Phantom Hare of Bolingbroke Castle

Bolingbroke Castle, now a picturesque ruin in the Lincolnshire Wolds, was a seat of the Duchy of Lancaster and the birthplace of Henry of Bolingbroke, the future King Henry IV. Its gradual decline after the Civil War left it a haunted shell, and local tradition populated the ruins with a phantom white hare.

White hares in British folklore are almost universally unlucky — they appear before disasters, follow the condemned, and cannot be killed by any ordinary means. The Bolingbroke hare was pursued by hunters on several recorded occasions, always to no effect: it would lead the pack across the ruins and the surrounding fields, then vanish completely at the edge of the castle ditch. Dogs that gave chase too eagerly were said to return shaken, and occasionally one would not return at all.

Whether the tradition predates or postdates the castle's ruin is unclear, but white hare hauntings tend to attach themselves to sites of historical significance or violent death — both of which Bolingbroke can supply, having been slighted during the Lincolnshire Rising and again in the Civil War.