The Blue Lady Ghost at Berry Pomeroy Castle

I know this sounds too strange to be true, but my 13th great-grandmother is a ghost at Berry Pomeroy castle in Devon, England.

They call her the Blue Lady. But her real name was Elizabeth. As my grandmother told it, this takes place in the 1300s. Pomeroy castle was built around 1100 and the Pomeroys lived there for centuries.

Berry Pomeroy castle is perched high on a hill, overlooking the moors. A deer park surrounds the castle. It is quite hidden and hard to find.

Here is how the story was told to me: Elizabeth is said to be the spirit of the daughter of an early Norman lord, who after a brief relationship with a farmhand, she gave birth to a child.

The farmhand was poor and would never have given Elizabeth’s child the life it deserved. Elizabeth’s father Hugh decided to take matters into his own hands, literally. Shortly after its birth, her father strangled the baby in one of the upper rooms of the tower. He buried the body in the walls of the sewing room. At various times, the cries of the murdered infant can be heard throughout the castle.

Elizabeth went mad after this and bribed one of the servants to poison her father’s food in revenge. He died a few days after her infant died.

Then Elizabeth killed herself by jumping from Pomeroy’s Leap.

Many years passed. The castle changed hands to the Seymours and then was abandoned. Covered in ivy, like something out of a fairytale, it was known to be haunted.

Visited and explored by only the bravest, The Reverend John Swete, writing of his visit to Berry Pomeroy Castle in his Devon Tour of 1793.

What a luxury thus to muse away a not unprofitable hour, among such Scenes of grandeur, solemnity, and solitude! longer much longer could I have sat, and indulg’d the penseroso sensations amid these charming Ruins had the time permitted — but I had eight miles to ride — I had…