Ghosts of Penrhyn Castle

Penrhyn Castle stands near Bangor in North Wales, between Snowdonia and the Menai Strait. It looks like a great Norman fortress, but it was built between about 1820 and 1837 for George Hay Dawkins-Pennant, to a design by Thomas Hopper. The money came from the family's Jamaican sugar plantations and from the Penrhyn slate quarry, and the house stands on the site of an older medieval house. The castle passed to the National Trust in 1951, and according to one local news report, it has about a hundred recorded ghost sightings.

The Keep at Penrhyn Castle.

The ghost most often talked about is Lord Penrhyn himself, who is thought to be George Sholto Douglas-Pennant, the 2nd Baron Penrhyn. He owned the Penrhyn slate quarry during the Great Strike that began in 1900, the longest industrial dispute in British history, and he died in London on March 10th, 1907, at the age of 70. Visitors describe a tall, slim man with high cheekbones and a beard, wearing a long dark jacket, striped grey trousers, and a high-collared shirt with a ruffled cravat. He seems to be holding a book or papers in very pale hands. He has been seen in his old sitting room and near the Keep bedrooms. Nobody has named him, and the link to Lord Penrhyn comes from comparing the description with photographs.

A second apparition is said to be Lady Alice Douglas-Pennant, born in 1863 as one of the fifteen children of the family. Strange writing was once found in her bedroom, which people first took to be Latin. It is Italian, and it reads "essere amato amando," which means "to be loved, whilst loving." Rumor says she fell in love with a member of the castle's staff, which would have been unthinkable at the time, but the National Trust is still checking the diaries of former residents, and the story has not been confirmed. One family saw a woman at the top of the Grand Staircase who was very slim, with an hourglass figure, "as though she was wearing a corset."

Ghost tours at the castle in October 2013 produced more stories. Two visitor services assistants saw a shadowy shape move across the large mirror at the top of the stairs by the Keep bedrooms, heading for the bedrooms just before the group arrived. Near the Grand Hall gallery, a guest and her daughter saw a dark shadow pass through the door of a room, and both suddenly felt sick. Several earlier visitors had reported a bad feeling outside that same room.

One of the cellar ghosts is called John the Bottler. He is said to lurk in the cellars under the Drawing Room, which are part of the original medieval house, and to have had a withered arm. On the 2013 ghost tour, a psychic guest said that a man with a withered arm, whose name was John, had met the group outside the front door and followed them through the downstairs rooms.

In the autumn of 2013, the supervisor of the tea room left her office, which is dark oak-paneled and next to the housemaid's tower staircase, and went to the kitchens. When she returned a few minutes later, the door was bolted from the inside and nobody was in the room. The duty officer had to break the bolt to get in. The bolt is brass, about ten centimeters long, and it could not have slid into place as the door closed.

The railway museum in the castle grounds has its own ghosts. A psychic who visited the Dinorwic carriage said she saw a man in a top hat and a jacket with shiny buttons, who "looked very authoritarian and had a hard stare." A volunteer locking up the museum saw a man through the carriage windows, and a photograph is said to show a figure inside it. A railway engineer named Dafydd also reported a small, dark-haired boy running near the Charles engine, who "disappeared into the wall."

Penrhyn's ghost stories are not documented by the National Trust, and many of them come from psychics and from the blog of a ghost tour guide, so they are best read as local folklore. The castle runs ghost walks around Halloween, if you would like to look for the Keep's shadows yourself.