This haunting is recorded here as dubious in a fairly literal sense, since the fullest surviving account of it is a work of nineteenth century poetry rather than a witness report or an older folk tale collected directly from local informants, and this register is honest about that distinction rather than presenting Landon's literary treatment as though it were independent testimony.
At the same time, Landon's own framing of the poem as drawing on existing local tradition suggests some version of a Restormel ghost story predates her 1832 verse, even if no earlier written source for it was found for this entry, which leaves open the more modest possibility that a genuine, older, and now largely lost oral legend about the castle's last chief lies somewhere behind the poem rather than the whole story being Landon's own invention.
The symbolic shape of the tale, a ghostly midnight visitation causing the death that seals a great castle's decline into the picturesque ruin visitors see today, fits a very recognisable Romantic era literary pattern of using a supernatural encounter to dramatise the passing of medieval grandeur, and readers should weigh this entry accordingly as sitting closer to literary folklore than to a directly witnessed local haunting.
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