The Battle of Torrington and its catastrophic church explosion are exceptionally well documented events in English Civil War historiography, described by contemporaries as a deafening roar felt for miles around, giving this haunting a genuine and dramatic historical catastrophe as its foundation in a way relatively few of this register's traditions can claim.
The battle's own comparative obscurity, sometimes called the forgotten battle despite its decisive role in ending Royalist resistance in the West Country, makes the survival of a local ghost tradition attached to it a notable piece of folk memory keeping the event alive in Torrington itself even where it receives less attention in the wider historical record than betterknown Civil War battles.
The explosion's genuinely high casualty count among soldiers and prisoners packed into a single building gives this register a plausible enough source of restless dead that the Castle Hill tradition requires little embellishment to feel historically grounded, unlike many of this county's more purely legendary hauntings, the site's tragedy a matter of established military record rather than folklore alone.
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