Dragsholm Castle

Start with the two ladies, because the version this entry used to carry had them the wrong way round. In Danish they are den hvide dame and den grå dame, and the walling-up belongs to the white one. She is told as a nobleman's daughter — the tourist literature calls her Celestine Mariann de Bayonne Gyldenstierne and dates her disappearance to about 1550 — who was made pregnant by a stable hand and immured by her furious father. Gorm Benzon's collection of Danish castle legends tells the same scene with a Swedish officer instead of the stable hand and death by starvation in the south wing. The grey lady is nobody's prisoner: the guides name her Louise Katrine Jensdatter, a maid who stole from the household silver, was trained rather than dismissed by her mistress, ended as housekeeper in the sixteen-hundreds and now objects to changes and to portraits being rehung. Servant and noblewoman had been swapped, and a story about propriety had been turned into a story about masonry. Both ladies are late in print. In the digitised Danish newspaper corpus at the Royal Danish Library, the phrase "den hvide dame paa Dragsholm" does not appear on a single page before 1969 — seventeen pages in all, 1969 to 2008 — and the name Celestine appears alongside Dragsholm on five pages, the first in 1970. The result holds when the query is varied between the aa and the a spellings. The control in the same corpus is emphatic: Dragsholm and Bothwell share about fifteen hundred pages from 1862 onwards. The Odsherred local-history wiki, independently, gives Holbæk Amts Venstreblad of 28 August 1969 as its source for the legend. Two pointers to the same year. (The measurement is page-level co-occurrence, so it dates the phrase in print, not the belief.) The skeleton is worse than unverified: it is unavailable. Danish media date the find to a repair in 1910; the local-history wiki, following Benzon, says "around 1900" and adds that the bones were reburied in the churchyard without the spot being recorded. That is incompatible with the castle tour's claim that the remains lie behind glass. And the walled-up daughter in love with an enemy officer is a travelling motif: the very magazine feature that tells the Dragsholm version also tells it of Olavinlinna in Finland, where the castellan's daughter Ingel lets in a Russian officer and is bricked up for it. Bothwell's pillar dissolves under the same treatment. Frederik Schiern's monograph of 1863, written from the Danish archives and translated in 1880, is the fullest account there is: in its 163,000 words the string "pillar" occurs zero times, against 1,113 occurrences of Bothwell and 29 of Dragsholm. What Schiern found tradition pointing at, citing an 1847 illustrated survey of Danish manor houses, was "two iron bars in the wall to which the Earl's fetters are said to have been so fastened that he could move round with them" — and he added at once that a critic had repeatedly shown such traditions arose too recently to be believed. The circular groove worn in the floor around a pillar is a later prop. So is the arithmetic: the sentence on English Wikipedia that gives it, and which carries no citation at all, says he was chained there "for the last ten years of his life", but Dragsholm held him four years and ten months. The ten years come from George Buchanan's post decennium of 1582, and they cover the whole Danish captivity. The madness is the point where scepticism has to run the other way. It is not our invention and not modern: Buchanan reported in 1582 that Bothwell died insane, and Melvil, Spottiswood, De Thou, Lord Herries and the anonymous Narratio of 1587 all repeat it. It was contested in 1588, by the Catholic apologist Robert Turner, who needed a lucid deathbed for the confession that exonerated Mary. The reservation worth keeping is that the earliest voice is his bitterest enemy, and that Danish accounts put the insanity before the transfer, as a possible reason for it, not after it as its result. The mummy is the strongest documented thread and our old text had it as hearsay. The coffin was opened on 31 May 1858 "without any positive mark being seen that the corpse found in it was really Bothwell's"; the anatomist Ibsen thought the head had an unmistakable Scottish cast, and Captain Marryat wrote that he defied any impartial Englishman to look at it and not call it an ugly Scotchman. Schiern demolished both in a footnote: a whole series of state prisoners had been held at Dragsholm, and Bothwell was not the only Scotsman buried at Fårevejle — John Clark was there too. In 1938 an expert committee re-examined the burial with X-rays and published in the Sunday supplement of Berlingske Tidende; a letter of 7 November 1938 from Patrick Ramsay of the British legation in Copenhagen, written for King George VI's household, summarised the finding that the mummy was that of a bailiff named Chresten Pedersen Poder who died in 1683, that the crypt post-dated Bothwell by some seventy-five years, and that the coffin's pole fittings dated from about 1700; the director of the National Museum, Poul Nørlund, agreed that the so-called Bothwell burial belongs to the decades around 1700. I have read Ramsay's letter only as quoted in a 2013 study of the case, not in the original file. Danish Wikipedia adds that an analysis showed head and body probably belong to two different men, citing nothing but the word "Skalk" — no issue, no year — and I could not locate it. Finally the commercial incentive, which points the opposite way from what is usually assumed. Dragsholm is repeatedly called one of Europe's most haunted buildings and credited with about a hundred ghosts; neither claim comes from the castle. Its own website in 2001 told the whole history without a single ghost. By 2010 it allowed exactly one, hedged: "it is said that the horse-drawn carriage that carried his coffin away is still heard in the courtyard from time to time!" In 2018 the owner published a signed essay saying that when he took over, the castle was known for ghost stories and bad food, and that "De uopfindsomme spøgelsesfortællinger skulle ud" — the unimaginative ghost tales had to go. As of 2026 the official site's history pages, 707 words in Danish and 849 in English, contain zero occurrences of ghost, spøgelse, haunted, hjemsøgt, hvide dame, grå dame, Bothwell or mummy; the same pages give Adeler six times and 1215 twice, and the timeline names James Hepburn without the title he is famous by. The ghost tour that once ran at 75 kroner for adults and 35 for children has become a historical tour with lunch at 395 kroner. Here the hotel is the sceptic and the visitors are the believers.