Ballygally Castle
Ballygally Castle
English Castles come with a lot of stone, a lot of bedrooms, probably some stories of murder, incest and most definitely resident ghosts! Ballygally castle is no different. With these once great households reduced to rely on tourism to keep their doors open we now see some of the great castles of old turned into hotels, open houses or in some cases safari parks. Ballygally Castle dates back to 1625 and was and is home to Lord Shaw and his ghostly green wife. There is a lot of activity going on within the old castle. With it now being a hotel, reports of strange activity is flooding constantly. Objects thrown, stacking wails and so much more happens here when the sun goes down that we could not give it a miss.
Coast Rd,
Ballygally,
United Kingdom
Ghost Hunting At The Ballygally Castle
Ghost Hunting at Ballygally castle
BallyGally Castle seems to have activity all over the place. A lot of guests report activity most nights no matter what room they stay in. So what’s really going on here? A large game of Chinese whispers or is Mrs Shaw floating from room to room and scaring the vajazzles of paying customers?
The Rightly Named Ghost Room
The Ghost Room is actually a bedroom! The site of an imprisonment and suicide this room has been active since the day the hotel opened its doors. The smell of an old musty kind of vanilla is said to fill the room before the castles resident spook manifests. Guests have reported feeling tugging on the bottom of the bed sheets, so they sit up to find out what’s going on. Only to find standing in the middle of the room looking directly at them with a look filled with ferocity or some have said fear. Is she thinking these people are trespassing? The temperature in the room has been known to spike also, with fully functioning central heating it is said to get either very cold or very hot. Going up or down 10 degrees without explanation. People have also awoken to rustling sounds to find some of their possessions in a neat pile at the base of their bed, on one occasion a couple returned to find their suitcases stacked on top of each other with their clothes taken from the wardrobe in a messy bundle on top of the suitcases! When they went to move the suitcases (presumably to pack and GTF out) one of the suitcases was flung at the wife! I think it’s safe to say at that point they asked for one of the kindly hotel porters to collect their things.
One reporter called Kim decided to brave the night in the ghost room armed with a flask of coffee, brandy and a tape recorder, she ascended the stairs to the room, settled in and waited. According to Ms. Lenaghan, around 3 a.m. the room started to get warmer again. Perhaps just the coffee and the brandy. And then it got even warmer and I thought: No, this isn’t right. And the next thing, the smell came back instantly – that same smell. And it was even stronger than before. The smell was very intense toward my head. Yes, it was a smell, but the weirdest thing of all was it was a smell that almost covered you, like a sheet – it was all pervasive. It was almost like you could feel the smell on your clothes and in your hair and on the bed.”
Seconds later the reporter fled the room, and spent the rest of the night in a room as far from the turret as possible. The next morning the staff took her back to the room, where they reported that several guests had heard knocking during the night, one reported seeing a woman in their room who faded away to nothing, and then showed her, written in the dust of the mirror of the ghost room, the name Kim.
The Old Castle
Of course a castle of such history is said to have other yet less famous ghosts, all of which causing their own activity. The older part of the building has a lot more activity than the more modern extension. Which again supports the theory that these spooks energy are stored within the very foundations of the building they knew or died in?
A more amusing part of staying at the Ballybolley is the knocks of nonexistent room service. A common report here is hearing a knocking at the door, only to open it at the dead of night to find no one there and then hear small children laughing ( 2 or more ) and what sounds like running from a group of tiny feet. An undead game of knock a door run, love it! Another form of similar activity in the old part of Ballygally happens in the bedroom. Guests have reported being woken up by small hands pushing them or tugging at their toes in their sleep, after the rude awakening, again they hear the sounds of mischievous children.
In the corridors of the old castle people have been brushed up against by someone unseen, but they seem to be wearing what feels like silk. A strong smell of vulgar ladies perfume also comes and goes.
An elderly couple had an experience within Ballygally I’m sure they will never forget It was Christmas a number of years back, and the couple had booked a room at the Ballygally Castle Hotel. The hotel and castle sits nearly on the bay itself, and in winter the wind blows hard and cold. When they arrived at the hotel, they were surprised to see various members of the staff preparing for a fancy dress ball, and that night, there was a knock on the door. When the gentleman opened the door, he found standing there a member of the serving staff, with an invitation to the ball. Not having any other plans, they attended and had the most beautiful evening. The hotel staff and other guests were all decked out in period attire, and everyone kept their tongues pressed firmly in their cheek to make the evening as authentic as possible. There are medieval banquets after all, all over Ireland and England, but the couple agreed that this surely must have been one of the finest. The next morning at breakfast they couldn’t help but thank the lady who was the manager for one of the nicest evenings that they could remember. Which surprised their host to no end, as the ball was not scheduled to take place for another two days.
Upon learning that, perhaps understandably, the couple checked out.
The Ballygally Castle is alive with activity. With a large spectrum of different haunting and a wide variety of poltergeist activity, apparitions and of course the childish giggles, it is defiantly my hotel of choice when vacationing in sunny Northern Ireland.
Ghosts of The Ballygally Castle
Ghosts of Ballygally Castle
. Lady Isobel Shaw
. Madame Nixon
. Ballygally’s Children
Lady Isobel Shaw
Lady Shaw is by far the castles most famous ghost. If you search for “Haunted Ballygally Castle” and treacherously click on an inferior paranormal website you will no doubt see her name, written somewhere in there articles. However there is alot of speculation around her death. Yup you guessed it suicide for being an unfit wife.
The first rumour states the Lady Shaw was unable to produce a male heir, only a single daughter who did not have the testicles required to inherit her fathers estate or carry on the grand family name. She this unspeakable crime she was imprisoned in her room ( now called the ghost room ), from which she jumped from the miniscule window. Another rumour is that Lady Shaw was having an affair with a rugged sailor. So Mr skinny arms Shaw through a jealous fit and looked her in her room, from which she once again flung herself from the window.
Lady Isobel is seen in the ghost room with a look of fear and/or anger. Justified from the fact her husband locked her within her room. But she has also been seen looking out of the window, as if searching for someone. The name Robert has also been heard called out in the night. So paranormal evidence would conclude that she was indeed unfaithful. Or perhaps its all just a clever rouse to attract tourists to book one of the hotels most expensive rooms. Either way people have reported these things happening so unless they are all making it up it would seem Lady Shaw is still locked in there, even after 200 years.
Madame Nixon & The Children
Madam Nixon was a 19th century women who lived in the hotel. She was said to be a boring person who always dressed in fine silk and wore a heavy perfume. I guess we know who is walking up and down the corridors with a rather smelly perfume, brushing up against unsuspecting customers. The children of Ballygally’s origins are unknown, but that doesn’t make them any less real.
Old Castles always have there stories and legends. In Ballygally castle those stories have solid proof in the form of paranormal evidence. Of Course for all you sceptics out there, you need only to spend the night yourself to witness some of the activity here. Not the kind of haunting we seek out personally, as there are no demonic entities to mock. However Ballygally Castle over the years has been a favourite spot for ghost hunters for a long time. I mean who doesn’t want to be woken up from a sound sleep by an obvious ghostly women standing in the centre of your room, watching your sleep !?
Ballygally Castle Location
The Ballygally Castle Ghost ?
Investigation Of Ballygally Castle
Castle Ghosts of Ireland ( Old School )
A Ghost Hunters Experience
March 18, 2008 — Every bar, restaurant, and hotel older than you is haunted. It’s not hard to figure out why. The longer a place is around, the more of a chance that a mortal tragedy of the kind that results in a ghost or two will occur…or ghosts are just good for business.
Now, judging by every ghost story I’ve ever read, the opposite should be true. In those tales, the person who patronizes a haunted establishment ends up either dead under mysterious circumstances or running white-haired and jibbering into the night. In reality, though, the person who patronizes a haunted place of business just gives them business. Of course, the legitimacy of your spiritual infestation claim might go up a little when your establishment is located in a country whose organized history goes back thousands of years and is Siamesed with a 400-year-old medieval castle…oh, and you keep a permanent room set aside just for the ghost.
Such is the case with the Ballygally Castle Hotel in BallyGally, Northern Ireland, a village about a half an hour above Belfast on the coast of County Antrim. 
About four hundred years ago it was built as a defensible residence by a Scotsman named James Shaw. A few years later his wife Isabella Brisbane Shaw either fell, jumped, or was pushed out of a tower window. At some point after that her ghost started appearing. Fifty years ago it was expanded and turned into a hotel. A week ago I spent the night there.
I way lucked into this little experience, folks. Originally, Ballygally was just a place to hide from night. It was stuck on my itinerary by a travel agent to be a nice change of pace after three days straight in small beds and breakfasts. However, a week or so before the trip, I was perusing some books on a Barnes & Noble table and came across a book entitled The World’s Most Haunted Places. Guess what was in there? Yup, the Catacomb Museum in Paris, France. But the Ballygally Castle Hotel was also on the list. Upon further research, what should have been just a night of recuperation and BBC watching turned into an O.T.I.S.-worthy event all its own. I didn’t mean the word event there at all.
The castle hotel touches Ballygally Bay on the Irish Sea, as the waters of the bay lap against the wall of i
ts parking lot. In the distance you can see a lighthouse winking suggestively and cursing the inventions of radar and satellite that turned it from a lifesaving tower vital to coastal life to a thing to be painted by the likes of Thomas Kinkade and to be forever subjected to the word quaint.
From the outside, the hotel looks exactly as I’ve already described it and even more exactly like the picture of it in this article. At one end is a tall, thin stone castle that, much like most of us, is probably a remnant of its original self, and stretching away from the castle like an inhaling accordion is a white, two-story hotel. The interior of the hotel just looks like the interior of a hotel, except that if you walk too far to one end, you’ll end up in a castle tower. More importantly, though, you’ll also miss the hotel bar, which is located at the opposite end of the hotel.
Although I never really checked the manual to make sure, I was pretty sure that there’s no reason to visit a ghost room during the day, so we didn’t go check it out right away. We spent some time in our own non-ghost room and then ate a leisurely meal at the hotel restaurant, the décor of which featured the mounted head of some large cervid, a fireplace, and a suit of armor. I had the venison, she had the salmon, and you get a heaping portion of irrelevant facts.
Finally, back in our room, the window panes turned night-colored, and we were ready for our foray. It was strangely exciting considering that up to that moment the most stimulating thing that I’d ever done in a hotel is to make an ice run. The Ghost Room is, of course, located in the castle tower part of the hotel. But even if you didn’t have the logic of that already worked out in your head, you just have to follow the sign. That’s right. The sign. Rooms 201-212 this-a-way, Ghost Room that-a-way. More or less, anyway.
It’s exactly that moment when I first saw the sign that I felt cheesy. Up to that point I had convinced myself that I was about to undergo something on the more obscure end of touristy and that I might even have to bribe hotel staff to find the room and gain access. The sign told me otherwise. As did the place’s website before that, but I just didn’t pay any mind at the time.
Part of me (my left arm and my only kidney) wishes that I hadn’t known in advance about the Ghost Room, and that I would have just stumbled across the sign in the hotel. That would have made it more of a revelation, and that, along with scruples and a giant moon-bounce, is one thing my life decidedly lacks. Other parts of me that have been with me longer know better that I probably would have missed the sign entirely, as my hotel tunnel vision usually only has one eye for the bed and the other for the bar.
Despite the obvious external demarcation of the castle tower from the hotel, thanks to modern plaster and paint, the interior of the two section don’t seem to be separated at all. The castle is even wired for electricity. You can end up there by accident. Which, I should mention to protect me from copyright issues, is the actual state slogan of Indiana. 
There are no locks, no posted policies, and you don’t have to get permission or pay a fee. Unrestricted access for all, apparently. Hotel pools usually have more rules. You just go to it like it was the vending machine room.
In the tower are located a few special rooms with alliterated names like Glenariff, Glenaan, Glencoy, and Glenarm that guests can reserve. I was in the much less romanticized but still adequate Room 212 in the hotel portion. Once we entered the tower, we found a door that opened onto a spiral staircase. We headed down it first, and it deposited us at the Dungeon Room, which by the looks of it is set up for meetings and private gatherings.
After that we went to the top of the stairs, which ended a small door that opened onto another, smaller spiral stairway that ascended to the Ghost Room. Outside of this door is a plaque explaining the history of the haunting and the purpose of the Ghost Room. Here is the text of the plaque in full. I’m not sure why “friendly” is in quotation marks instead of about a dozen other more likely words.
Every castle has to have a ghost of some kind, and the ghost of Ballygally has been around for the better part of 400 years! The popular theory is that the ghost is that of Lady Isobella Shaw, wife of Lord James Shaw. Lord Shaw wanted a son, and when his wife delivered his heir, he snatched the baby from his wife and locked her in a room at the top of the castle. While trying to escape to search for beloved child, Lady Isobella fell to her death from the tower window! Another theory is that she was actually thrown from the window by the cruel Lord Shaw or one of his henchmen!
Lady Isobella’s ghost is reputed to be a ‘friendly’ spirit who walks the corridors of the old Castle. Over the years many guests have reported strange experiences and have felt a presence in their rooms! There are also endless stories of unexplained noises in the night, and an eerie green mist over the Castle. The hotel is so fiercely proud of their permanent resident they have even given her a bedroom, ‘The Ghost Room’ here in the tower in the oldest part of the Castle.
The Ghost Room itself is small and furnished with antique-looking pieces including a bed, a desk, a couple of chairs, and a chest, all of which have seen better days but shouldn’t complain because if they weren’t furnishing a ghost room they’d probably be junked in a landfill somewhere.
The ceiling is painted black with a white compass design in its center, and the room itself has a pair of windows. Just off the room, like a small closet, is the interior of a cylindrical turret with another window, the outside of which you can see in the first picture of this article. The infamous tower window inside that cylinder is tiny, and while a human being can fit through there, they’d have to be determined to the point of desperation, which is actually how some of the stories of Lady Isabella Shaw go. Then again, there’s no evidence that this room is the exact room where the tragedy happened. Then again, there’s no evidence that the tragedy happened. Then again, when was evidence ever relevant to a good ghost story. Or a bad one.
The only other bit of notableness in the room is that on the wall is a pencil drawing of a severe-looking woman that I assume is supposed to be of the Lady Isabella, although it wasn’t labeled.
For those of you who are wondering, even though I saw the room part of the Ghost Room, I didn’t get to see the ghost part. In fact, I saw no ghosts during my stay at Ballygally Castle Hotel at all, Lady Isabella or otherwise (the place is also supposed to be haunted by other ghosts from its history). My patronage of the hotel establishment only resulted in an exchange of money that made me curse the American dollar and a complimentary rubber duck. It’s too bad, though. I’ve always wanted to run white-haired and jibbering.