Berry Pomeroy Castle sits in a deep, wooded valley about a mile north-east of the village of Berry Pomeroy in South Devon, near Totnes. It is not a castle in the simple sense of battlements and a keep. It is a ruined Tudor mansion built within the walls of an earlier castle, and that layering — medieval stone beneath Elizabethan ambition, both left to decay — is a large part of its atmosphere. By day it is picturesque, a romantic ruin in a quiet combe. By reputation, it is one of the most haunted castles in Britain.
The English Heritage guidebook says the castle “is reputed to be one of the most haunted castles in Britain.” That wording matters. It records a reputation, not a finding. The ghosts of Berry Pomeroy are legends attached to a real place with a real, documented history, and the two are best kept apart.
A Castle, Then a Mansion, Then a Ruin
The Pomeroy family held the land at Berry Pomeroy for centuries. The castle itself was built by the Pomeroy family in the late fifteenth century. In 1547, Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, purchased Berry Pomeroy Castle from Sir Thomas Pomeroy. The Seymours were one of the great families of Tudor England, and they began to transform the medieval castle into something grander.
Around 1560, the Seymour family began building a large Tudor mansion within the castle’s defences. The work was never finished. The mansion was abandoned by about 1700, and by the middle of the eighteenth century the site was already a ruin. Substantial walls, a gatehouse and the shell of the mansion survived.
That unfinished quality is visible everywhere in the ruins. Fine stonework stops abruptly. A grand house that was meant to impress visitors was left open to the weather, and the woodland slowly closed in around it. It is easy to see why the place attracted stories. A ruin that was never completed feels suspended, as if its history stopped halfway through a sentence.
Between 1980 and 1996, the castle was subjected to extensive archaeological excavations. Those excavations clarified much of its history and overturned earlier beliefs about its age and the cause of its destruction. They also followed an earlier discovery: in 1978, a wall painting in the upper storey of the gatehouse representing the Adoration of the Magi was found, dated to about 1490. The painting is a reminder that Berry Pomeroy was a place of real medieval life, not only a setting for ghost stories. The castle is now owned by the Duke of Somerset and maintained by English Heritage, which provides an audio guide and interpretation panels for visitors.
The White Lady
Two female ghosts are said to haunt Berry Pomeroy: the White Lady and the Blue Lady. Their stories are often told together, and in some versions they blur into one another. That blurring is itself a clue that they are folklore, shaped by retelling, rather than a single fixed account.
The White Lady is said to be the spirit of Margaret Pomeroy. According to the most commonly repeated version, Margaret was imprisoned in the dungeons by her sister Eleanor, who was jealous of her beauty, and was left there to starve. Her ghost is said to haunt the dungeons and to be seen wandering the castle grounds in white.
Other versions give a different jailer. Some say Margaret was imprisoned by her father rather than her sister. The core of the story — a young woman, imprisoned, left to die — remains the same, but the details change from telling to telling. No contemporary record has been found that confirms Margaret Pomeroy was imprisoned or starved in the castle dungeons. The story survives as legend, not as documented history.
Visitors are sometimes told that the White Lady is a harbinger of misfortune, or that seeing her foretells a death in the family. Those additions are part of the folklore, and they vary with the teller. What is consistent is the image: a pale woman in white, in the darkest part of the castle, in a place built for confinement.
The Blue Lady
The Blue Lady is the more unsettling of the two figures in the tradition. She is said to beckon for help from passers-by, luring them towards her tower. If they follow her, the story says, they fall to their death. She is also said to wander the dungeons, mourning the loss of her baby.
The legend identifies her as the daughter of a Norman lord. In the version recorded in the English Heritage guidebook and in reference works, she was abused by her own father, and the child that resulted from that abuse was killed by her in shame. She is then said to wander the dungeons mourning the child she lost. The story is told here in restrained terms because the details are distressing, and because they are, in any case, legend rather than history. There is no documentary evidence that identifies the Blue Lady as a real person, or that records such a death at Berry Pomeroy.
In some versions, the Blue Lady’s appearance is said to foretell a death in the family. In others, she is confused with the White Lady, and the two figures are treated as one. The confusion is understandable: both are women in the dungeons, both are associated with grief and confinement, and both wear a colour as a name. What the Blue Lady story does, more than the White Lady story, is to turn the castle itself into a trap. The White Lady is imprisoned. The Blue Lady imprisons others, drawing them towards a fall. That difference may explain why she is remembered as the more dangerous of the two.
A Haunted Reputation
Berry Pomeroy’s reputation as a haunted castle dates back at least to the eighteenth century, when ghost sightings were first recorded there. It has appeared in a BBC Timewatch documentary, and it is a regular stop on lists of Britain’s most haunted places. Visitors report ghostly figures drifting through the towers, cries echoing in the dungeons, and a heavy atmosphere of sorrow.
Those reports are anecdotal. They are not the kind of evidence that can be checked against a document, and they should not be presented as if they were. What can be checked is the effect the reputation has had. It has kept Berry Pomeroy in the public imagination long after the house itself fell into ruin. People who would never visit a Tudor shell for its architecture will walk into a wooded valley to stand where the White Lady is said to walk.
The castle rewards that visit in a way that has nothing to do with ghosts. The gatehouse, the ruined mansion, the wall painting of the Adoration of the Magi, and the woodland setting are all real, and they are all worth seeing. The archaeology of the 1980s and 1990s gave the site a firmer history than it had before, and that history is in some ways stranger than the legends: a medieval castle bought by a duke, rebuilt as a palace, abandoned unfinished, and left to become a ruin within a century.
The ghosts, if they are anything, are a way of remembering that history. A house that was built for display and then abandoned invites stories about people who were also displayed and then abandoned. Margaret Pomeroy, imprisoned by a jealous sister, and the Blue Lady, mourning a lost child, are both stories about women who were trapped in a place built by powerful men. Whether or not they ever walked the dungeons, the stories say something true about how such houses were used, and about who paid the price for them.
What Is Documented and What Is Not
Documented: Berry Pomeroy Castle is a Tudor mansion within the walls of an earlier castle near Berry Pomeroy in South Devon. The Pomeroy family built the castle in the late fifteenth century. Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, purchased it from Sir Thomas Pomeroy in 1547. The Seymour mansion was begun around 1560, never finished, and abandoned by about 1700. Archaeological excavations took place between 1980 and 1996. A wall painting of the Adoration of the Magi, dated to about 1490, was discovered in the gatehouse in 1978. English Heritage describes the castle as reputed to be one of the most haunted castles in Britain.
Unverified or legendary: That Margaret Pomeroy was imprisoned and starved in the dungeons, whether by her sister Eleanor or by her father; that the Blue Lady was the daughter of a Norman lord who lost a child in the circumstances described in the legend; that either figure lures visitors to their death or foretells a death in the family; and all reported sightings of ghostly figures, cries or apparitions at the castle. The two ladies’ stories blur together in different versions, and no version is supported by contemporary documentary evidence.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Pomeroy_Castle
- https://www.visitsouthdevon.co.uk/blog/read/2026/10/haunted-places-and-ghost-stories-in-south-devon-b502
- https://www.history.co.uk/articles/ghosts-from-britains-historic-castle-ruins
- https://www.thedicamillo.com/house/berry-pomeroy-castle/