Charles I's own genuine imprisonment at Carisbrooke Castle between 1647 and 1648, during the period between the first and second English Civil Wars, is a matter of well documented historical record, the king having been held there under conditions that allowed him some contact with the outside world, including multiple documented attempts, some successful and some not, to communicate with sympathisers and to escape, giving the premise of a French agent sent to make contact with him a genuinely plausible historical setting even though no specific documented record of Louis De Rochefort himself, or of his murder, has been traced in the sources consulted for this entry.
De Rochefort's reported haunting of two adjacent but functionally distinct sites, the former Wax Works and the neighbouring Crown pub, where he is seen together with his horse, gives this haunting an unusually mobile character across a small but specific stretch of Brading High Street, his horse's continued presence alongside him being a detail that recurs in various forms of English ghost lore associated with messengers, couriers and other travelling figures whose animal companions become as integral to their haunting as the figures themselves.
No further detail about the specific circumstances of his murder, its date, or the identity of those responsible has been traced in the sources consulted for this entry, and this haunting is recorded here as local Brading tradition, situated within the wider genuine historical drama of Charles I's island imprisonment even where the specific agent's own story cannot be independently verified.
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