History & Haunting Blenkinsopp Castle, Greenhead, Northumberland, England Blenkinsopp Castle is a fire-damaged, partly demolished 19th-century country mansion incorporating the ruinous remains of a 14th-century tower house located above the Tipalt Burn approximately one mile from Greenhead, Northumberland, England. It is a Grade I listed building and a Scheduled Ancient monuments Like almost all the old Northumbrian castles and peels, Blenkinsopp has the reputation of being haunted. A gloomy vault under the castle is said to have buried in it a large chest of gold, hidden in the troublous times: some say by a lady whose spirit cannot rest so long as it is there, and who used formerly to appear--though not, that we have heard, for the last four or five decades--clothed in white from head to foot, and so was known as The White Lady. About the beginning of this century several of the least ruinous apartments in the castle were still occupied by a hind on the estate and some cotters. Indeed, two or three of them continued to be so down to the year 1820 or thereabouts. The visits of the White Lady seem to have been unfrequent latterly, and for some considerable time they had ceased. One night, however, shortly after retiring to rest, the hind and his wife (so the story goes) were alarmed on hearing loud and reiterated screams coming from an adjoining room, in which one of the children, a boy of about eight years of age, had been laid to sleep. On hastily rushing in to see what was the matter, they found the boy sitting trembling on his pillow, terror-struck and bathed in perspiration. The White Lady! the White Lady! he screamed, as soon as he saw them. What Lady? cried the astonished parents, looking round the room; there is no lady here. She is gone, replied the boy, and she looked so angry at me because I would not go with her. She was a fine lady, and she sat down on my bedside and wrung her hands and cried sore. Then she kissed me and asked me to go with her, and she would make me a rich man, as she had buried a large box of gold many hundred years since, down in the vault; and she would give it to me, as she could not rest so long as it was there. When I told her I durst not go, she said she would carry me, and she was lifting me up when I cried out and I frightened her away. The hind and his wife, both very sensible people, concluded that the child had been dreaming and at length succeeded in quieting him and getting him to sleep. But for three successive nights they were disturbed in the same manner, the boy repeating the same story with little variation, so that they were forced to let him sleep in the same apartment with themselves, when the apparition no longer visited him. The effect upon the boys mind however, was such that nothing ever afterwards would induce him to enter into any part of the old castle alone even in daylight. The legend of the White Lady is not one of those that unsophisticated country people willingly let die; and the belief that treasure lies hidden under the grim old ruin waiting to be disinterred, is probably still entertained by not a few. Indeed, there is hardly a place of the kind, either in this country or any other, regarding which some such impression does not exist. About fifty years since, we are told, a strange lady arrived at the village of Greenhead, and took up her quarters at the inn there. She told the landlady, in confidence, that she had had a wonderful dream, to the effect that a large chest of gold lay buried in the vault of Blenkinsopp Castle, and that she was to be the person to find it. She stayed several weeks, awaiting the return of the owner of the property to ask leave to search; but she either got tired of waiting, or could not obtain permission, and so she went away without accomplishing her purpose, and the hidden treasure, if there be such a thing there, remains for some more fortunate person to bring to the light of day. Tradition accounts for the alleged hiding of the gold in the following way:--One of the castellans in the middle ages, named Bryan de Blenkinsopp, familiarly Bryan Blenship, was as avaricious as he was bold, daring, and lawless. He was once heard to say, when taunted with being a fusty old bachelor, that he would never marry until he met with a lady possessed of a chest of gold heavier than ten of his strongest men could carry into his castle; and fate, it seems, had ordained that he would keep his word. For, going to the wars abroad, whether to the Holy Land to fight against the Saracens, or to Hungary to oppose the Turks, we cannot tell, and staying away several years, he met with a lady in some far country, who came up to his expectations, courted her, married her, and brought her home, together with a chest of gold which it took twelve strong men to lift. Bryan Blenkinsopp was now the richest man in the North of England; but it soon transpired that his riches had not brought him happiness, but the reverse. He and his lady quarrelled continually--a fact which could not long be concealed; and one day when the unhappy couple had had a more serious difference than usual, Sir Bryan was heard to utter threats, in reply to his wifes bitter reproaches, which seemed to indicate that he meant to get rid of her as soon as he could without any more formality or fuss than if they had merely been handfasted, that is, pledged to each other for a year and a day. The lady muttered something in return, which could not be distinctly heard by the servants, and so the affair, for the nonce, seemed to end. But a very short time afterwards--possibly the next night--the indignant, ill-used lady got the foreign men-servants who had accompanied her to the castle to take up the precious chest and bury it deep in some secret place out of her miserly husbands reach, where it lies to this day. Accounts differ as to what followed. Some say Sir Bryan disappeared shortly after be discovered his loss; others say the lady disappeared first; but it is affirmed that they both disappeared in a mysterious manner, and that neither of them was ever afterwards seen. It was, moreover, sagely hinted that the lady was something uncanny,--in plain terms, an imp of darkness, sent with her wealth to ensnare Sir Bryans greedy soul. At any rate folks were sure that she was an infidel, for she never went to church, and used on Sundays to sing hymns to Mahoun, or some other false god, in an unknown tongue in her own room. Monthly Chronicle of North-Country Lore and Legend, March 1888 The ancient manor of Blenkinsopp was held by the eponymous Blenkinsopp family from the 13th century and they created a substantial tower house. A licence to crenellate the house was granted on May 6, 1340. An early account by Wallis, writing prior to 1769 and quoted by Rev. J. F. Hodgson, found the west and north-west side of it protected by a very high cespititious wall and a deep foss - a vault going through it, north and south, 33 feet in length, and in breadth 18½ feet: two lesser ones on the north side. The facing on the western wall has been down beyond the memory of any person yet living. (Cespititious in the above quote means turfy or grass-covered, from the Latin caespes meaning turf.) A survey of 1541 reported the roof to be in decay and the tower not to be in good repair. The family, whilst retaining ownership, granted possession to the Earl of Northumberland and abandoned the castle for their other nearby properties at Bellister Castle and Dryburnhaugh. In 1727 the heiress Jane Blenkinsopp married William Coulson of Jesmond. By 1832 the property was in disuse, and a mine agents house was built adjoining the ruinous structure, probably by the architect John Dobson. In about 1877 William Blenkinsopp Coulson carried out a major restoration project which created a large mansion house on the site. Shortly after these works, the Coulsons sold all their Blenkinsopp estates to Edward Joicey. In the 20th century the mansion served as an hotel but major damage was caused in 1954 by a fire, and large parts of the property were demolished, on safety grounds. Today it is part home and part ruin. en.wikipedia.org Some medieval walls survive from the tower and the outer wall; in east wall of the main building there is a wall 1.4m thick, and in the service court buildings there is a wall 2m thick. There are probably more medieval remains buried beneath the ground surface. An ghostly legend clings to Blenkinsop Castle. The story goes that a medieval lord of Blenkinsop married a rich wife. When she refused to tell him where her money chest was kept, he left to look for it and was never heard from again. His wife, stricken with remorse, went to look for him, and she, too, was never heard from again. It is said that her spectre, known as the White Lady, wanders the castle. Just a mile or so to the north is medieval Thirlwall Castle. Chinese Whispers by Chris Huff Documented Phenomena at the Castle In the 1890s the Anne family rented the renovated castle. Braddock (1991) relates some tales of the paranormal which were obtained from Major George Anne, whose family had the tenancy of the castle in the 1890s. On one occasion when Major Ernest Anne, the head of the household and father of George above, was about to leave for a trip to Iceland in 1893, he saw the figure of a woman in a white dress leaning on the banister and looking ‘piercingly’ at him as he was about to ascend the stairs. Thinking that it was one of the two female servants who were employed at the time, he decided not to climb the stairs but to go for a short walk in the garden. There he saw both of the servants in the garden, which made the presence of the woman in white on the stairs quite inexplicable. This woman was also witnessed by the Major’s youngest son, Bob, who died in combat in 1917. As a two-year-old he is known to have shouted while in the nursery, ‘go away, lady’. Major George Anne also told Braddock that there were unexplained knockings on the bedroom door (unspecified as to which bedroom) which would occur at 2am and 5am. The present owner of Blenkinsopp, Michael Simpson, related some tales of the ghosts of the castle (Warren and Wells 1995) which would certainly support a case for the castle still being haunted. On one occasion he was in his bedroom when he heard the steady but loud and unmistakable sound of approaching footsteps in the corridor outside. The footsteps appeared to stop outside the bedroom door, and by the bright moonlight Michael Simpson saw the knob of the door slowly turn, as if to open, and then turn back to its original position. Assuming it was his brother returning from a late night, in a state of some inebriation, he thought little more about the incident, until he discovered that his brother had not returned that night. On balance, it would seem that a haunting has occurred at Blenkinsopp, but whether it is still active is unknown. The evidence presented by Braddock suggests that there may be some fact behind the folklore of the White Lady, even to suggest that she appears to children. However, short of staking a young child down during a vigil in the ruin and waiting and watching what happened, I suspect that this would be hard to prove. The recorded phenomena are of such low intensity that I suspect a vigil or three at the castle would not stand a very good chance of witnessing anything of the paranormal. I fear that this little-known haunting will remain, like so many others, just that, and slowly fade into obscurity. assap.ac.uk/
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 14:39:01 +0000
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