MEIRCHIONNE CASTLE
Location: Meirchionne Castle is located four hundred miles west of Paris in the tiny farming commune of Meirchionne, a small farming community not far from where the D700 Highway crosses the D-41roughly 2 KM (1.25 miles) from Loudeze in the province of Cotes-d'Armor (formerly Cotes-du-Nord) in the area of the former Roman province of Armorica. The village is only about fifty to fifty-five structures around a marketplace and courtyard with around 1200 inhabitants surrounded by goat and dairy farms, woodland and rolling hills.
Description Of Place: Located in the overlaying hillside surrounded by woods and farm pastures, the three-story castle includes Norman, Victorian and French Renaissance characteristics on a palatial mansion that possibly dates back to Tenth France. At one time, it consisted as ruins both intact and exposed to the elements over fifty-five thousand square feet (5100 sq. m.) on a hillside with less than half of the structure completely gutted and full of vines and brush and sections of wall laying about the structures. An artificial lake once rested on the grounds.
Containing around a hundred and fifty rooms including a large entry hall, fine dining room and a vast ballroom with a high-supported domed ceiling, the stone, mortar and brick edifice includes parapets, pitched roofs, towers, garret windows and bay windows along with an elaborate garden and veranda with cobblestone pathways and statues of cherubs, female divinities and other characters. The interior is decorated with ornate furnishings, faux museum pieces, parquet floors and a combination of modern and period fixtures amidst green walls with white trim, interior statuary and replicas of fine artwork as decoration.
Ghostly Manifestations: While the United States and England dominate the bulk of ghost stories in the world, it is not difficult to comprehend that all nations have their own share of haunted houses. From Dragsholm Castle in Denmark to the Villa Pallazzo in Italy, Europe has locations far older than the United States, and structures tainted by thousands of years of bloodshed, inhumanity against man and even dark arts rooted in pagan beliefs. While the ghost of Vlad Tepes, the inspiration for the literary character of Count Dracula , walks the ramparts of Bran Castle in Romania, his female counterpart, Ersebeta Bathory, is reported to still be heard screaming from her bedroom at Cachtice Castle near Nove Mesto in the Czech Republic. Ghostly centurions still wander parts of the former Roman Empire in Greece, and in Germany, the White Lady of the Hohenzollerns travels far beyond her castle haunting the descendants of her cruel husband. In France, nearly every hotel and castle has its own phantom maid or a former lord who lost his life during the French Revolution and tries to order guests from his castle.
"Meirchionne Castle is something special." Eldon Duquesne is a French native who attended schooling in the United States. Although not interested in ghost stories, he often finds himself at a loss to explain some of the things happening around him. "It was empty and deserted since the war, a mere shell of what it once was, crumbling to the elements and visited only by graffiti artists and bored teenage youths. In 1999, however, hikers claimed that they were seeing activity here. Brush choked pathways were suddenly clearing themselves, a collapsed wall was suddenly rebuilt, and a doorway into an ancient foyer open to the sky was suddenly restored. Rumors were the castle had ghosts trying to rebuild the structure."
In addition to these tales, people claimed they saw lights floating through the grounds of the castle ruins beyond the trees. Others reported hearing screams and moans, and a Belgian investigative reporter coming to do a story on the reports claimed he was terrified by a spectral figure on a black horse. However, the paranormal occurrences were soon revealed to not be ghostly at all.
"What people were really seeing and finding were the beginnings of the castle being rebuilt." Duquesne reveals. "My partner, Roland LaChance, and I were here several times at night with flashlights doing measurements, taking photos and everything else to get investors and estimates to see if the castle could be restored. We had studied and looked through several area ruins for a place we could affordably restore, and Meirchionne was it. However, during all of our late night visits from Paris, we never saw lights, we never heard voices and we never saw a ghostly horseman."
Guests have awoke in the middle of the night to find the apparition of a woman standing looking out of the window. After a few moments of gazing out into the night, she turns and around the bed, passing through an area in the wall where a doorway was sealed off to a stairway. Ladies visting the location have felt the ghost of a young boy who has been known to go around pulling on women’s dresses or attempting to hold their hands. Others have described a shadowy man swaying in a corner, a young girl lying on a bed and even the distabt barking sounds of a small dog who has also been seen racing out from under beds and vanishing into the hall. Strange orbs have caught on film here, and electrical gadgets like I-Pods and camera phones sometimes malfunction inexplicably.
"Something here really hates modern pop music." LaChance reveals. "We have no problem here with Classical music, but if you play anything like Lady Gaga or even modern jazz, your device will fail and refuse to work until you leave the grounds. One young lady staying here on her way to Cannes said she was planning on listening to her DVD player while in the shadow, but the second she turned her back, her CD shot out of her device and shattered into the wall."
Restoration of the castle cost Duquesne and LaChance over eight hundred thousand Euros of their investor's money (about $5,000,000 in American currency) and almost $12.000 of their own resources to furnish. As much of the original walls, parapets, floors and veranda were included in rebuilding the castle as close to its original 18th Century condition. Furnishings were acquired by their assistant, Miranda LeBeau, scouting estate sales, antique stores and myriad locations. A desk set came from a museum storage building on the Isle of Man, decorations and paintings were taken a remote structure in the Channel Islands and several bedroom sets were virtually donated from a foreclosed hotel near Cherbourg. According to LeBeau, some of these items came with the former owners.
"The desk set for example..." She reveals. "Belonged to Lord Byron Ruthven, who according to legend was murdered on the desk by a chambermaid from whom he tried to take carnal pleasure. The new owners of his estate sold his furniture and furnishings to be rid of his ghost, and the museum who later acquired it claimed to hear hearty laughter from it in their storehouse. Today, it's located in Meirchionne Library in the castle, and people outside have reported seeing a figure pacing behind the library windows and sipping a drink. Others crossing the room threshold have heard a young woman's giggling laughter followed by the sound of a man asking her to be more quiet. It is as if Ruthven is still cavorting with spectral chambermaids, although others think he's miffed to being exiled to French soil."
The books filling the shelves are excess from area libraries and includes original hand-written manuscripts and journals from the private study of Gaston Gautier, an obscure writer from Paris who passed away in 2005. A light at the reading table close to his unpublished works has been found on late at night as if he still returns to proofread his work. It's been turned off several times only for witnesses to walk away and hear the switch click back on by itself.
"Several ghosts are believed to wander the castle’s timeworn interior." Miranda confesses in a very regal French accent. "The most active is that of the “Errand Boy”, a puckish child-like apparition that is seen in the castle’s back hall, dining room and kitchen whose image has been seen scampering through the location. A few witnesses have reported seeing him seemed to emanate from a spot in the kitchen near where a passage was cut though the 10-feet thick wall into the adjoining tower. When he appears, a bright halo of light would appear, and the figure of a young boy, dressed in blue, would approach those sleeping in the room then vanish before their eyes.
According to rumor, during renovation, the bones of a child surrounded by decaying fragments of blue cloth were found in a very old wooden box behind the wall of the downstairs playroom. The box was misplaced for a while and forgotten for sometime until 2008 when they were found on a shelf of the workhouse on the grounds.
"No one knows where they came from, or how they got there." Miranda continues. "It's a very small one-room shed for storing groundskeepers supplies, and there's not a lot of room for storing things in there, but last Spring during the landscaping, they were brought to attention and we decided to bury them on the grounds of the local cemetery at St. Brendan's Chapel. Thereafter, the “Radiant Boy” was seen no more, that is, until we began decorating the old playroom with period toys. Some guests in the adjacent bedroom complain of a blue flash that shoots out of the wall in the dead of night. Although they attribute it to an electrical fault, I am quick to point out that there is no electrical wiring in that particular section of the wall.
“I felt this hand on my arm. It was a most friendly feeling, and I believe someone was trying to guide me to see something.” Miranda tells the story of her first visit to the grounds during the re-construction process. “I just passed on it at the time, but since then, I still find myself coming back to where it was trying to take me."
In the chapel beside the Great Hall, which was once open to the sky, the voices of two men are often heard talking. It is never possible to follow their words, and they stop talking if one makes serious efforts to trace them. In the courtyard where trees and vines covered the veranda, moonlight casts the shadows of the battlements across the worn centuries-old flagstones, and it is positively to hard not to see the shades and shadows come to life. In the Great Hall itself, from where one could look up to the clear sky and through the then missing back wall, guests have seen a phantom concierge tip his hat to them before vanishing. Guests in the master bedroom which was almost entirely preserved except for a ruined bed and furnishings have smelled the scent of roses... even well into the winter months.
"Another unquiet soul to stalk the castle is a spirit we call "Lady Dorothy" because of her resemblance to the American actress Judy Garland. She appears very often around the ballroom and grounds as if she is searching or waiting for someone. We don't know who she is, but she is often seen watching the housekeepers as they're working, and if she's noticed, she tends to vanish. More often, she's been seen pacing around the doors to the garden area or sitting in a bench looking down the hill. The rustle of her dress is sometimes heard as her invisible revenant sweeps along the rambling corridors searching the structure, but no one knows for which who or what she's looking. One theory is that she is looking for the child, but we really don't know. A few people have heard a light plaintiff gasp upstairs on the landing, but we don't know if this is also her or another spirit."
Among other apparitions are a phantom maid who tends to guests and promises to bring drinks and food but who never, An English travel agent who says she brought him tea in the parlor described her as resembling a very young version of actress Angela Lansbury in period attire. She's been also seen upstairs, passing by open bedroom doors and vanishing around corners, but no one is sure if she's behind the poltergeist activity occurs in the kitchen. Dishes, glasses, ceramic dishes and tea pots are often explicably left out after housekeeping as been through, and the sound of clanking pots and pans often brings the concierge running to rectify the disturbance, but nothing is ever found askew.
"As I mentioned," Miranda reveals. "There are often noises in the ballroom... especially when it has been empty and unused for a while. We don't do a lot of weddings or gatherings here, but when I'm in there, I get the feeling I'm being watched from several directions. The spirits here aren't scary, but they do get intimidating, and the ballroom with that large domed ceiling and pillars tends to amplify a lot of sounds such as voices and footsteps. I've been in there several times, halfway expecting to see the apparitions of a couple dancing by me in the room..."
Of the stories reported at Meirchionne, the most odd tale involves the statue of a large lion-headed man standing guard over the garden. It was part of statuary from a demolished residence Miranda rescued from near Paris, and half of the castle overlooks its profile peering down the hill, but at least a few guests have claimed to see the statue come to life, step off its base and enter the back veranda... where one witness has heard the giggle of a young woman waiting for him.
History: Not much is known about Meirchionne Castle, but it's believed the current structure includes foundations from as many as five separate castles or fortresses to have existed on the site. The general analysis of the grounds suggests it was originally a fortress built by the Gauls and later fortified by the invading Normans before its final restoration around the 11th Century, but it's known history actually begins in the 16th Century when a British lord took residence in the structure and used the grounds to grow and produce wine. His great-grandson was reputed to have been a recluse who lived alone in the structure for several years with just a retinue of servants, but fiction claims he fell in love with a servant girl and took her as his wife, escaping to England just before the French Revolution. The details of their romance were distorted and romanticized into the story, "Beauty and the Beast," by Gabrielle Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve around 1740, released in France in 1756 and published in English for the first time in 1757.
Ravaged and burned down during the French Revolution, the castle continued to decline in condition until the Forties when German artillery shells in World War Two knocked out more of the existing structure, but in 1998, locals exploring the castle for the first time started noticing that someone was clearing the property and slowly re-building the structure from the foundation up. By 2000, Roland LaChance and Eldon Duquesne, two enterprising contractors originally searching for relics in the grounds, had rebuilt enough of the main mansion to encourage entrepreneurs to invest in completing restoring the castle to estimations of the castle's original state as per its image in an old 16th Century engraving. By 2003, the site was being rented as a private retreat and eventually transformed into a hotel for travelers interested in experiencing medieval age surroundings.
Identity of Ghosts: There is not enough history to establish characters for all of the ghosts at the Meirchionne, but almost twenty-five spirits have been described here, including ghostly servants, a spectral monk, a confused old man in chains and phantom church-goers in the former chapel. Instead of the usual appearance of a monk with long brown robe, this monk is wearing a wide-brimmed hat.
Source/Comments: Beauty and the Beast (1998) - Activity loosely based on Chillingham Castle in Northumbia, England, Longleat Castle in Essex County, England, Pendersick Castle in Cornwall, England, Hever Castle in Kent England, Woodchester Mansion in Gloucestershire, England and Belcourt Castle in Newport, Rhode Island.
Updated: 10/12/2013