The Pomeroy Brothers

A long time ago, my ancestors, the Pomeroy’s owned a castle in Devon, England.

It is very haunted and by several different ghosts. Today I will talk about the Pomeroy Brothers.

In the early 1500’s, beset by attackers, the two brothers, rather than surrender to their enemies, decided to commit suicide by leaping from the steepest part of the castle’s escarpment.

To do so, they blindfolded their horses and spurred them over the precipice. After their deaths, the enemies supposedly allowed the retainers of the castle to go find the bodies for a proper burial.

As my grandmother tells it, it is a true tale that was passed down for many generations.

Plymouth Live photo credit

Can you see the brothers riding their horses in the photo above? This photo was taken a few years ago. The group visiting there did not stage it and it’s not mist.

Many visitors claim they have heard screams and noises in the area of the castle known as, Pomeroy’s Leap.

Here is some background on Berry Pomeroy castle, which my family lived in for 19 generations:

From Wikipedia:

The de la Pomeroy family held the large feudal barony of Berry Pomeroy from shortly after the Norman conquest of England, as the Domesday Book of 1086 records. Early documents refer to a “capital messuage” at Berry, signifying the caput of the manor, which manor in turn was the caput of the barony, which consisted in 1166 of almost 32 knight’s fees,[1] each equating approximately to a single manor.

Although Henry Pomeroy enclosed a deer park here in 1207,[2] the first reference to a castle does not appear until 1496, when Elizabeth, widow of Richard Pomeroy, was assigned a third of both the castle and the capital messuage. The document makes it clear that these were on different sites; the messuage is now thought to have been on or near the site of Berry House in the nearby village.[3]