A Suffolk castle which inspired an Ed Sheeran hit song has been listed in the top 10 spookiest English Heritage sites.

Framlingham Castle is among the locations voted for in a poll by 1,800 English Heritage staff in which they were asked to rate the individual site they work at on a “spooky scale”.

With mysterious footsteps, cold sensations and a little boy seen holding visitors’ hands without them realising, Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire, which was built on an ancient burial ground, was voted as the most spookiest.

Lucy Hutchings, regional director at English Heritage, said: “Our sites are soaked in history and from bloody battles to dark deeds, not all of their stories are sweetness and light.

“Our castles and palaces, especially on these Halloween nights, can be eerie places and some of our team have seen and heard things they can’t easily explain. “With Halloween fast approaching, who better then to decide which site is the spookiest of them all than those people who are there from dawn to dusk, who know the sites’ history and its ghostly legends inside out?”

Coming a close second in the poll across English Heritage’s 400 castles, abbeys and historic houses is 900-year-old Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, where staff have encountered ghostly figures, an antique cot rocking by itself and the smell of pipe smoke.

Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, whose deep well was the site of a young girl’s drowning, is haunted by several figures and staff often hear the sound of children laughing in other rooms.