My ghostly experiences at Carisbrooke Castle

With at least one ghost story associated with every main town and village, the Isle of Wight is famously one of the most haunted islands in the world. One place that regularly comes up as being home to wandering spirits is Carisbrooke Castle, which sits at the centre of the island. With over 1000 years’ worth of history, it’s no surprise that the castle gets so much attention from intrigued ghost hunters. Whilst some stories mention monks and guards who linger, the two main stories mention a ‘grey lady’ that walks around the grounds and a girl named Elizabeth Ruffin who is said to appear within the 160 foot well after falling to her death in 1632. When I first moved to the island and began working at Carisbrooke Castle Museum a few years ago, I was initially apprehensive to believe the stories. But within a few months of joining the museum and after spending some time alone in the old Governor’s House, I began experiencing things that logic couldn’t explain.

As one of the island’s main tourist attractions, Carisbrooke Castle often welcomes visitors who take a keen interest in the paranormal. Within a few weeks of beginning my work there I met a visitor who claimed she could communicate with ‘the little girl upstairs’. Whilst my knowledge of the castle’s history was still scarce at that time, I instantly knew who she was referring to. The most famous person to stay at the castle had been King Charles I, who was imprisoned at Carisbrooke between November 1647 and September 1648 before he was eventually taken to London and executed in January the following year. However, Charles wasn’t the only royal prisoner to be held here. In August 1650, two of Charles’s children, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Henry, were forced to stay within the constrictive walls of Carisbrooke Castle.

Within weeks of their arrival, Princess Elizabeth caught a chill whilst playing bowls on the castle’s bowling greens. As her symptoms worsened it became clear that she wouldn’t recover and Elizabeth tragically passed away on 8^th September, aged just fourteen. Whilst there isn’t any concrete evidence, it is widely believed that Elizabeth died in a small room which sits in the back corner of the museum’s upper gallery. This is the exact room where the visitor had spent over half an hour touching walls and talking to ‘the little girl’. At the time I tried not to think much of it but as I told other staff members about what the visitor had said, I discovered that other people have made similar claims about the same room, with some describing a strange atmosphere and others feeling as if they were being watched. Quite interestingly, there are also several stories of dogs flatly refusing to enter the room as if they are scared of something inside.

Whilst the stories were enough to make me question what, or even who, lurked in that back room, what happened next changed my opinion of the situation entirely. A few days after speaking to the visitor, I mentioned what happened to the curator. At the time we were standing just a couple of metres away from the room we affectionately call ‘Elizabeth’s room’ and, like everyone else, she confirmed that she had heard similar stories in the past. As the conversation continued, she told me of a ghostly figure that is said to walk through a bricked up old doorway within the museum before the conversation circled back to Princess Elizabeth. By this time, we were now stood beside the 1870s dollhouse which is on display in the museum. This is where things get spooky, just as I asked the curator if she believed the room was haunted, the lights in the dollhouse began to flicker. We instantly looked at each other and nervously chuckled that the ghost was communicating with us, before swiftly making our way out of the upper galleries. Of course, the logical explanation is that the light flickered due to faulty wiring, but soon I began noticing a pattern. Each time I told a colleague about the light or mentioned the supposed ghost, the dollhouse light would flicker the next time I was alone in the upper gallery but stopped as soon as I got a colleague to come and have a look. This happened three times before I told someone what was happening and then it stopped. It’s been over three years now and I still haven’t seen the dollhouse light flicker once since.

Unfortunately for my anxiety levels, these aren’t my only unusual experiences at the museum. Some days the building seems light and cheerful, but others it can seem particularly eerie like something is lurking. Going by experience, it is on these days where I have smelt a wood fire coming from the fireplace, had sneezing fits by Elizabeth’s room and been ‘followed’ around the building by flickering lightbulbs. Not to mention the times I’ve seen shadows move on the staircase and cameras or heard the faint sound of talking and laughing in the upper gallery, along with the sound of heeled shoes clicking along the floor directly next to me before fading into the distance, despite me being alone in the building. Whilst it’s most likely down to tricks of the mind, other staff members have also had similar experiences. One of my colleagues had been alone in the building on 26th October 2024 when the alarms started going off. As she was checking all the external doors were shut, a rarely used door down into the downstairs kitchen opened by itself. After returning to the lower gallery to check the cameras, she began hearing footsteps and talking upstairs, despite the cameras showing that no one was there. Interestingly, this day coincided with the 80th anniversary of the passing of the museum’s founder and previous castle resident, Princess Beatrice.

On another occasion, one of my other colleagues had been doing some work in one of the downstairs storage rooms when the closed door began banging and shaking as if someone was trying to get in. Confused by the noise, she opened the door to find that there was no one on the other side. Within a few minutes of closing the door to resume her work, my colleague was once again met with the distressed rattling of the door. This time she left the room, shutting the door behind her. From what I can remember, the door began banging once more, this time sounding more frantic, as if someone was trapped inside. Whilst there aren’t any other known experiences in this room besides that it just feels a bit dark and creepy, we do know that this particular door sits within the oldest doorframe in the building, which dates back to the Tudors and previously led to the (now demolished) building where King Charles I had been imprisoned.

Update: On Thursday I was showing this post to my boss and discussing the spooky events before I went to prepare the museum for the day. As I was stood next to the doll house, there were three loud knocks on either the display case with the house, or on the wall opposite. At the time I was alone in that part of the building and there was nothing else around that could have made the sound. Needless to say I instantly left the room to tell my boss about what had just happened. Could this have been the ghost confirming my theories?

Whilst we will never truly know what, or even who, continues to lurk within the walls of Carisbrooke Castle, I like to imagine it being a previous resident overseeing as we continue to retain the same level of pride in the building as they had during their lifetime.

© Queen.Victoria.Roses 2026

Want to be notified about new content? Subscribe to my website to receive email updates! 

This article is the intellectual property of Queen.Victoria.Roses and should not be COPIED, EDITED, OR POSTED IN ANY FORM ON ANOTHER WEBSITE under any circumstances unless permission is given by the author