John Archdale, a planter from Norfolk, built the first Castle Archdale in 1615 on the Lough Erne shore. Spirited Isle reports a long-standing account that the upper floors were haunted by a spectral black dog, an omen of death in Irish tradition, and that horses refused to be taken up beyond the second floor, rearing or panicking for no visible reason.
The page links the place to the Irish Rebellion of 1641, when Rory Maguire's forces are said to have set the castle ablaze with Edward Archdale's children trapped inside. In the story, all but one of the children died, and the family nurse threw the youngest from a window to safety before dying in the flames herself. Modern visitors are said to report a silent woman in the grounds taken to be the nurse, and the cries of children heard at night.
The original ruins survive, partly hidden in the older woodland. A Georgian mansion built about a mile away in 1773 was demolished in 1970. The details of 1641 at Archdale are less well documented than those at Tully, so the nurse story should be read as local tradition.
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