About This Location
Also known as the Samuel Taylor Suit Cottage, this castle-like stone structure was built in 1885 by Colonel Samuel Taylor Suit of Washington, D.C. as a personal retreat near the spa town. The Romanesque Revival building sits on a hill overlooking Berkeley Springs.
The Ghost Story
On a hill above the warm mineral springs that George Washington himself once bathed in, Berkeley Springs Castle rises like something transported from medieval England to the mountains of West Virginia. It is the only Norman-style castle in the United States, and the story of its creation is as haunted as the building itself -- a tale of obsessive love, ruin, death, and a promise kept from beyond the grave.
Colonel Samuel Taylor Suit was born in 1832 and built his fortune through investments, politics, and a distillery in Maryland. But 1876 brought catastrophe: his Washington, D.C. mansion burned to the ground, he filed for bankruptcy, and his marriage dissolved. At the age of fifty-one, the ruined Colonel set his sights on seventeen-year-old Rosa Pelham, the daughter of Confederate officer and Alabama congressman Charles Pelham. They married in 1883, and Suit immediately began planning the grandest gesture of his devotion -- a castle for his young bride.
The first stone was laid in 1885. Legend holds that the initial design was sketched on a tablecloth at the Berkeley Springs Hotel by famed architect Alfred B. Mullett, designer of the Old Executive Office Building in Washington. Approximately one hundred German masons worked on the structure, hand-cutting each block of silica sandstone from local quarries and hauling them to the hilltop site by horse and wagon. The castle took shape as an English-Norman fortress with towers, arched windows, and walls built to endure centuries.
But Colonel Suit would never see his castle completed. He died after a brief illness in 1888, three years before the final stone was set. With eerie prescience, his will contained a peculiar stipulation: the castle must be finished before Rosa could claim her inheritance. Construction continued without him, and in 1891, Rosa received the literal and figurative keys to the castle her dead husband had built for her.
Rosa lived in the castle until her own death, and it is here that the haunting begins. Four distinct spirits are said to inhabit Berkeley Castle. The Colonel himself has been seen in the upper rooms and hallways, still inspecting the building he never lived to occupy. Rosa appears throughout the castle, particularly near mirrors -- visitors have reported seeing her reflection in the dining room looking glasses, a young woman staring back from a surface that should show only their own faces. 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 young girl with no apparent connection to the Suit family, whose identity remains a mystery.
The spirits make themselves known through more than apparitions. Furniture rearranges itself in rooms that have been locked overnight. Loud crashes and banging emanate from the upper floors when no one is present. Disembodied voices carry through the stone corridors, and footsteps echo on staircases where no living person walks. The castle's thick sandstone walls seem to amplify rather than muffle these disturbances, as though the stone itself has absorbed the turbulent emotions of the Suit household.
The property served as a boys' summer camp from 1938 to 1954, then operated as a public museum from 1954 to 1999. In 2000, ghost hunters purchased the allegedly haunted castle, drawn by its reputation and the sheer volume of documented encounters. Today, Berkeley Springs Castle stands at 276 Cacapon Road, a monument to obsessive devotion and the spirits who refuse to leave the home that was built -- and completed -- as an act of love that outlasted death itself.