Interesting. Kenilworth Castle in second place with staff saying that they "...have encountered ghostly figures, an antique cot rocking by itself and the smell of pipe smoke."
Is Pipe Smoke really to be considered supernatural? Or the phenomenon of wind rocking a cot?
I'd like to know more about these ghostly figures, though. I've posted elsewhere on here about some odd experiences in an old terraced house opposite the Castle, which my now wife used to rent as part of a houseshare. Castle Hill, which adjoins the old High Street, is known to the locals as the path of a ghost walk. Figures have been anecdotally mentioned by several residents as being seen walking through the houses between the castle and the site of St Nicholas Church (itself adjoining the remains of the former Abbey).
Kenilworth Castle has laid in a state of semi ruin since the mid 1600s, damaged intentionally by Parliamentary forces in order to prevent the castle being used as a military stronghold by opposition forces.
Rightly so. In 1266 the castle was used as a stronghold in the Second Baron's War, during the reign of Henry III. Its high walled Keep was practically impregnable in an age before the wide-scale usage of cannons and gunpowder, so it was a valuable structure from a tactical point of view.
During that war supporters loyal to Simon De Montford (6th Earl of Leicester, and figurehead for the Barons' opposing King Henry) were cornered in the castle by Royalist forces, during what became known as the 6 month long 'Siege of Kenilworth'. De Montford had already died in battle elsewhere by that point, and the forces inside feared retribution from the King for their siding with him. But between the causeway and the Keep the Castle itself could not be breached.
They tried! Trebuchets, brute force, even trying to invade across the lake. Nothing worked.
So the Royalists decided to wait it out. Until the food ran out... And until people inside the Castle walls started to get sick.
After 6 months of the siege, with people now dying of both starvation and disease, they decided to surrender.
If you were the type of person to believe in ghosts choosing to haunt the place of their death, then there's a good potential source of quite tormented souls in wait behind what remains of those walls...
The castle was also well visited by Elizabeth I. She visited a number of times. At that point the Castle was owned by Robert Dudley, another Earl of Leicester, the nearest thing to a husband Elizabeth ever had.
Nearest, because he was already married.
The two were incredibly close. Dudley was very much held in high favour by the Queen, and very regularly held at her side.
His wife, Amy, was not.
And she met an untimely death while Dudley was at Court. She broke her neck, falling down some stairs.
Now while modern historians have mostly written off the possibility of a plot conceived by her Husband to have her taken out of the picture as unlikely (what medical details there were seemed to support this being a true accident), and Amy Dudley did not die AT Kenilworth Castle, is it implausible if she did come back to Haunt her Husband that she wouldn't pick the place he used for entertaining...?
You might have expected somebody to have seen something. The scariest tales I heard round the campfire were to do with bodged procedures at Sellafield.
