A medieval romance does not arrive with a ghost.

Ludlow offers a wonderfully complete legend: a young woman, a lover, a rope lowered from a tower and a betrayal that ends in death. Unlike many castle stories, its central plot has a genuinely old written ancestry. The surprise is that an old tragedy and an old haunting are not necessarily the same thing.

Read what the romance actually says

The story can be followed through Fouke le Fitz Waryn and later historical retellings. The medieval romance matters as a source for the narrative. It is not automatically a literal record of every person and event it describes.

More importantly, a tragic character in an early text does not become a ghost merely because modern readers know a haunted version. We need to find where that additional claim appears.

Keep the sound separate

Accounts of heavy breathing in the castle walls belong to another evidential category. Here the question is a reported experience rather than the biography of a white lady. Those reports need to be treated independently.

Old masonry offers several things to investigate, from openings and shafts to animals and acoustics. Naming those possibilities is not the same as having tested them at the reported time and place. The surviving detail puts a limit on what can now be resolved.

The difference makes the story better

If we join the heroine and the noise too quickly, each seems to verify the other. Separating them reveals a more interesting process: a literary tradition, a striking ruin and a later experience can be brought together into a single apparently coherent haunting.

Ludlow closes this volume by asking readers to resist that neatness. The romance can be worth reading, the castle worth understanding and the sound unresolved without any one of them supplying evidence for a woman returning from the dead.