St Briavels Castle was begun around 1075–1129 by Milo Fitz Walter, Earl of Hereford, to guard against Welsh incursions from a hillside spur above the River Wye in the Forest of Dean. Milo died on the site itself in 1143, killed by a stray arrow while hunting on Christmas Day — the castle then passed to his son and became the administrative centre for the Royal Forest of Dean.

King John used the castle as a hunting lodge in the early 13th century, visiting five times over seventeen years, and the Solar is still named King John’s Bedroom in his honour. Edward I added the castle’s famous twin-towered gatehouse in 1292, uniquely fitted with three separate portcullises. Through the 13th and 14th centuries the castle became the primary English centre for manufacturing crossbow quarrels, using Forest of Dean iron for military campaigns in Wales and Scotland.

By the 17th and 18th centuries the castle had declined significantly — the original Norman keep collapsed and was demolished. From the 18th century onward it served as a court and a notorious debtors’ prison; conditions were bad enough that prison reformer John Howard documented them in 1775, and local riots eventually forced its closure as a prison in the 1840s.

The castle sat largely empty through the later 19th century before restoration allowed it to reopen — first informally, then from 1948 as a Youth Hostel, a role it still fills today under YHA management. That’s when the modern flood of ghost stories really began circulating, coinciding with decades of overnight guests sleeping in rooms with names like the Hanging Room and the Oubliette.

Evidence here stays anecdotal — this is a case built on an unusually high volume of consistent guest testimony over nearly 80 years of continuous overnight use, rather than any single documented incident. Few UK haunted locations have had thousands of overnight strangers cycling through the same rooms for eight decades.

Whatever’s actually happening in the Solar at night, the detail that keeps this one in circulation is grimly specific: workers really did find a mummified infant wrapped in cloth in the ceiling rafters during a renovation, and the crying reportedly didn’t stop after it was given a proper burial.