Some people think there’s a ghost at Albion Castle.

It’s the perfect setting for a good ghost story, as any old San Franciscan will tell you. The two-story Norman castle, with its three-story turret, looks like it holds centuries of secrets right on the edge of Hunters Point. Unless you’re searching with intention, you’d never know it’s there. A fence and trees hide it from the street.

The castle was built in 1870 by John Hamlyn Burnell, a 21-year-old Sussex native with a background in brewing. Beneath the property he purchased on Innes Ave. flowed fresh springwater, today the only natural springs in the city.

"There are two good artesian wells at South San Francisco — one at Mission Mills Scouring House, and another at the Albion Brewery,” an 1878 San Francisco Chronicle story wrote.

Burnell set about hand-carving two 200-foot caverns. Inside the reservoirs, it was a steady 58 degrees. It was the perfect place to store Burnell’s ale.

After getting his business in place, Burnell sailed back to England to marry. One of the few records remaining from Burnell is an 1875 marriage certificate from the Parish of Lyminster. It records the marriage of Burnell (“a gentleman”) and Fanny Constable (at 30, “a spinster”). Her father, George, is listed as a brewer, perhaps explaining how John and Fanny met.

The Burnells returned to San Francisco and their thriving Albion Porter & Ale Brewery. But the good times were short-lived. In 1890, at just 41 years old, John Burnell suddenly died. His estate of $8,000 — about $250,000 today — went to his wife. Operation of the brewery fell to Fanny and her brother-in-law Frederick Burnell.

We know little about Frederick, but according to several accounts of divorce and marriage proceedings in the local newspapers, he was something of a ne’er-do-well. In 1894, the papers covered his divorce from first wife Flora Dodge; she filed on grounds of desertion. Two years later, he had married again, this time to one Amelia Topping.

Family drama aside, the drumbeat of temperance was growing steadily in the United States. Two disasters befell Albion brewery in 1919 — the passage of Prohibition and the death of Fanny Burnell. The remaining Burnell family members decided to close the brewery for good.

It's never brewed beer again, but it's had a few different lives since then. In the late 1920s, Leonard Mees, president of the Mountain Springs Water Company, wisely realized the city was literally sitting on a source of splendid drinking water. For the next two decades, Albion Castle's cisterns were plumbed for the company's water.

In the intervening years, it's switched hands a number of times — owned twice by artists — and avoided being absorbed once by the U.S. Navy through eminent domain in the 1940s.

Today, there's new life at the Norman castle: It's opened up to the public, as well as to a new generation of ghost stories.

In 2012, Bill Gilbert, who grew up near Candlestick Park, bought the property he'd admired throughout his youth. After spiffying up the place, it's become an event space, hosting baby showers, weddings and the like.

It also recently hosted the cast and crew of "Ghost Adventures," the perennially popular paranormal show on the Travel Channel. For some time, rumors of a dark-haired lady, haunting the windows of the tower and the caverns below, have percolated at Albion Castle. The crew came to investigate; the episode filmed there is set to air in early November.

"I've never seen anything personally, but a few people have claimed to have seen a lovely dark-haired woman walking on the property from time-to-time," said property manager Jennifer Gilbert.

"Could be after too many glasses of wine," she joked.

Katie Dowd is an SFGATE Senior Digital Editor. Contact: katie.dowd@sfgate.com | Twitter: @katiedowd