The Lady in Black appears most frequently in the corridors and ground-floor rooms of the ruined mansion. She wears a long black dress and her approach is announced by a strong, distinctive perfume. One staff member, encountering her after hours, assumed she was a guest who had stayed past closing time. He approached and asked her to leave. The woman turned, held his gaze, and slowly faded from view. Many staff believe she is the ghost of a 19th-century noblewoman who drowned in the moat while attempting to flee the tower during a failed elopement.

The gift shop poltergeist terrorised staff for years with increasingly elaborate and disturbing interventions. Manager Sheila Bradshaw arrived one morning to find hundreds of plastic toy soldiers scattered across the floor, meticulously arranged into battlefield formations. Armed soldiers had been positioned as dead while unarmed figures remained standing. On another occasion, watches locked inside glass display cabinets were found completely twisted, torn and shredded. Sheila held the only key, and there were no signs of forced entry. Dolls were repeatedly removed from their packaging and placed at restaurant chairs, sometimes dressed in jewellery stolen from locked cabinets. Catering manager Dorothy Bond discovered random pages torn from books with the letters D.O.L.L.Y. spelled out at the base of a bookshelf, a name from her unhappy childhood that no colleague knew.

The Chained Oak witch appeared on an autumn night when the Earl of Shrewsbury’s coach was halted by an old woman begging for a coin. The Earl dismissed her. She cursed him: for every branch of the Old Oak Tree that falls, a member of the Earl’s family will die. That same night, a branch broke during a storm. A family member subsequently died. The Earl ordered every branch chained to prevent further falls. The chains remain on the roughly 700-year-old oak in the woodland near Alton village, approached by twenty worn stone steps.