I accidentally watched that programme Most Haunted once, just in time to witness a shrieking Yvette Fielding claiming to see dead people.

If you haven’t caught it, it’s kind of like Springwatch, with ghosts instead of badgers, but with the one crucial difference that badgers exist, and are actually captured on film, whereas ghosts don’t, and aren’t. So all you get is Fielding screeching “Did you see that?!” into a camera that plainly didn’t.

I confess I’ve always liked the idea of ghosts, but never quite enough actually to want to see one. (It’s exactly the same way I feel about the Arctic Monkeys.) There’s a film called 1408, in which a sceptical writer (John Cusack) agrees to check in to the most haunted hotel room in America, alone, and spend the night there to write about it.

It doesn’t go well. There’s a section of The Sunday Times called Travel, and a sceptical writer (me) agrees to check in to one of the most haunted hotel rooms in Britain, alone, and write about it. It goes... well, let’s see.

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Rising from the mist high on the side of a glen near Gorebridge, in Scotland, is Borthwick Castle Hotel, the ideal Hallowe’en weekend-break destination.

A castle first and hotel second, it has only 10 bedrooms, ranging from the inevitable one where Mary, Queen of Scots stayed to mine, where a ghost lives. Built in 1430, the castle served as protection for various earls until 1650, when Oliver Cromwell turned up in a mood.

Outside, the wall is pitted with the pockmarks of Cromwellian cannonballs, testament to its impregnability; inside, it is a maze of spiral stairs and rooms built into walls. The hotel clearly retains the atmosphere of its historical past. And, according to the stories, it also retains ghosts. And me. For one night. But, as the philosopher Ray Parker Jr once sagely remarked: “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.”

You first enter a magnificent medieval great hall — all vaulted ceilings and suits of armour — which I can best describe as being the ideal room in which to hear Brian Blessed bellow Beowulf while feasting on a boar.

I was greeted by Angela, the hotel manager, who led me through a tiny doorway and up a stone spiral staircase into the dark, forbidding heart of Borthwick Castle.

She apologised and switched the lights on. It’s not dark and forbidding at all. It’s warm and welcoming and charming and — importantly — authentic. High in one of the towers, we arrived at the notorious Red Room, so called because it’s where a maid carrying the illegitimate child of the earl was slaughtered, along with the child, to cover up the scandal.

They say the walls ran red with gore, and in the dead of night, guests have had covers pulled off, seen shapes in the fireplace and heard scratching on the door. An exorcist has been called in, but to no avail. And that’s where I was staying. Alone. (My wife had refused to come, citing a bad cough.) But hey, should anything happen, I would heed Ray Parker Jr’s advice: “Who you gonna call?”

Nobody, as it turns out, because the first thing you notice is that there’s no mobile signal. There’s also no television, no internet and no contact with the outside world. It’s brilliantly and completely cut off, much like having BT broadband at home.

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