Berkeley Springs Castle

A ruined Maryland colonel built the only Norman-style castle in America for his teenage bride in 1885, died before it was finished, and wrote a will requiring its completion. Four spirits now occupy the 13-room sandstone fortress, and in 2000, a paranormal research group bought it outright because the evidence was too compelling to pass up.

In 2000, a group of ghost chasers bought a castle. Not a metaphor. Virginia Science Research, a paranormal investigation group, purchased the only Norman-style castle in the United States because the volume of documented encounters was too compelling to ignore. The Baltimore Sun covered the sale.

Colonel Samuel Taylor Suit started building this thing in 1885 for Rosa Pelham, his seventeen-year-old bride (he was fifty-one). Suit had already lost a Washington, D.C. mansion to fire, filed for bankruptcy, and divorced. Rosa was the daughter of Alabama congressman Charles Pelham, thirty years younger than the Colonel, and the castle was his grand gesture. Legend says the initial design was sketched on a tablecloth at the Berkeley Springs Hotel by Alfred B. Mullett, the architect behind the Old Executive Office Building in Washington.

One hundred German masons cut each block of silica sandstone from local quarries and hauled them up the hill by horse and wagon. The 9,300-square-foot castle took shape as an English-Norman fortress with towers, arched windows, and 13 rooms plus a basement dungeon. Suit poured everything into it.

He died after a brief illness in September 1888, three years before the final stone was set.

His will contained a clause that reads like a ghost story setup: Rosa could only claim her inheritance if the castle was completed. Construction continued without him. In 1891, Rosa got the keys to a castle her dead husband had ordered finished from beyond the grave.

Rosa became known for lavish parties and unrestrained spending. Creditors eventually forced her out, and she sold the castle to a local bank in 1916. The property later served as a boys' summer camp from 1938 to 1954, then operated as a public museum from 1954 to 1999.

Four spirits reportedly occupy Berkeley Castle. The Colonel appears in upper rooms and hallways, inspecting a building he never occupied in life. Rosa shows up in the dining room, where visitors have seen her reflection in the mirrors, a young woman staring back from a surface that should show only their own face. A third ghost is believed to be a male companion of Rosa's (possibly a suitor who visited after the Colonel's death). The fourth is a little girl with no apparent connection to the Suit family, seen playing on the grounds alongside an older gentleman that some identify as Suit.

The spirits are not subtle. Furniture rearranges in locked rooms overnight. Loud crashes bang from the upper floors when the building is empty. Voices carry through the stone corridors. Footsteps echo on staircases where nobody is walking. The castle's thick sandstone walls seem to amplify the disturbances rather than muffle them.

This is a love story that went sideways at every turn. A ruined man builds a castle for a teenage bride, dies before he can live in it, writes a will forcing its completion, and then apparently moves in anyway. Rosa threw parties until the money ran out. The ghost chasers bought the place because the evidence was that good. Berkeley Springs Castle sits at 276 Cacapon Road, on a hill above the mineral springs that George Washington once bathed in, looking like it belongs in England and behaving like it belongs on a paranormal investigator's bucket list.