Dragsholm Castle

In Danish the two ladies 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, whom the tourist literature calls Celestine Mariann de Bayonne Gyldenstierne and whose disappearance it dates to about 1550, 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 in place 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 by her mistress when she could have been dismissed, ended as housekeeper in the sixteen-hundreds and now objects to changes and to portraits being rehung. Both ladies are late in print. In the digitised Danish newspaper corpus of the Royal Danish Library, queried through its open LabsAPI on 1 October 2026, the phrase "den hvide dame paa Dragsholm" appears on seventeen pages, the first in 1969 and the last in 2008, with the same seventeen when the query is spelled with å. The name Celestine appears alongside Dragsholm on five pages, the first in 1970. The control in the same corpus is Dragsholm with Bothwell: 1,413 pages, from the 1860s onwards. Looser pairings do occur earlier, on about thirty pages between the 1860s and the 1960s that carry both Dragsholm and "hvide dame" somewhere on the page; the only two of those articles old enough to be read in full through the API, from 1868 and 1877, are theatre listings for Boieldieu's opera Den hvide Dame. 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 dates the phrase in print, and a belief can be older than its first printing. The skeleton cannot be examined. 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 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 "an historical critic has, however, repeatedly shown of late how such traditions first arose at a period too recent for any one fully to believe the unauthenticated report." 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. On the madness, the scepticism runs the other way, because the report is old. Buchanan wrote 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 earliest of those voices belongs to Bothwell's bitterest enemy. The mummy is the strongest documented thread. 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, since John Clark lay there too. In 1938 an expert committee re-examined the burial with X-rays and published its report 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 and quoted from the British file in a 2013 post on the history blog Strange Company, summarised the finding: the mummy was that of a bailiff named Chresten Pedersen Poder who died in 1683, the crypt post-dated Bothwell by some seventy-five years, and 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. In the Danish newspaper corpus, Bothwell and Poder share 30 pages in 1938 and 35 in 1939, and none before. Danish Wikipedia adds that an analysis showed head and body probably belong to two different men; its only reference is the single word "Skalk", the name of a Danish archaeology magazine, with no issue and no year. 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. On 1 October 2026 the English history page of the official site, 850 words, contained no occurrence of ghost, haunted, White Lady, Grey Lady, Bothwell or mummy; the same page gives Adeler six times and 1215 twice, and its 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 guided tour with lunch" at 395 kroner, sold out for its October 2026 dates. Here the hotel is the sceptic and the visitors are the believers.