Woodcroft Castle's haunting is grounded in one of the more thoroughly documented and genuinely gruesome deaths recorded anywhere in this register, an episode of the English Civil War preserved in enough contemporary and near-contemporary detail to leave little doubt about what actually happened, whatever view is taken of the ghost said to result from it. Built in the thirteenth century as a fortified manor house and held by the Woodcroft family until its sale to the Fitzwilliams in 1545, the castle became, during the Second Civil War of 1648, a Royalist stronghold under the command of Dr Michael Hudson, a chaplain to Charles I who had taken up arms in the King's cause against Parliament's forces.
When Roundhead soldiers besieged and stormed the castle in June 1648, Hudson attempted a desperate escape, lowering himself from the ramparts in the hope of reaching the ground and fleeing. His pursuers caught him still dangling from the wall and cut off his hands as he clung there, sending him plunging into the moat below. Rather than ending his ordeal, the fall only brought him within reach of the soldiers waiting at the water's edge, who dragged him out and, in a final act of battlefield atrocity, disembowelled him and cut out his tongue before he finally died. The sheer specific brutality of this sequence, documented closely enough to survive as a coherent, detailed narrative across nearly four centuries, marks it as one of the more extensively recorded individual deaths of the entire English Civil War.
His haunting is correspondingly vivid: local tradition holds that his death is annually re-enacted in spectral form, and that his screams can still be heard, with reports of activity concentrated specifically in June, the same month in which he actually died. No single modern witness account has been traced in the sources consulted for this entry with enough independent detail to describe individually, but the consistency between the dated historical record of Hudson's death and the seasonal timing of his reported haunting gives Woodcroft Castle one of the more internally coherent ghost stories in this register, a real, documented seventeenth-century atrocity whose anniversary its own site is said to still mark.
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