The Broughtbury Castle in
Weston-upon-Trimarch, as you could read on Wikipedia, or in the Encyclopedia
Britannica, was built in 1748 by Lord Broughtbury and served as the family
manor of the Broughtbury family for two centuries. At the death of the last
offspring, Jeremy, who fell in 1945, the castle became a state property and was
used as a hospital up until 1987, when it was closed down due to its poor
condition. The official story ends here.
However, if you take the time and
effort and go to Weston-upon-Trimarch (not to be confused with Weston-upon-Mersey),
the plot (so to say) thickens. The first person you want to talk to is the
Mayor, only because he (being a modern rational man) will talk to you at great
length about the insanely complicated process of classifying the building as
“available community building”, which is necessarily to use it as a school,
asylum or (God save us!) museum. But he won’t talk about (refuses to talk
about) the most interesting thing about it: for that information, you’ll need
somebody else.