In Brief
At Belhurst Castle in Geneva, NY, guests keep seeing a woman in white the staff call Isabella, drifting the halls and the shore of Seneca Lake. She's an opera singer, the story goes, who died when an escape tunnel collapsed.
The Full Story
The ghost guests at Belhurst Castle in Geneva, New York keep talking about is a woman in white named Isabella. They see her in the halls, out on the front lawn at night, walking the shore of Seneca Lake. The story goes that she was an opera singer who fled to America with a forbidden lover and died when one of the property's escape tunnels collapsed on her.
The story varies depending on who tells it. Some say she fled Spain and a husband; some tie her to a much older scandal on the same land. People describe her flying in through windows and crossing the dark lawn. The tunnels themselves are local folklore, never dug up or documented, but the lore keeps coming back to them because of who lived here first.
Carrie Harron's Romanesque castle, built of Medina sandstone by fifty men over four years, didn't go up until 1885. Before it, the land held a house called the Hermitage, and in it lived a London fugitive. His name was William Henry Bucke, though he went by Henry Hall. He'd been treasurer of Covent Garden Theatre, embezzled its funds, married his stepmother, and run to America. Local lore says he dug the tunnels down to the lake to have a way out if anyone came looking. In the spring of 1836 he tripped over an obstruction, broke his leg, refused treatment, and died of blood poisoning. By most accounts he was the first person to die on this ground, decades before the castle that now stands over it.
Isabella isn't the only one guests report. They blame a caretaker named Dick O'Brien, who died in 1972, for the tablecloths found knotted onto the bar's chandeliers, for the disembodied laughter, for the small pranks. He was known as a prankster in life, and guests still report seeing him on the stairs or sitting in his favorite chair. The bar has its own habits. Bottles and glasses move on their own. Up in the rooms, showers turn on and off with no one near them, a lullaby is sung at night, and pregnant guests in particular report hearing children playing where there are no children.
The castle is a hotel and winery now, a stop on New York's Haunted History Trail, and in 2019 it ran fourth in a national vote for most haunted hotel. Its own marketing manager kept it honest. "It's interesting and cool to be considered," she said, "but we have no hard evidence of haunting."
