The Broughtbury Castle

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.

The Broughtbury Estate is lying three miles northeast of Weston (this little detail is not presented in the abovementioned sources, but can be obtained with the help of Google Maps) but you don’t have to go that far away just yet. The best source for information regarding the castle is (as the best source for virtually anything) the pub. Weston has two major and twelve minor pubs, and it really doesn’t matter where you go, you will hear the same five stories in different colours. ‘You got the creeps if you go near. The trees of the manor never bloom, just stand there as monuments of an ancient danger [story number one, mind you]. You walk along them and feel as they lean above you, closing up the sky. You choose to look on the pavement, but it’s no jolly sight either: the cracks and potholes are covered with black mud and unholy weed that grows on evilness…’

And this is just the beginning.

‘There are eyes looking through the windows’, says somebody else. ‘But you no see them. Until you realize: the windows are the eyes. The glass is broken mostly, and frame is missing here and there, but it can see inside you. You got the feeling in your tummy, the Thing is looking at you through the windows and ivy runs on the walls and grows quicker that the eye can see. Them ivy grows in the cracks. Them ivy holds the castle together. It is true as I say.’

‘The place is cursed. You go in, no way out. You get lost in the infinite numbers of rooms [actually, the castle has fifty-eight rooms altogether, which number falls short for infinite]. Literally infinite, make no mistake [that is a mistake, the number is fifty-eight]. Poor boys and girls goes there for a little fun and all they find is… death! Or, no one knows exactly, but no one sees them again, I tell ya! [no reported missing person in the police records since 1941]’

So hearsay goes. One thing for sure: The castle is silent. No voices, no noises. The trees stand still because no winds ever hits the estate. Birds never fly there. Boards avoid it. Dogs go mad and run away. The only living thing is the ivy, holding the castle together.