Investigation #002: Hastings Castle

Thomas Becket was genuinely Dean here. The ghost stories arrived later and are considerably less interesting.

Location: West Hill, Hastings, Sussex

Hastings Castle stands on a sandstone promontory above the Old Town, looking out over a Channel that has been eating it for the better part of seven centuries. What remains is a ruin — two towers, a fragment of curtain wall, the chancel arch of a collegiate church — but it is a ruin of some consequence. This is, by most accounts, the first Norman castle built on English soil, and the hill on which it stands was already ancient when William the Conqueror arrived.

The castle is also, by the standards of English castle ghost tourism, comprehensively haunted — or is claimed to be. Our interest, as usual, lies in the distance between what is claimed and what the record actually supports.

Hastings Castle, Sussex

DOCUMENTED

The promontory has a longer history than the castle. Historic England's designation notes the presence of an Iron Age fort on the site, pre-dating the Norman construction by over a millennium and identified in excavation as a promontory fort of a type largely confined to Cornwall. The association of this headland with defensive occupation is, in other words, genuinely ancient — though the specific form that defence took changed considerably over the intervening centuries.

William the Conqueror, having landed at Pevensey in October 1066, moved east to Hastings and established a fortification on the West Hill promontory before the Battle of Senlac. The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the raising of a castle at Hastings — a wooden motte-and-bailey structure of the kind transported prefabricated from Normandy.

The subsequent stone castle was built by the Counts of Eu, to whom William granted the Rape of Hastings, and remained in their possession until the early thirteenth century. Within the castle walls, Robert, Count of Eu established the Collegiate Church of St Mary — a community of priests whose purpose was to offer prayers on behalf of the castle's patron. Historic England notes that early collegiate foundations of this kind, of which Hastings is an example, are rare survivors.

Before his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury and subsequent murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, Thomas Becket held the deanship of the Collegiate Church of St Mary at Hastings. This is documented: contemporary sources list him as 'dean of Hastings' among his numerous ecclesiastical offices held during his period as Chancellor to Henry II. He was, in short, genuinely here.

The castle's decline is well attested. The storms of February 1287, which also reshaped the America Ground (see Investigation #001), drove the sandstone cliffs back considerably, taking the castle's tower and large sections of its walls into the sea. French raids in 1339 and 1377 damaged the town further. The castle was already described as ruinous by the reign of Richard II, and the final institutional blow came in the sixteenth century when Henry VIII dissolved the Collegiate Church during the Reformation. The site was excavated and partially repaired in 1824, sold to Hastings Corporation in 1951, and now constitutes a managed ruin and tourist attraction.

SUSPECTED

The most persistent ghost associated with Hastings Castle is Thomas Becket, said to walk the area of the former collegiate church. The tradition is not entirely without logic. Becket's connection to the site is real; his murder and subsequent canonisation in 1173 made him the most celebrated martyr in medieval England; and the medieval habit of attaching Becket-related traditions to every significant place he had been is well documented across the country.

It seems probable, though no primary source for the Hastings tradition has been located in the course of this investigation, that the Becket ghost story developed in the period following his canonisation — when pilgrimage culture and the deliberate cultivation of Becket associations were at their height — and attached itself to a site where his presence was historically genuine. This would make it one of the older traditions associated with the castle, though 'older' here means post-1173 at the earliest, and not medieval in the sense the popular imagination usually intends.

A 1970s account records a nun being captured on film at the site. The evidence for this has not been independently examined. The collegiate church at Hastings was not a nunnery, which does not preclude a nun visiting, but does make the tradition somewhat difficult to anchor.

INVENTED

The remaining ghost traditions at Hastings Castle are of a type familiar to anyone who has surveyed the paranormal tourism literature: a woman in a hooded cloak who carries a baby and melts into the south wall, variously attributed to a Victorian woman abandoned by a fisherman; chain-rattling prisoners calling for food from the cellars; phantom organ music in the upper areas; and a spectral image of the castle floating over the sea, flags flying, in something like its medieval condition.

None of these traditions is traceable to a primary source. The woman with the baby is a stock figure of English castle haunting, appearing in similar form at multiple sites across the country; the Victorian attribution is telling, since it is precisely the period when such traditions were being manufactured for popular consumption. The chain-rattling prisoners are generic. The spectral castle floating over the sea is worth noting: atmospheric refraction can produce optical effects of this kind under certain coastal conditions, and the sight of what appears to be a floating castle has been recorded at other coastal sites with perfectly explicable causes. The supernatural interpretation is a later gloss on what may be an occasional genuine optical phenomenon.

What the invented traditions share is an almost complete indifference to the site's actual history. A castle with a real connection to Thomas Becket, a promontory occupied since the Iron Age, and a documented record of six hundred years of coastal erosion has generated ghost stories about a Victorian fisherman's lover and prisoners whose imprisonment is unrecorded. The ratio of invention to history is, by any measure, unfavourable to the invention.

VERDICT

Hastings Castle is among the most historically significant sites in the English southeast — the first Norman castle on English soil, a collegiate foundation of unusual early date, and a genuine location in the biography of Thomas Becket. Its ghost traditions are largely generic Victorian-era or later constructions, with the partial exception of the Becket association, which at least has the courtesy to refer to someone who was actually there.

The site earns a verdict of historically exceptional and folklorically unremarkable. The documented history is stranger, older and better evidenced than anything the ghost tourism record has produced. The most remarkable thing about the castle's haunting is how little of it engages with what the castle actually was.

Evidential tier: Well-documented history; ghost tradition largely invented or unverifiable, with one partially grounded exception (the Becket association).

Treasure of the Cinque Ports by the Untruth Seekers

Treasure of the Cinque Ports

Hastings Castle's Cinque Ports history — its role in the Norman defence of the Channel coast and its place in the confederation's long decline — is explored in Treasure of the Cinque Ports, available now. Find it here (UK) and here (US).

About the Untruth Seekers

The Untruth Seekers are dedicated investigators of the legends, ghost stories, and historical mysteries lurking beneath the surface of Sussex and beyond. Their confidential files document the folklore, hauntings, and half-buried histories that most people walk past without a second glance. All findings are published under the series From the Confidential Files of the Untruth Seekers, for readers who suspect there is always more to the story.