Dunstanburgh Castle's dramatic clifftop ruin above the Northumberland coast has attracted its own genuinely chivalric ghost legend in the figure of Sir Guy the Seeker, a story built with all the classic ingredients of medieval romance even though it was actually composed centuries later. The tale tells of a knight caught in a sudden storm who took shelter within the castle ruins, where a hideous spectre appeared before him and led him down into an underground chamber, where a beautiful maiden lay sleeping on a crystal plinth, a horn resting on one side of her and a sword on the other, an unmistakable test laid out for whoever found her.
Given the choice between the two objects, Sir Guy picked up the horn and blew it, an act that woke a hundred ghostly knights who immediately attacked him with blades that passed harmlessly through his body, unable to actually harm him, and a disembodied voice then told him plainly that he had chosen wrongly, that a true warrior would have taken up the sword instead of the horn. Consumed afterward by the need to find the sleeping maiden again and complete the rescue properly this time, Sir Guy spent the remainder of his entire life searching the ruins without ever succeeding.
His ghost is said to still wander Dunstanburgh to this day, endlessly continuing his failed search, and his cries are reported by visitors on stormy evenings, the weather itself seeming to echo the desperate storm that first brought him to the castle. The story is usually traced to a 1808 poem by Matthew Lewis rather than to any genuinely older oral tradition, which makes it, much like Lindisfarne's own Constance de Beverley legend elsewhere in this collection, a piece of Romantic-era literary folklore that has, over the two centuries since, become thoroughly attached to a real and much-visited medieval ruin, its Georgian literary origins now all but invisible beneath generations of local retelling.
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