In honor of Halloween, we decided to take a trip around the world to visit the most famous haunted castles. Many of them are shrouded in an ominous aura and were once places of torture and witch hunts.
10. Leap Castle in Ireland
One of the most terrifying haunted castles was built in the 15th century on a ritual site of the ancient Celts. It belonged to the O'Carroll clan, which was famous for its treachery and cruelty.
The "friendly" O'Carrolls would often invite their enemies to a reconciliatory feast and then kill them while they were eating or sleeping. One of the clansmen plunged a sword into his brother, a priest, while he was celebrating mass in the castle chapel. The room is now called the "Bloody Chapel," and the priest is said to haunt it at night.
The O'Carrolls were no better with their allies - the mercenary warriors from the O'Neill and MacMahon clans. In the corner of the banquet hall there was a secret door leading to a room whose floor was strewn with stakes. Guess for yourself what kind of pay the mercenaries received.
Now their spirits sometimes appear in the dungeon, accompanied by a terrible creature called the Elemental. Eyewitnesses who have seen it claim that it is a creature the size of a sheep, with a human face and black holes instead of eyes. When it appears, the air is filled with the stench of rotting corpses and sulfur.
9. Tower of London in Great Britain
The famous haunted castle is known for its bloody history. Henry VIII ordered the execution of his two wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, here. Incidentally, Anne Boleyn's ghost is the only one to have received "official registration" and permission to live in the Tower. It has appeared to many people, some of whom were hospitalized with a diagnosis of "hallucination." Sometimes Anne's head was on her shoulders, and sometimes the ghost prefers to walk around headless.
Two more famous Tower ghosts are the young princes Richard and Edward V who were imprisoned after the death of their father, King Edward IV. They disappeared shortly after in 1483 and their remains were not discovered until 1647.
8. Castle Fraser in Scotland
This place is known for its remarkable architecture, beautiful gardens and... a gruesome murder.
According to local legend, a beautiful princess once stayed at Castle Fraser. Instead of tossing and turning all night for a pea or meeting a handsome lord, the girl was brutally murdered in her sleep. Her body was then dragged down the stone steps and left in the woods.
The castle's inhabitants tried in vain to wash the unfortunate princess's blood off the stairs, but failed. So they covered the stone stairs with wooden panels, which have survived to this day.
Some say that in Fraser you can still hear the princess's scream when she visits the castle halls.
7. Mikhailovsky Castle in Russia
Although Russia is inferior to Europe in the number of haunted castles, we also have something to please lovers of mysticism. For example, the Mikhailovsky Castle, in which not some seedy relative of Casper lives, but the very ghost of the Emperor of All Russia Paul I.
In 1801, the "Russian Hamlet" was strangled by conspirators in his bedchamber, although the official cause of death was apoplexy. Since then, according to rumors, Pavel's ghost sometimes appears at midnight in the corridors of the Mikhailovsky Castle, carrying a candle in his hands.
6. Dragsholm Castle in Denmark
Built in the late 12th century, Dragsholm Castle was once a prison for Danish nobility and clergy.
Today it is a famous hotel and one of the centers of mystical tourism. It is inhabited by three ghosts: the Gray Lady, the White Lady and the Earl of Bothwell.
- Gray Lady — is a kind of ghostly maid. At night, she walks the corridors of the hotel, checking to see if any of the guests have gotten lost.
- White Lady — the ghost of a noble girl who fell in love with a local resident. Her father did not approve of the misalliance and locked the girl in her room. Centuries later, builders discovered her skeleton in a small recess in the walls of the creepy castle.
- Earl of Bothwell was the third husband of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, but their marriage caused outrage among the Scottish nobility, and the earl was forced to flee to Norway. There he fell into the hands of relatives of the girl he had once seduced, and by the sentence of the King of Denmark and Norway he spent the rest of his life in prison at Dragsholm Castle.
5. Muschamp Castle in Austria
You may have heard of the Salem Witch Trials, which were one of the most famous witch hunts in history. But the massacre of witches and wizards at Mooshamp Castle was one of the bloodiest.
More than a hundred young women and men were accused of witchcraft and brought to Muschamp Castle between 1675 and 1690. Many were under 21, and their only crime was not having sureties. They were tortured with hot irons and killed in the local dungeon.
It is no wonder that now in this scary haunted castle you can often hear bloodcurdling screams, footsteps and creaking doors. And some visitors have claimed to have seen a floating white fog.
4. Himeji Castle in Japan
It is one of the best preserved examples of Japanese castle architecture in the entire country.
It is also supposedly haunted by a ghost named Okiku. According to local lore, Okiku was a beautiful young maid who was accused of stealing a precious plate from a 10-piece set.
In an attempt to force Okiku to confess, she was hung upside down, beaten, and lowered into water over and over again until she died. Her body was then thrown into a well and covered with a lid.
Since then, the spirit of the unjustly tortured Okiku cries and moans at night near the well, vainly counting the plates.
3. Castle of Good Hope in South Africa
One of Cape Town's main landmarks, the history of the building dates back to 1666, making it the oldest colonial building in South Africa.
The castle was originally used by the Dutch East India Company as a provisioning station for ships, and later served as a military fortress and prison during the Second Boer War from 1899 to 1902.
Today, you can tour many of the castle's rooms (including the grisly torture chambers), but you might want to try your hand at being a ghost hunter.
In 1728, Governor Pieter van Noordt condemned several deserters who were hanged. One of the condemned men cursed the governor as he stood before the gallows, and van Noordt died of a heart attack that same day. His ghost has haunted the battlements ever since.
Another famous local ghost is a black dog that attacks people and disappears into thin air.
2. Chateau de Brissac in France
An elegant country estate now houses a beautiful inn. But its charming exterior hides a dark past.
According to an old story, one of the castle's inhabitants discovered that his wife was cheating on him with another man. To avenge his dishonor, he imprisoned his wife and her lover, tortured them, and eventually killed them both.
Now, hotel guests can enjoy the added bonus of ghostly sightings, chilling touches and eerie sounds when checking into their room.
1. Bran Castle in Romania
In a picturesque and inaccessible part of the Carpathians lies Bran Castle, the infamous home of Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula.
It was this character who inspired Bram Stoker's gothic horror novel Dracula, and Vlad the Impaler's reign over Transylvania became a dark and terrifying legend.
Historians are unsure whether Vlad actually killed people at Bran Castle, but it has nonetheless become one of the most haunted castles in the world.
Whether or not Vlad the Impaler actually tortured and killed hundreds of people here, the castle boasts many other chilling features, including a system of secret passages that runs throughout the building.
Now the castle houses a museum, which displays artifacts from previous years - shields, ancient costumes, armor, etc.
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