Lucy Walter was born around 1630 into the family that held Roch Castle. Parliamentary forces took and damaged the castle during the Civil War, and the family scattered. Lucy turned up in The Hague in the late 1640s, where she became the first mistress of the young exiled Prince Charles, later Charles II. Their son, James, was born in 1649. He grew up to be the Duke of Monmouth, whose claim to the throne ended in rebellion and execution in 1685. Lucy herself died in Paris in 1658, still under thirty, with a reputation blackened by royalist and parliamentary propaganda alike.
The story now told at Roch is that she came home in death. Her ghost is described as a woman in flowing white who drifts through the corridors of the castle and passes through closed doors and solid walls. The local press has repeated it alongside the older adder legend, and the castle, now a hotel, has a room named for her.
There are no named witnesses or dated reports in the accounts used here, so this is best treated as a house tradition. It is an understandable one: a woman whose short life was pulled about by the politics of the age, attached after death to the one place she might have called home.
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