A haunting attached to a family pet rather than to any human occupant or visitor is a distinctly unusual variant within this register's wider haunting traditions, and the ape's story gives Athelhampton a genuinely memorable and much retold centrepiece to its reputation as one of England's most haunted houses, its purely auditory manifestation, scratching rather than any visual sighting, consistent with the animal's supposed manner of death, trapped and unseen within the fabric of the building itself.
The Martyn family's own genuine historical ownership of Athelhampton during the 16th century gives this tradition a real family and period to draw on, even though no specific documented record of the ape itself, its acquisition, or its accidental death has been traced beyond the oral tradition recorded here, exotic pets of this kind being a genuine, if unusual, feature of wealthy Tudor households able to afford animals imported through international trade.
The ape's status as Athelhampton's most famous ghost, ranked above even the separately recorded Grey Lady and monk in popular retellings of the house's hauntings, gives this register an unusually well known example of a non-human haunting, situating it as a distinctive Dorset counterpart to the various phantom animal traditions recorded elsewhere in this wider register.
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