The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Why I’m still spooked by my frightful stay in a haunted castle
With Halloween just one dark night away, Lizzie Milk recalls an eerie escape in Gloucestershire that left her chilled to the bone
The mood was jovial as we wound our way along the twisting rural road, my companions sharing ghost stories and speculating over what spooky things we could expect to see when we arrived at our destination. Their conversation and laughter washed over me as I looked out of the window at the brooding Gloucestershire hills, wondering if there could be a better setting for a haunted castle.
Aged just 20 at the time, I was a fresh-faced student looking to bolster my threadbare CV with some voluntary work. I had signed on with the Youth Hostels Association (YHA) to help out at one of its children’s summer camps, and had been offered a choice of placements as an activity leader at hostels across the country.
One in particular had caught my eye. With its stone gatehouse and dungeon dormitories, St Briavel’s Castle looked like an exciting place to work. The coordinator warned me it had a reputation for being haunted, but I was sure it was where I wanted to go.
And so it was that, some weeks later, I found myself on a minibus with eight others, bound for a week of adventure in Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean. We arrived and were promptly split into two groups by our ebullient team leader: the men were sent to rooms in the old prison cells; the women to one of the gatehouse towers. The children would be arriving in the next few hours and we had to prepare.
St Briavel’s was built in the early 12th century by Norman barons to guard against marauding Welsh rebels. It was repurposed as a court and prison, and over the course of several centuries it gained notoriety as a place of execution and torture. The castle served as a debtors’ prison in the Georgian era, before being converted into a youth hostel in 1948, when a series of strange incidents brought it to the attention of ghost hunters.
It certainly wasn’t long before we made our first unsettling discovery. One of my colleagues caught her foot on a rug while unpacking, pulling it back to reveal the old oubliette. I felt the first prickles on the back of my neck as I thought of the unimaginable suffering that had taken place in that claustrophobic pit. But the feeling was soon forgotten when the children arrived. We settled into an evening of fun and games, and by the time I climbed the spiral staircase to my dormitory, I was feeling contentedly tired, thoughts of spectres far from my mind.
It must have been about midnight when I awoke. A strange, uneasy feeling had come upon me, and as I opened my eyes, I caught sight of the silhouette of a stooped woman standing over me.
I drew up against the headboard with a jolt, instinctively pulling the bedclothes up to my chin, too terrorstricken to make a sound. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, the apparition appeared to dissipate, and before long I was scolding myself for being frightened by what must have been the shadow of a tree through the window. Or perhaps the vestige of a dream.
Then the door began slowly to creak open, wider and wider, before slamming shut with a bang.
I didn’t sleep until dawn. Nor did I move. Once the sun had come up enough for me to feel safe, I rose to find that the three other women in the room had also lain awake all night, too terrified to call out, although no one else had seen the shadowy woman.
The next night, I switched to a different bed and had no more disturbances, although there were several eerie occurrences over the following few days. The men sleeping in the old prison cells, where centuries-old graffiti still covered the walls, would sometimes hear laughing and singing emanating from the walls. On another night, while the entire group was gathered in the canteen, I was walking across the courtyard when I saw – all too briefly – a deathly white face staring out of a window in an unoccupied building.
I discovered some years later that others had experienced the same things I had, and plenty more besides. Many reported hearing a baby crying in the old sleeping quarters, although this stopped after workmen found the mummified remains of a child inside one of the chimneys. Others claim to have felt an unexplained choking sensation when staying in the room where the gallows once stood.
I try to remain sceptical – after all, it’s easy to jump at shadows when you’re half expecting ghouls and goblins to leap out at you. But I still get a chill down my spine every time I think back to that first night, and the shadowy figure beside my bed. Part of me wants to go back one day to find out the “truth”. Another part of me knows I never will.
YHA St Briavel’s Castle Hostel (0345 371 9042; yha.org.uk) is currently available on an exclusive-hire basis only