Arundel Castle's genuinely long history as the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Norfolk, its original structure founded on Christmas Day 1067, gives its several reported ghosts an unusually deep well of real family and national history to have drawn from, the Blue Man's proposed Cavalier identity connecting him specifically to the castle's documented role during the tumultuous years of the English Civil War, when Arundel itself was besieged and changed hands between Royalist and Parliamentarian forces.
The Blue Man's consistent characterisation, calmly reading in the library rather than engaging in any more dramatic or distressing activity, gives him an unusually peaceable presence among this register's Civil War-era ghosts, many of whom are instead associated with violent death or battlefield trauma. His specifically blue tunic, distinct from the buff coats more commonly associated with Cavalier dress in popular imagination, gives the tradition a specific visual detail that has apparently persisted consistently enough across retellings to have become his defining feature and namesake.
No particular witness account, precise date, or named identity beyond his general Cavalier association has been traced for the Blue Man in the sources consulted for this entry, and he is recorded here as one of several distinct ghosts reported within a castle whose sheer scale and continuous occupation across nearly a thousand years have made it, according to local tradition, an unusually active site among England's aristocratic residences.
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