Ballygally Castle is, by its own hotel’s account, the only 17th-century building in Northern Ireland still in continuous use as a residence today. It was built in 1625 by James Shaw, a Scot from Greenock who had come to Ireland in 1606 to make his fortune and rented the land from the Earl of Antrim for £24 a year. Given the ongoing conflict between English and Scottish settlers and the Gaelic Irish chieftains of the period, the castle was built defensively — walls five feet thick, and narrow windows designed to allow muskets to be fired through them — and it also served as a refuge for Protestant settlers during the Civil Wars.

Ownership passed out of the Shaw family in the early 1800s, and the estate later served as a coastguard station before passing through several other families. Textile millionaire Cyril Lord bought and refurbished it as a hotel in the early 1950s, and it has operated as one ever since, combining the surviving 17th-century castle rooms — its former dungeon now serving as the ladies’ toilets — with a much larger modern hotel wing.

The castle’s defining ghost story belongs to Lady Isabella Shaw. According to the traditional telling, after she gave birth to a daughter rather than the son James Shaw wanted, he locked her away in a small turret room at the top of the tower. Starving and tormented by the sound of her baby crying elsewhere in the castle, she is said to have tried to escape through the tiny tower window and fell to her death on the rocks below. Her ghost is said to walk the hotel corridors at night, knocking on guests’ doors. The room where she died, the “Ghost Room,” is preserved today for visitors to see rather than for overnight stays. In 2021, BBC Two Northern Ireland’s documentary series Afeared sent historians to investigate the real, documented life behind the folklore, turning up archival findings that complicate the traditional story.

Isabella isn’t the only figure attached to the castle. Guests and staff also report the ghosts of one or more children, most often a girl said to have died of plague and sometimes named “Annie,” for whom visitors still leave dolls and sweets in her old room, along with small hands reportedly tugging at bedclothes in the night. A separate figure, “Madame Nixon,” a 19th-century resident, is said to be heard rather than seen — the rustle of silk skirts moving through the castle at night. Staff interviewed by the Irish Times in 2025 described a consistent cold, oppressive atmosphere in the tower room, and noted that a local psychic has both investigated the room and led seances in the castle’s former meeting room.

Weighed honestly, none of this rises above staff and guest anecdote, a psychic’s personal impressions, and one documentary team’s dig into the historical record behind a well-worn legend. Readers weighing how much stock to put in it may find our guide to how ghost hunting evidence gets evaluated useful context. What isn’t in question is the building itself: a genuinely rare, still-inhabited 17th-century fortified house on the Antrim coast, its defensive architecture and a 400-year-old tragedy-turned-legend giving it a strong claim to the “most haunted” title several UK surveys have handed it.