The Bolsover Castle visible today is not really a castle in the defensive sense at all. It was built from 1612 by Sir Charles Cavendish on the site of an earlier Norman castle, then extended lavishly by his son William, as a deliberate architectural fantasy, a place for entertaining and display rather than for withstanding a siege, complete with a riding house built specifically for William's celebrated passion for dressage. That theatrical, slightly unreal quality seems to have carried through into its modern reputation, which staff themselves describe in strikingly confident terms as among the most haunted in the country.
The castle's most frequently reported ghost is a young boy, seen moving through the building and its grounds and occasionally felt rather than seen, as a small cold hand closing around a visitor's own. Local belief holds that he died tragically on the site, though no specific name or documented incident is given for him in the sources available. A separate figure, a Grey Lady in a flowing dress, is reported walking the castle's garden; her identity is likewise unconfirmed, though some have suggested a connection to the plague, which swept through the wider region in earlier centuries, as a possible explanation for an unnamed female figure tied to the grounds rather than the house itself.
Beyond these two named figures, Bolsover has a wide scatter of less specific reported phenomena: balls of light seen moving and dancing through the rooms, which staff are quick to say look different from the usual dust or insect explanations offered for such things; screams and cries of anguish with no visible source; a woman's voice whispering directly into men's ears; and the sound of footsteps following staff on their daily rounds through the building. None of this rests on a single well-documented historical event, but the volume and consistency of separate reports, kept up by generations of staff rather than a one-off ghost-hunting visit, gives Bolsover's reputation more weight than many single-incident hauntings elsewhere in the county.
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