Ghost hunters investigating “the world’s most haunted castle” think they’ve spotted something that will make your blood run cold.

Sharon Moen, from Keady, Northern Ireland, was searching for spirits at Leap Castle when she caught something unexpected on camera.

A shadowy female figure appears to be watching her and her group in two photos.

Ms Moen said: “I was just snapping away, I was looking at the camera, I wasn’t looking at anything else.

“Then I went back through the photos and I just saw that one come up, and I was like ‘no, that shouldn’t be there.’

“I can’t really explain it, it looks like a shadow but it’s 3D – it’s not just against the wall, it comes out of the wall.”

Leap Castle, across the border in Coolderry, Ireland, has been called the world’s most haunted castle.

It was famously the home of Victorian novelist, Mildred Darby, who described multiple paranormal encounters within its walls.

Its “Bloody Chapel” is also the site of a famous murder – a priest was slain by his own brother in a row over the leadership of the O’Carroll clan.

The chapel was later found to have a secret oubliette, or dungeon, containing wooden spikes and human remains.

Sharon thinks that the figure she spotted could be explained by this dark past.

“The history of the castle is gruesome, sad and violent,” said the 43-year-old.

“Some people say the figure could be the priest, could be the brother, could be Mildred herself, we don’t know who it is.”

And the photo wasn’t the only curious occurrence when Ms Moen and her fellow ghost hunters from Paravent visited on Saturday night.

Sharon claims that their EVP (electronic voice phenomena) recorder picked up on several spirits communicating.

She said: “We were sitting in a room upstairs and I called out, and I said, ‘okay, are there any spirits here that want to communicate with us, anybody in the room?’

“And then we heard, ‘this is Edward’s room.’

“When we looked it up, there was an obituary for an Edward who died in Leap Castle, he was 47 years of age. So could it be him? Is that what came through?

“We could hear footsteps out on the stairway, like somebody running up the stairs in a dress. It wasn’t any of us.”

She’s sure that what she caught on camera couldn’t be any one of her group either.

“I’m very confident because we’re certain of where everybody was at the time,” she said.

“It doesn’t even resemble anybody that was in the group for a start, plus if it was – look at the ones that are sitting there on either side, you can see them clearly.

“It’s one of those things – everybody will have an opinion on it, especially people who don’t believe in that type of thing, but I’m pretty sure it was none of us.”