Somewhere in the fabric of Whitestown House, if the old accounts are to be believed, are the stones of a castle that no longer exists and cannot be found. The house sits on a north-facing slope in a col, a natural saddle of land with higher ground rising to both north and south, and has been abandoned for some time. Five bays wide and three storeys tall, it is the kind of Georgian rural pile that would once have anchored a modest estate, and a date stone records its construction in 1771.

The house was built for a Richard Dockrel, and writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1874 to 1875, a Dr Martin suggested that its fabric incorporated dressed stone robbed from Hackettstown Castle, a medieval structure located roughly five kilometres to the south-east. Robbing stone from earlier buildings was entirely common practice in eighteenth-century Ireland, and a vanished castle would have offered a ready-made quarry. The difficulty is that Hackettstown Castle itself has never been located with any certainty, and no diagnostic dressed stones, meaning cut or shaped masonry of a kind distinctive enough to identify its origin, are visible in the standing fabric of the house. The claim rests on Martin's nineteenth-century account and nothing that can presently be verified on the ground. The result is a building that may contain a ghost, architecturally speaking, of something older and entirely lost.