Pontefract Castle II was captured by Henry Bolingbroke's supporters in August 1399 and initially imprisoned in the Tower of London. Sometime before Christmas that year he was moved to Pontefract Castle (via Knaresborough) where he remained under guard until his death, perhaps on 14 February 1400. William Shakespeare's play Richard III mentions this incident: Various chroniclers suggest that Richard was starved to death by his captors, and others suggest he starved himself. A contemporary French chronicler suggested that Richard II had been hacked to death, but this is, according to the ODNB, "almost certainly fictitious". In 1536, the castle's guardian, Thomas Darcy,
Foulksrath Castle and it was visited in 1992 by a BBC television crew of British ghost hunters. The first legend concerns a female ghost said to look out from the castle windows; she is purported to be the daughter of a former owner of the castle, who, unhappy with his daughter's choice of lover, had her locked away in a tower, where she either starved to death, or was put to death by her father, depending on the version. The second ghost apparently makes a yearly apparition on 29 November, and is supposedly a guard who fell asleep on duty and was