6 Mar. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Glanvill
• “The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall.” UK Paranormal Society. https://ukparanormalsociety.org/encyclopedia/the-brown-lady-of-raynham-hall/
• “The day a Country Life photographer captured an image of a ghost, a picture that’s become one of the most famous ‘spirit photography’ images of all time.” Country Life. Oct. 31, 2022. https://www.countrylife.co.uk/nature/the-day-a-country-life-photographer-captured-an-image-of-a-ghost-234642
• Dorney, John. “The Plantation of Ulster: A Brief Overview.” The Irish Story. June 2, 2024. https://www.theirishstory.com/2024/06/02/the-plantation-of-ulster-a-brief-overview/
• Hunter, Michael (2005) New light on the ‘Drummer of Tedworth’: conflicting narratives of witchcraft in Restoration England. London: Birkbeck ePrints. http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/archive/00000250
• Mackay, Charles. Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” London. 1852. Accessed online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
• Mantell, Rowan and Siofra Connor. “Weird Norfolk: The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall.” Eastern Daily Press. August 4, 2018.
• Miles, Abraham. "Wonder of wonders being a true relation of the strange and invisible beating of a drum, at the house of John Mompesson, Esquire, at Tidcomb, in the county of Wilt-shire ... : to the tune of Bragandary / by Abraham Miles." In the digital collection Early English Books Online. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A50850.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.
• “On Wednesday Night died at his Seat … “The Derby Mercury. June 29, 1738. https://www.newspapers.com/image/394517191/?match=1&terms=Raynham%20Hall
• “Settlers, Sieges and Spirits: The Story of Ballygally Castle.” Ballygally Castle Hotel. https://www.ballygallycastlehotel.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/heritage-leaflet_ballygally-web.pdf
• Smith, Edd. “The Vast History of Raynham Hall.” BBC. May 20, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/norfolk/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8058000/8058145.stm
• Spirit, L. “THE BROWN LADY OF RAYNHAM HALL: The World’s Most Infamous Ghost.” Norfolk Record Office Blog. July 31, 2024. https://norfolkrecordofficeblog.org/2024/07/31/the-brown-lady-of-raynham-hall-the-worlds-most-infamous-ghost/
• Spirit, L. “THE BROWN LADY OF RAYNHAM HALL: The World’s Most Infamous Ghost (continued).” Norfolk Record Office Blog. August 14, 2024. https://norfolkrecordofficeblog.org/2024/08/14/the-brown-lady-of-raynham-hall-the-worlds-most-infamous-

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
It's the last week of October.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Not all of our October episodes have been as halloweeny
as they might historically have been. Yeah, I would say
it's typical to have some non Halloween episodes, but it
has felt a little thinner this year. There. It's because
usually all of mine are very HALLOWEENI and they haven't
all been very Halloween, and I feel like I've failed.
So it's ghost Week. I'm trying to make it up

(00:42):
to everybody's all ghosts all the time. According to an
article that was written by Mike Wade for The Times
in two thousand and nine, quote in Britain, around a
third of people say that they believe in ghosts, and
one in ten claims to have seen one. And that
got me thinking that the British Isles sure are full
of ghost stories. So all week long we're doing Ghosts

(01:05):
of the British Isles. It's our wrap up to Halloween season,
and I thought, oh, it would be a cool thing
to do a two parter that collects assorted ghost stories
of the British Isles, which I sort of did, but
I also kind of messed up because I only got
to three of them because in doing the research, I
got so involved in seeking out info and trying to

(01:30):
flesh out some things that I realized like had gotten
dead ended in a lot of the telling, that I
filled up two episodes with just three. So the first
episode deals with two very ghosty ghost tales. They are
ghost stories. The first one takes about two thirds of

(01:50):
the episode, and then the second takes about the last third,
and then the second episode of the week will be
an examination of a seven teenth century poltergeist story, so
they can stand each on their own, but we're still
grouping them together as a two parter as our sort
of October finale. So welcome to Ghost Week.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
First, we have the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, and
that's a spirit we've talked about on the show before.
She was part of our Spirit Photography live show in
twenty nineteen, and we'll have a little bit of crossover
with that. But there is more to the Brown Lady
haunting story than we could really include of that in
the context of that show on a different topic.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, So first we'll talk a little bit about Raynham
Hall for clarity. This is the Raindom Hall in Norfolk, England,
not the one in New York, which has its own
historical significance. But this Raindom Hall was built in sixteen
twenty by Sir Roger Townsend on a seven thousand acre
estate and it was at the time a unique structure

(02:57):
in comparison to most existing manor houses in England at
the time because it was built in the Italian style.
It's this beautiful red brick building. It looks definitely different
than others that were being built around the time.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
More than one hundred years later, the person living at
Raynham Hall was Charles Townsend, second Viscount Townsend, who came
to be known by the nickname Turnip Townsend, and that
was because he was interested in agriculture. He had been
born at Raynham in sixteen seventy four and after a
career in politics, that was where he returned to work

(03:31):
on the farming projects. Turnip Townsend hired an architect named
William Kent to make both exterior and interior renovations to
the existing structure. In the seventeen thirties. One of Raynham's
famous features is its ornate chimney pieces, and those were
part of Kent's work.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
But it is also with this Charles, and there are
several Charles's. I apologize. Charles Townsend is a name that
gets repeated throughout the family tree. But it is with
this Charles that the haunting story begins, or rather really
with his wife, Lady Dorothy Walpole. She was the sister
of Robert Walpole, considered the first British Prime Minister. So

(04:12):
the Walpoles are hot topics this Halloween season on stuff
you missed a history class, so you'll remember we just
covered Horace. And the story here is that Dorothy haunts
Raynham Hall to this day, but the details regarding her
life have kind of taken on a life of their own.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
The classic and often repeated version of Lady Townshend's story
is that Charles treated her terribly, and this is in
line with the reason that people give for Dorothy haunting
the estate. She's trapped there, maybe seeking some kind of
retribution or understanding. This version of the story is that

(04:51):
Charles had a temper and he either learned that Dorothy
had been unfaithful to him, or that she'd been romantically
involved with someone else before they were married. A popular
version is that Dorothy, who was known to be a spender,
had angered Charles by just frittering away huge amounts of money.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
She and Charles have their own additional, complicated backstory. They're
said to have been childhood sweethearts, but that the Wallpoles
did not agree to a match, so Charles married another woman,
that was Elizabeth Pelham, and they had a family together,
a big family. Some reports say they had ten kids,
while others say that it was five, and this might

(05:34):
reflect the remainder of them having died in childhood. But
when Elizabeth died, Charles and Dorothy were finally able to marry,
which they did in seventeen thirteen, and they too had
a lot of kids, perhaps eleven. Similarly, in Charles's obituary,
it states that he and Dorothy had four sons and

(05:55):
two daughters. So obviously that does not add up to eleven,
and that discrepancy numbers remains a mystery. Like the other one,
they may have lost children at a very young age,
but after thirteen years of marriage in seventeen twenty six,
Dorothy contracted smallpox and died.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
But rumors sprang up that she was not in fact dead,
and she was instead a prisoner at Raynham Hall, forbidden
to go out or even see her own children. These
rumors persisted, and, as rumors often do, they expanded. Soon
there were whispers that the funeral had been staged, and
that there was no body in her coffin, and that

(06:36):
Charles had put together this deception so that he could
keep her in the house, isolated and alone, as some
kind of punishment. Some versions of the story say that
she was starved to death, and others say she was
pushed down the stairs by Charles and broke her neck.
In seventeen thirty eight, Charles Townsend died somewhat suddenly, according

(06:59):
to a report in the Darby Mercury on Sunday, June
twenty ninth, seventeen thirty eight, on the preceding Wednesday, quote
after supper, his Lordship returned to his room, apparently in
good health. He rung his bell, and the servant going
immediately up the stairs, found his lord dead. His Lordship
had flung up the sash of the window, as though

(07:21):
he had done it for the sake of air. He
was in the sixty fourth year of his age. There's
the sighting of a ghost at Raynam that's sometimes included
in the story and sometimes not, which is surprising because
it involved royalty. This one involves King George the Fourth,
who was born in seventeen sixty two and visited Raynam

(07:42):
while he was a young boy. In this story, he's
said to have seen a pale woman in a brown dress,
looking disheveled, and this woman was in his room. He
woke everybody up, and depending on which account you read,
he either said he would not spend another hour in
the house or that he wanted to change rooms. The

(08:03):
first widely reported ghost sighting at the hall wasn't until
eighteen thirty five, during a party, which, as was common
for the day, included the invited guests sleeping over, and
one of those guests, a major. Loftus, described encountering a
female apparition while he was headed to bed in the
wee hours of the morning. The woman he saw was

(08:25):
wearing a brown silk dress and was standing on the
landing on the stairs. Loftus called out to this mystery woman,
who then vanished into thin air. He decided to try
to corner the spirit, and once again he saw her,
this time more closely. Loftus described a woman with a
frightening countenance. Her eye sockets were empty. He drew what

(08:48):
he had seen and shared his drawing with the rest
of the guests the next day at breakfast, and this
prompted the Charles Townsend, who was living there at the time,
who was a descendant of Dorothy's husband, Charleston Townsend, to
admit that he and his family had also seen this specter.
This information is said to have scared the house staff

(09:08):
so much that all of them reportedly quit on the spot,
and then that led the townshend in residence to suspect
that someone had actually been playing a trick by creating
this ghost with the intent of creating havoc in his life,
so he actually had a team of detectives investigate. But
after two months of these detectives essentially living at Raynham Hall,

(09:30):
they found nothing and they closed the case. In a moment,
we will talk about another account of an encounter with
the Brown Lady, but first we will have a sponsor break.
After the Loftis sighting, another guest saw the spirit. Although

(09:54):
the account we have of that event is from years later,
even though it happened the year after Loftus saw the
Brown Lady. In an eighteen ninety one account of the
Raynham Hall haunting written by Florence Marriott in her book
There Is No Death, she describes another experience that happened
at Sir Charles Townsend's house. Marriott claims in the text

(10:16):
that her father learned about the story from Townsend, who
at the time was his country neighbor. Charles and his wife,
once they took ownership of the Raynham Hall estate, had
launched this huge renovation and redecorating project, and they brought
a load of friends over to stay and party, but
soon the guests started leaving one by one because of

(10:39):
all the ghost sightings. They claimed to have seen a
woman quote wearing a brown satin dress with yellow trim
and a rough around her throat. She's described as looking
innocent and harmless, and her portrait, according to Marriott, also
hung in one of the bedrooms. The initial assessment of
the situation was that this was a trick that was

(11:01):
being played by poachers who would rather have the estate
left unoccupied so that they could hunt the grounds there themselves,
which they had apparently been doing before this whole renovation
and party happened. So to help Marriott's father, Captain Frederick Marriott,
who was a Navy officer and a novelist, offered to
stay in the room where the brown Lady's portrait hung

(11:24):
because he believed he could catch the tricksters. He slept
his daughter wrote quote with a loaded revolver under his pillow,
and after a couple of nights of seeing nothing, Frederick
Marriott did see a woman in the hallway, and he
was not alone. The host's two adult sons were with him.
Captain Marriott discharged his weapon at the woman at close

(11:48):
range after she had made like this menacing face at him,
and she vanished. The bullet he fired lodged in a
panel of the room opposite where he stood, and he
was after that experience convinced that the apparition was real.
The Townshends occupied this estate for centuries, and in eighteen
ninety nine, John Townsend six, Marquess Townshend, inherited it. At

(12:12):
that point, though the estate and the family were bankrupt.
The estate was rented out and the art collection was
sold off. It wasn't until nineteen twenty one that he
died and his widow moved in. The Marchiness Townsend, who
was quite wealthy, decided that she would restore the house,
but she also had another project related to the house,

(12:34):
and that was a book about all of its various hauntings.
This is one of those details that does not seem
to pop up a lot that the owner of the
house published a book about its various ghosts in nineteen
thirty six, But this seems pretty important. As you'll see,
the Marchioness Gladys Townsend co wrote the book with another writer,

(12:57):
Maud Folks, who was a ghostwriter. Excuse the punt for
a lot of wealthy society women who want to depend
their memoirs or their family biographies. And I was not
able to get my hands on a copy of the
book in time for this episode. I presume it will
get here today, right after we finished the corning. It does,

(13:18):
though we know, include the story of the Brown Lady
Dorothy Walpole, and it seems, based on the brief excerpts
that I was able to get a hold of online,
that this might be the source of some of the
speculative versions and the sort of dark, romanticized and played
up for dramatic effect versions of Dorothy's story. So this

(13:43):
all sets the scene for the famous photo of the
Brown Lady. Two men were assigned by Country Life magazine
in nineteen thirty six to visit Raynham Hall and take
photos of the estate. These two men were Captain Hubert
privaned and In Shira, who was Provin's assistant. The official

(14:03):
story is that when they were getting ready to take
a photo of the building's main staircase, Andrey Sierra saw
what he described as a vapory form that slowly took
on the futures of a woman floating down the stairs.
When Shira exclaimed in shocked, Provand who was under the
camera's black cloth, jumped and snapped the photo and captured

(14:26):
an image of the ghost in the process. The magazine
published the photograph on Boxing day that year, December twenty sixth,
with the following as part of the introduction to the
article about it quote a genuine case of spirit photograph
has yet to be proved. Those so far investigated either
proving to be fakes or impossible to authenticate owing to

(14:48):
the absence of witnesses. Yet the following account and the
illustration of what happened at Rayndham Hall, Norfolk, the seat
of the Marcus Townshend deserves attention, so the account of
what happened, as written by Andre Shira is included next.
Here's how he described how they snapped the photo quote.
Captain Pravaan took one photograph of it whilst I flashed

(15:11):
the light. He was focusing again for another exposure. I
was standing by his side, just behind the camera, with
the flashlight pistol in my hand, looking directly up the staircase.
All at once I detected an ethereal veiled form coming
slowly down the stairs. Rather excitedly, I called out, sharply, quick, quick,

(15:33):
there's something. Are you ready?

Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (15:35):
The photographer replied and removed the cap from the lens.
I pressed the trigger of the flashlight pistol after the flash,
and on closing the shutter, Captain Privan removed the focusing
cloth from his head and, turning to me, said, what's
all the excitement about. I directed his attention to the
staircase and explained that I had distinctly seen a figure there,

(15:58):
transparent so that the step were visible through the ethereal form.
But nevertheless very definite and to me perfectly real. He
laughed and said, I must have imagined I had seen
a ghost, for there was nothing now to be seen.
It may be of interest to record that the flash
from the Sasha bulb, which in this instance was used,

(16:20):
is equivalent, I understand, to a speed of one fiftieth
part of a second. Shira's account goes on to mention
that Privan didn't believe in spirits and actually bet Indra
five pounds that there was nothing on the image, But
of course when they developed it there it was pravand,
according to Shira, allegedly never paid up. Shira noted, quote,

(16:42):
I have neither his technical skills nor long years of
practical experience as a portraitist. Neither am I interested in
psychic phenomena. But I maintained that the form of a
very refined influence was so real to my eyes that
it must have been caught at that psychic logical moment
by the lens of the camera. Paranormal investigator Harry Price

(17:06):
wrote the next segment of the piece in Country Life,
Price explains, quote, it must be admitted that had the
photographer first taken the stairs and without moving the camera
introduced a draped figure into the picture. By the double
exposure method, an identical spirit picture would have been obtained.
I asked to see the negative, and much more important.

(17:28):
Mister Andre Shira and his operator, Captain Privan we duly
met at their studio and I was invited to cross
examine the photographers. I will say at once that I
was impressed. I was told a perfectly simple story. Mister
Andrey Shira saw the apparition descending the stairs at the
precise moment when Captain Provan's head was under the black cloth,

(17:51):
a shout and the cap was off and the flashbulb fired,
with the result which we now see. I could not
shake their story, and I had no right to disbelieve them.
Only collusion between the two men would account for the ghost.
If it is a fake, the negative is entirely innocent
of any faking.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
So this famous paranormal investigator could not find evidence of
trickery or foul play on Provan's and Shearer's parts. But
though that was good enough for a lot of people,
the Society for Psychical Research was not convinced. In nineteen
thirty seven that organization did its own investigation and it

(18:34):
came to the conclusion that the alleged apparition in the
photo was there because the camera was shaken or shifted
during its exposure.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
This photo has continued to garner interest in the nearly
ninety years since it was published. There are still people
who believe it is real, as well as skeptics who
have picked it apart. To some it looks as though
there was an awkward shift in the way the lines
of the staircase appear in the photo, or that there's
a double exposure, with some elements of the wall decors

(19:04):
repeating just below their actual positions, But a clean image
of the staircase shows that there is a sort of
demi landing halfway down, It isn't one continuous line from
top to bottom, and there's a panel with trim that
could easily be mistaken for a picture frame. There are
some examinations of the height of the figure. She does

(19:25):
look unusually short, and a number of people have noticed
that the shape looks more like a statue of the
Virgin Mary than an early eighteenth century woman in a
silk nightgown.

Speaker 1 (19:36):
But perhaps the most informative part of all this story
is the timing. It does seem oddly coincidental that a
photo of the Brown Lady would be snapped right after
a book featuring her was released by the owner of
the property. One item of note is that the Country
Living right up never references the Brown Lady at all.

(19:58):
It talks about the possible ghost in more general terms,
and this is sometimes held up as some sort of
proof that the photo must be genuine and that no
one involved knew about the story of Dorothy Walpole Townsend.
But that would just mean that the magazine that just
published an entire spread on Martianists, Gladys Townsend and her

(20:18):
home hadn't done a very thorough job of researching her life.
As to the rumors of why Dorothy Walpole might be
haunting Randham Hall, they also have problems the story that
Dorothy was held captive and that her funeral was all
theatrics those just don't actually hold up. In a statement

(20:39):
to the BBC in two thousand and nine, the estate
said quote people said that Dorothy was locked away and
badly treated, but in the nineteen sixties we uncovered paperwork
and medical reports suggesting she had a happy life and
was much loved. She does seem to have gotten treatment
for her smallpox, even though that did not save her,

(21:00):
not actually effective treatment for small boss. Ye she was living,
and if she was haunting the house, at some point
she seems to have stopped. No one has claimed to
see her since that famous photograph was taken. Oh, Dorothy,
We will get to another ghost in just a moment,

(21:21):
but first we're gonna hear from the sponsors that keep
stuff you missed in history class. Going in sixteen twenty five,
on the northeastern coast of what's now Northern Ireland that's
known as the Antrim Coast, John Shaw of Greencock built

(21:42):
a French chateau style castle. Shaw did not own the land.
He was at the time renting it from the Earl
of Antrim, Randall McSorley MacDonell, at a rate of twenty
four pounds per year. This area, incidentally, might look quite
familiar to listeners if they watched Game of Thrones, because
some exterior scenes were shot nearby. That whole coast is

(22:04):
home to a lot of shooting locations.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
The castle, as originally built, had a stream that ran
through its outer hall and a tower at each of
its four corners with a conical roof. The walls of
this castle are also very thick, more than a meter
and a half, and this was definitely a place built
for defense protection and thanks to that water source survival.

(22:27):
And that's because at the time that it was constructed,
there was a lot of conflict happening in this area,
and that conflict had been going on since sixteen oh nine.
That was when King James the First decided that residents
of England and Scotland, and Protestants specifically should move to
the northern region of Ireland, which was at the time Catholic.

(22:48):
Prior to this, that region was not exactly friendly for
the king, So really this conflict goes back much farther
than sixteen oh nine, and he basically wanted to make
sure that all of the areas of his kingdom were
populated with people sympathetic and loyal to the crown in
order to theoretically prevent any uprisings. And this effort to

(23:10):
relocate Protestants is called the plantation of Ulster. The Protestants
who made this move were called planters. But this was not,
of course, as benign as just suggesting people move and
then they did it. Even if it had been that benign,
there were political reasons to suggest that people do such

(23:31):
a thing. There was the financial component to the plan
that also caused a lot of strife. To pay for
moving a bunch of people, King James leaned on the
wealthy companies and landowners of London. He made a deal
with them that if they financed people moving, they could
have large tracts of land in Ireland. But that land,

(23:52):
of course, already had people living on it. So the
king was seizing the land in an area known as
Ulster to make this whole colonization thing work. And all
of this tension was ongoing. So when John Shaw built
his castle, those thick walls were considered imperative. Shaw was
one of the people who moved to Ireland as part

(24:12):
of the plantation. He had gotten there in sixteen thirteen.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
And in sixteen forty one there was an attack on
the castle by the Gaelic Irish, who wanted to force
out the Scots that were living there. This attack was
ultimately unsuccessful. Thirty nine years later, the castle was captured
in sixteen eighty by Irish chieftains, but their occupation was brief.
They were wanted men and they were being aggressively pursued,

(24:40):
and rather than stay and risk attack, they scattered into
the surrounding woods.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
But the political upheaval and battles are not the source
of the bally Galley ghost story. It's Shaw's immediate family.
Like most ghostlore, this one has several versions. The first
is that shortly after finishing the castle, or even while
it was being completed, James Shaw married a woman named
Isabella Brisbane. Her first name gets spelled in a variety

(25:09):
of ways depending on the source. Sometimes Isabella is also
described as very young, maybe just sixteen when the couple married. Yeah,
there are also versions that say that she came over
with him, but there's such a gap that then she
would have been much older by the time she got

(25:30):
married and had kids, and so uh, it just doesn't
add up. This is one of those cases where you
can tell that a lot of the lore has shifted
and embellished. James's goal was to have kids. He wanted
an air, and several years into their marriage, Isabella gave
birth to a child, but it was not the hoped

(25:50):
for son, and according to Lord James, flew into a
rage over it. He locked Isabella in a tower of
the castle after taking her baby away possibly killed the child.
Lady Shaw was soon found dead on the ground outside
of the tower. So in this version, the story is
that she climbed out the window and jumped, hoping she

(26:12):
would survive the fall and be able to get to
her baby. Other versions suggest that she was killed by
James or one of his allies. Another version of the story,
told by Jeff Bellinger in his two thousand and nine
book World's Most Haunted Places, is that James discovered Lady
Shaw had a paramour, that there was some doubt about

(26:34):
who the father of the newborn was. And then, and
yet another somewhat sanitized version that's shared by the current
owner of the castle, this baby was a boy, and
James took it and locked Isabelle up and because he
just had no more use for her once his air
had been produced.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
Yeah, this is one of those things that Jeff Bellinger
in particular, is like a lot of these versions of
the story don't make sense, because even if she had
had a daughter, there's no reason they couldn't have tried
again for an heir for a male child. And even
if he had a male child, wouldn't he want more

(27:13):
male children so that they could ensure the bloodline, so
it doesn't always really add up. But the castle, known
as bally Galley, passed down through the family and then
it was privately sold and shifted through a number of
hands over the centuries. It left the ownership of the
Shaw family in seventeen ninety nine when it was sold

(27:34):
for fifteen thoy four hundred pounds, and then in the
eighteen thirties the castle was used by the Coast Guard
for a while as a rental property. They used it
as a base of operations from which anti smuggling efforts
were initiated. The castle was purchased in the nineteen fifties
by Cyril Lord, who had made his fortune in the

(27:54):
carpet business. He was known as the Carpet King. Lord
turned the castle into an in called the Candlelight Inn.
In nineteen sixty six, the castle was purchased and updated
by Sir Billy Hastings. It has been expanded. The old
castle section remains and there's also a newer section of it.
Many elements of the original castle remain, including the original door.

(28:18):
There's an inscription over the door that reads sixteen twenty
five God's providence is my inheritance that inscription is not
from sixteen twenty five, though it was put there in
seventeen sixty during renovations. There's also a coat of arms
and the initials JS and IB for James and Isabella.

(28:38):
The castle remains a hotel in the Hastings Hotels collection.
Throughout the years, there have been stories of multiple ghosts
in the castle, and the hotel really leads into that lore.
For one, Lady Isabella's tower room is maintained as her room.
It's called the Ghost Room, and for a while you

(28:59):
could rent that room, although the hotel has stopped letting
guests stay there. The room has what is purported to
be Lady Shaw's original bed, and while guests can't sleep there,
they are encouraged to visit. There is actually very clear
signage that leads visitors up the stairs into the ghost Room.
Lady Shaw's story is on display on plaques, and many

(29:21):
guests specifically request rooms in the Old Castle section, hoping
that they might have an encounter with her, and there
have been all of the classic reports of haunting, so
hot and cold spots, sumping noises, knocks at the door
when there's no one in the corridor, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
There are reportedly other ghosts there, though one of the
ghosts is Madam Nixon. She was Shaw's sister in law
and moved to bally Galli after she was widowed. People
have described hearing what sounds like silk rustling in the
hallways of the Castle section, and that noise is attributed
to Madam Nixon.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Have also stated that guests have heard the laughter of
a child when there was no child present, as well
as sensations of having someone touch them when there is
no one in the room with them. There are stories
of banquet tables that are set for an evening being
disheveled before the guests have even arrived, and also a
story of nuns having their bibles fly off their dressers.

(30:21):
In two thousand and three, BBC presenter Kim Lenahan and
her crew spent the night in bally Galley for a
story leading up to Halloween, or at least they attempted
to a medium that the BBC had brought in reportedly
contacted the spirit of a distressed woman, and as they conversed,
Lenihan reported that the temperature in the room rose rapidly,

(30:43):
accompanied by a musty vanilla smell. After the medium left
and Lenihan tried to get some rest, she reported the
smell coming back in the middle of the night, saying, quote,
it was a smell that almost covered you like a sheet.
Kim asked to be moved to the newer section of
the hotel.

Speaker 2 (31:01):
Many many people have had experiences that they describe as
supernatural at bally Galley. But the good news is none
of those have been violent, so if there are spirits there,
they don't seem to want to hurt anyone.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
That is where we are going to end part one
of this two parter on ghosts of the British Isles.
As we said, we have another one coming up on
Wednesday that is essentially a standalone so they are options options.
And in the meantime, I have listener mail about another
scary thing from this year, which was carlosh as Waldo,

(31:40):
who is scarier than many other things. This is from
our listener Ann who writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy. Being
a music teacher, I knew somewhat of what I was
in for when I saw Carlojuswaldo's name in my podcast list.
My first experience with him, however, was in high school.
My high school choir did a European tour, and when

(32:00):
we had the opportunity to go to a performance at
the Vienna State Opera House, I went. We had standing
room tickets for a modern opera called Jezwaldo, all in German,
so I had no clue what they were singing, and
the music was really weird to my teenaged ears. The
only thing I remember is the ending, where there is
a murder and then all these dolls are swinging back

(32:21):
and forth on giant swings on the stage with lots
of red ribbons representing blood. Lo and behold. Two years later,
I am sitting in music history one as a college
freshman music major, and the composer Carlo Joswaldo comes up,
and the professor told us a little about him. Finally
the opera kind of made a little bit of sense,
sort of. Anyway, I enjoyed being reminded of the weirdness

(32:45):
and learning a little more in depth than we were
able to in a college class. Attached for your viewing
pleasure is my most recent pick of my two cats,
and I think it captures them perfectly. Aaron Purr is
the goofy orange tabby and white laying on his back
in the crack between the top of the futon and
the wall, and Merlin is the flufy boy on the
windowsill with the look of utter disdain on his face.

(33:07):
This is the scene that greeted me when I walked
in the door after work the other day. Thanks for
all you do stuffuest in History Class is one of
my favorite podcasts, and probably one I've listened to the longest,
at least fourteen or fifteen years. I got my PhD
back when there were nearly so many back episodes to
catch up on. Thanks again, and and I love this.
Your babies look so cute. Also, just the fact that

(33:29):
one you have a cat named Aaron Purr, which is brilliant,
and that you describe him as a goofy orange tabby
and white. I feel like you don't have to use
the adjective goofy. Orange cats kind of come with that
as part of the package most of the time.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Yeah, it seems almost standard behavior.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
If one of our listeners has a very stoic and
intellectual orange tabby, please write.

Speaker 2 (33:53):
Him, because yeah, I was saying, we just need the
data collection an oddly smart orange tabby.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
I think they exist. I believe I believe. It just
seems that the majority are like Noop Boop boop to
in the best way. I love them. I have never
had one personally, and it's on my wish list. So
if you would like to write to us and share
your stories about your encounters with weird opera, or your
kiddies or anything else, you can do so at History

(34:24):
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to
the show if you like. It is easiest pie to
do on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to
your favorite shows.

Speaker 2 (34:39):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.