Lumley Castle and the Lily of Lumley haunting, as reported by touring cricket teams (2000 to 2005)

Lumley Castle stands on the banks of the Lumley Park Burn at Chester-le-Street, County Durham. It dates from the 14th century and has been a hotel since 1976. It overlooks the Riverside Ground. Since the ground opened in 1995, touring international cricket teams have slept here.

The castle has a ghost with a name. Lily of Lumley, the story goes, was the wife of Sir Ralph Lumley, who turned the family manor into a castle in 1389. While he was away, two priests threw her down a well in the grounds because she rejected the Catholic faith. They told Ralph she had left to become a nun. She is said to rise from the well and walk the corridors.

The West Indies came first. Their players were "very uncomfortable with sightings and noises they encountered inside the castle," as the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian later put it. They left the building and asked to be moved. Three players, including captain Jimmy Adams, checked out. Nobody recorded exactly what they saw.

Then came Sourav Ganguly. The India captain was given a suite. After dinner he closed the curtains, turned off the lights and went to bed. Running taps in the bathroom woke him. "I got up, switched on the lights and went to turn off the water. The taps were already off."

About half an hour later, the sound woke him again. He left the lights on. Then he switched them off. The water woke him once more. "I went to Robin Singh's room, knocked on his door and asked if I could come in and stay in his room." He slept on the floor and never stayed at the castle again. His account appears in Ian Botham's book Beefy's Cricket Tales.

June 2005. Australia was in England for the NatWest one-day series before the Ashes. Belinda Dennett, the team's media officer, closed her window blind before bed. At 4am her phone woke her. The blind was up again. She looked out and saw a procession of people outside. She went back to bed. The blind went up again. Someone was looking in through the window. She noted the time and the phone message, to show she had not been dreaming.

"Several of the players were uneasy although a lot of them in the morning said they were fine," she said. All-rounder Shane Watson asked for a room change and spent part of the night on the floor of Brett Lee's room. When Dennett started telling her story, a lot of the players didn't want to know the details.

No police, scientific or clerical inquiry was ever made. There are no photographs, recordings or footage. Watson later said it was probably his imagination, after hearing the Lily legend. Others point to the setting: dark corridors and staff in period costume.

The legend is shaky too. The historical Ralph Lumley was married to Eleanor Neville, and the murdered lady of Lumley does not appear in family pedigrees. Some later accounts move the West Indies episode to 2004. Ganguly's account gives no year at all.

Before the 2013 Durham Test, Watson's first thought was simple: "Well, the good thing is we're not staying at Lumley Castle." Since 2019, the hotel has run a "Lily of Lumley" escape game in its old beer cellar, with Escape Rooms Durham.