No name, date, or specific incident has been traced for the screaming woman of the tower in the sources consulted for this entry, her haunting recorded far more thinly than the well documented case of Agnes Hungerford at the same castle, and this register treats the two as genuinely distinct traditions rather than assuming, without evidence, that the screaming figure and Agnes are one and the same.
Farleigh Hungerford Castle's own separately recorded history of another Lady Hungerford, imprisoned in the Lady Tower by her own husband for four years and reportedly fed by kindly villagers through her window, offers one plausible, though unconfirmed, candidate for the screaming tower's origin, genuine imprisonment of this kind a documented practice among the period's more controlling or abusive aristocratic husbands.
A purely auditory haunting, screaming without any accompanying visual apparition, is a recognisable and fairly common type throughout this wider register, the sound itself often interpreted locally as evidence of a specific historical trauma even where, as here, no fuller documented account survives to confirm what exactly that trauma might have been.
Comments