Muncaster Castle

The Penningtons have documentary evidence of Muncaster as their home since 1208, when lands here were granted to Alan de Penitone, and family tradition pushes the connection back further still. A castle went up in the later thirteenth century and was enlarged in the fourteenth, when a pele tower was built on Roman foundations close to the fort of Glannaventa at Ravenglass. The house's most treasured possession dates from 1464: after his defeat at the Battle of Hexham, Henry VI was found wandering on Muncaster Fell and sheltered for nine days by Sir John Pennington. In gratitude the king gave the family his gilded glass drinking bowl, promising that as long as it remained unbroken the Penningtons would remain at Muncaster. The Luck of Muncaster is still here, and so are they.

Thomas Skelton, the family's fool, served here in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and died around 1600. His full-length portrait, holding his will, hangs at the end of a corridor and is one of the castle's most celebrated pictures; the word tomfoolery is said to derive from him. The legend that darkens his memory is told below. By the eighteenth century the castle had become a Georgian country house, and between 1862 and 1866 the fashionable architect Anthony Salvin remodelled it for the 4th Lord Muncaster, giving it the romantic silhouette of towers and battlements you see from the gardens today.

In the twentieth century the castle passed through the female line. Patrick and Phyllida Gordon-Duff-Pennington inherited it and, in the 1980s, moved in with their children, becoming the first family to live here full-time since 1917; Patrick's voice narrates the audio tour of the house. Their descendants run the castle, its 77 acres of gardens, the Hawk and Owl Centre and the accommodation, and they talk about the ghosts with the ease of people who have lived alongside them.

What makes Muncaster unusual among haunted castles is that it has been studied as well as visited. Dr Jason Braithwaite, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham, has spent around two decades investigating the castle, and the Tapestry Room in particular. He has reported unusual and anomalous magnetic fields in the areas where hauntings are claimed, and his working theory is that such fields may affect the brains of susceptible people, particularly those prone to migraine or epilepsy, producing the sense of presence, the sounds and the figures that guests describe. It is a sceptical explanation offered with a straight face, and the castle happily promotes it alongside the ghost stories.

The guest reports themselves are consistent. Those who have slept in the Tapestry Room describe a child crying near the window, a woman singing, footsteps, the rustle of bed hangings and a shadow that moves across the room with depth and shape. Ghost-hunt groups who hire the castle add the usual bangs, cold spots and words on their recorders, and several report seeing a figure in the corridor near Tom Fool's portrait. Countryfile, exploring whether Muncaster is Britain's most haunted castle, found the family matter-of-fact about all of it: the Penningtons have lived with these stories for generations and tell them without either evangelism or embarrassment.

The road ghost has a longer paper trail. Reports of a white figure on the lane below the castle go back to the nineteenth century, and Mary Bragg's murder is remembered locally as a real event even though the details, like the names of her killers, are lost. Television has come and gone over the years, but the castle has never leaned on it; its reputation rests on the people who have paid to spend a night in the Tapestry Room and come down to breakfast with a story.

Muncaster Castle stands a mile from the village of Ravenglass on the west Cumbrian coast, reached by the A595 or by the Cumbrian Coast railway to Ravenglass, where the miniature Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway also starts. The castle, gardens and Hawk and Owl Centre are open daily through the main season from around Easter to early November, with the gardens and owl centre also open at weekends in winter; check the castle's website for current times and for the days the house itself is open. Allow a full day: there is the audio tour of the state rooms, the Tapestry Room and Tom Fool's portrait, 77 acres of gardens famous for rhododendrons and views up Eskdale, daily bird displays, a cafe and a play area. The house has stairs and no lift, and the gardens are hilly, though the main paths are firm. Parking is on site.

You can stay in the grounds. The Coachman's Quarters offers bed-and-breakfast rooms in the old stable yard, and the estate also has self-catering cottages and, in summer, glamping bell tents. For the ghosts, book the castle's Ghost Sit: a private evening tour followed by a night in the Tapestry Room for up to eight people, with a full English breakfast in Creeping Kate's Kitchen for those who make it to morning. Ravenglass has pubs with rooms and Eskdale has inns and campsites a few miles inland.