Dragsholm Castle

Dragsholm stands on a former islet in northwest Zealand, about 75 kilometres west of Copenhagen, beside the narrow neck of land – the drag – across which Vikings are said to have hauled their ships. The Bishop of Roskilde built the first castle around 1215, making it one of the oldest secular buildings in Denmark. It was strong enough to be the only castle on Zealand to hold out during the civil war known as the Count’s Feud (1534–1536). After the Reformation the Crown seized it and, from 1536 to 1664, used it as a prison for high-ranking nobles and clergy.

Its most famous prisoner was James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. Accused of murdering Mary’s previous husband, Lord Darnley, Bothwell fled Scotland in 1567, was detained in Norway and passed into Danish custody. King Frederick II held him first in Copenhagen and then, from 1568, at Malmöhus; once Mary’s cause had collapsed, Bothwell was moved on 16 June 1573 to Dragsholm, where he was held in harsh conditions until his death in April 1578; a pillar to which he is said to have been chained still stands, with a groove worn into the floor around it. He was buried at nearby Fårevejle Church, where a mummified body exhumed in 1858 has been displayed as his, although its identity has never been proven.

Badly damaged during the wars with Sweden in the 1650s, the castle was rebuilt in Baroque style after 1694 by the Adeler family, who held it until the 1930s. Since 1937 it has been a hotel and restaurant, now run by the Bøttger family and listed in the Michelin Nordic Guide – and guests have long come for its ghosts as well as its food.

Dragsholm is sometimes said to have as many as a hundred ghosts, but three are famous – details that come mostly from travel guides, ghost-story collections and listicles rather than from the castle itself, whose website no longer mentions them. The Grey Lady is described as a former servant who returns, grateful, to check on the household after the castle’s people cured her toothache. The White Lady is said to be a daughter of an owner who fell in love with a commoner and was locked away by her father; according to the story, workmen renovating the castle – in the 1930s, in most versions – found the skeleton of a young woman in a white gown inside a wall. The third is Bothwell himself, heard driving a horse and carriage across the cobbled courtyard at night. None of these accounts is backed by a documented find or record, and the White Lady tale closely follows a familiar European legend of the walled-up maiden. In 2008, when an American TV crew came to film the ghosts, the castle’s vice-director told a local newspaper he did not believe in them.

Hotel guests and staff tell of a grey figure moving through rooms at night, a white figure in the corridors, the clatter of a coach and horses in the empty courtyard, and the sense of someone standing by the bed.

Guest rooms and corridors of the main building for the Grey and White Ladies; the cobbled inner courtyard and the old prison tower and cellars for Bothwell.

Dragsholm regularly appears on lists of Europe’s most haunted castles and has been visited by paranormal TV crews. Bothwell’s story ties it to Scottish history, and visitors seek out his supposed mummy at Fårevejle Church nearby.