Valentine’s Day is meant to be a day of love, but one woman decided to ditch those plans and have some fun inside some of the most horrifying buildings in the country
A woman decided to ditch plans for Valentine’s Day to instead spend her evening in one of Britain’s most terrifying buildings. Instead of being wined and dined, she opted instead to head to a torture chamber to get her adrenaline fix.
Brocarde, a musician and ghost hunter, admitted she was more interested in the dark and dingy goings on of the torture chambers instead of feeling loved up. She explained she would have found those plans “nauseating” and much preferred s pending the night in an Iron Maiden.
The horror content creator headed to Chillingham Castle, which is believed to be the most haunted castle in the entire country. Eager to see if the experience lived up to the hype, Brocarde left her plans behind and headed to the Northumberland landmark.
Recalling the moment she stepped onto the grounds of the castle, Brocarde admitted that she was initially sceptical of what she had heard. As she made her way up the stairs that led to the fortress, she was exposed to the elements after being deluged in snow.
“Open to the elements and the howling wind, if there was a cold spell to be felt, it was continuous and brutal, unlike the display of medical torture devices that line the walls of the dungeon,” she explained. “As I walked through the door, I was amazed by the number of punishing devices.”
Chillingham Castle has a dark history when it comes to torture, having served as the base for infamous executioner John Sage. According to legend, it is believed that he used the torture chamber in the castle as the backdrop to his brutal killings.
The castle’s owners claim that at the height of his infamy, John would torture as many as 50 people in the space of just one week as they pleaded to stay alive being given the chop. But it was also said that he was quite the romantic, accidentally killing his lover Elizabeth Charlton in a sex game gone wrong in the chamber itself.
“There is indeed a rack present today, but does it have the remnants of Elizabeth’s body fluids on it? That is not something I could, or would, ever want to confirm,” she added.
However, one torture device — the Iron Maiden, a cabinet with spikes on its doors — attracted the soothsayer. Ever curious to see how the feeling was for poor victims of torture at the castle, she stepped into the casing itself, putting herself in the shoes of someone about to be killed.
“With my heart beating fast, I pulled open the iron door to reveal rows of spikes that could leave me impaled in a heartbeat,” she recalled. “I stepped inside, trying to imagine it must have actually felt like to be a prisoner trapped inside a structure like this at the mercy of an evil torturer.
“In that moment, I could feel everything and nothing all at once,” she admitted. “Fortunately for me, I was in control of the iron door, or was that the ghost of John Sage about to take history into his own hands?”
However, despite the owner’s stories of John Sage executing dozens of helpless prisoners each week, they added there is no historical record of his legacy, or whether he even existed. But despite everything, Brocarde said it was worth the trip as she it “definitely managed to get her heart racing” on Valentine’s Day.
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