Employees and visitors at Berkeley Castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia report furniture that moves on its own, crashes on the floors above, and images in the dining-room mirrors. Four spirits are said to hold the house, and only one of them has a name.
Employees and visitors at Berkeley Castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia report furniture that has been rearranged, loud crashes on the floors above, footsteps in rooms nobody is standing in, and images in the dining-room mirrors that nothing in the room explains. The ghost they can put a name to is called Jawbone.
He was a beau of Rosa Pelham Suit, the woman who finished the castle. The story has him holding the library and the ballroom, and hiding behind an unopened door at the end of the second-floor hallway. How he died, nobody will say. Every account gives the same phrase: an untimely death.
The town's tourism site counts four spirits in the building. Jawbone, Rosa, her husband the Colonel, and a seven-year-old girl who likes to sing and giggle. No source ties the girl to the Suit family, or to any child who died there.
The Colonel was Samuel Taylor Suit, who made a fortune on a Louisville distillery. He met Rosa Pelham at a hotel in Berkeley Springs when he was 46 and she was 17. She refused him. Five years later he won her with a pledge to build her a castle, and in 1885 about 100 German masons began cutting local sandstone and hauling it up the hill by horse and wagon. The castle's own history counts 9,300 square feet of it, stone griffins outside and a dungeon tucked into a secret passageway.
He died on September 1, 1888, with the castle unfinished. His will made Rosa's inheritance conditional on completing it, and West Virginia Explorer reports the will also required her to live in it and never remarry. She finished it, then spent everything else on it. The town's tourism site has her throwing parties that ran sunset to sunrise and renting whole railroad cars to bring guests to town, then the money gone by about 50, then a small house where she raised chickens.
Two of her suitors are supposed to have died at the castle, and the tellings don't agree. In one, Rosa pushes a man off the roof and a second falls down the grand staircase onto his own umbrella. In another, one jumps from the tower and one is poisoned. There is no death record, no inquest, no newspaper account of either. Don Mason, who wrote a book about the place, says it has drawn myths for over a century.
In 2000, a three-man paranormal group from Leesburg, Virginia bought the castle at auction for $360,125, outbidding 20 others. "We're not ghost busters," their leader Joe Holbert told the Baltimore Sun. "We observe, we document." The Sun also had an auctioneer's laptop dying during the inspection for no reason anyone could find, and his truck engine quitting near the building.
Berkeley Springs' own tourism site says most of the overblown stories were invented for the house tours that began in 1954. The Morgan Messenger has the local press naming Jawbone as the castle's ghost in 1893.
