Travellers Tales - The Ghosts of Gwydir Castle

Some years ago I took my sons, then aged 12 and 8 on their first visit to England. For reasons I won’t go into, my husband was supposed to accompany us but didn’t make the trip so it was just me and the two boys circumnavigating England in a Fiat Punto… and we did castles. I mean we really DID castles! Starting in the Tower of London on our first day through Warwick Castle, Ashby de La Zouch, York and down into Wales.

If you want to see castles then Wales is the place to go. The great castles built by Edward I as a symbol of his power and authority over the rebellious Welsh ring the Welsh border down through the Marches and across the coastline. However by the late middle ages, the need for these great stone edifices had diminished and the wealthy landowners were building elegant houses with minimal fortifications and “all mod cons”.

Our adventure was in the days before GPS and Navman and I was driving a car with an 8 year old and a 12 year old who, for all his badges in Scouts, appeared incapable of reading a map. So every evening, in consultation with the road atlas, I would painstakingly write out our route for the day for him to read out loud to me.

Gwydir Castle - exterior

This system worked well until we got to Wales where all the road signs are in Welsh. The inevitable happened and we got lost… spectacularly lost somewhere in northern Wales and on a back road I saw a sign that said “Gwydir Castle”. If nothing else it was a chance for a break and to consult the road map and ask a friendly native where we were. 

As it turned out Gwydir Castle was not so much a castle as a late medieval/Tudor fortified manor house. Probably owing to its strategic position in a narrow valley, the site of Gwydir had been in continual occupation for centuries before Meredith ap Ieuan ap Robert, the founder of the Wynn dynasty, built the present Gwydir Castle, using material from the dissolved Abbey of Maenan. Of particular interest to me, as a student of the English Civil War, the house was reputed to have been visited in 1645 by Charles I, as the guest of Sir Richard Wynn, 2nd Baronet, Treasurer to Queen Henrietta Maria, and Groom of the Royal Bed Chamber.

It had recently been purchased and opened up to the public by the owners to raise the money to restore it (I believe it is now a B&B). At the time I happened upon it in 1996, these works were very much in their early stages and it was dark, gloomy and overgrown. Everything you would imagine a thoroughly haunted house to be! In preparing for this article I found wonderful images on the internet which bear no resemblance to the half derelict building it had been!

Gwydir Castle - gates

I have an interest in ghost stories and the paranormal and while I have not ‘seen’ a ghost I have visited places where I have felt decidedly uncomfortable and Gwydir was one of those places. From the moment I stepped through the heavy front gate, it felt as if my heckles went up and I am not surprised to see it described (more recently) on its website as “One of the most haunted houses in Wales”. 

Needless to say we were the only visitors so I got talking to the caretaker, asking her about the spectral inhabitants of the house. The most frequent ‘visitor’ is a grey (or white) lady thought to be the ghost of a servant girl who was murdered after becoming pregnant during a romance with one of the lords of the manor and her body  hidden in a wall space beside a chimney breast (a priest hole). The presence of this apparition is said to be accompanied by the stench of decaying flesh. It is said that the 5th Baronet confessed on his death bed to a murder in his youth. The other suspect is the first Baronet, Sir John Wynn (whose ghost is also seen) who was reputedly something of a local tyrant.

Also seen is a monk (said to have died when trapped in a tunnel from a secret room) and the sound of crying children is also heard.

Gwydir Castle - interior

Thankfully our visit was uneventful and free of nauseating smells of decay. However the chatty caretaker did tell us about the ghost dog. She owned a dog which came with her to work at the Castle. Hearing barking she looked out of the window and saw her dog joyfully gambling in the garden with a strange dog (she described as “a tall, grey dog”) she had never seen before. She went out to call her animal in and at the sound of her voice the second dog just vanished. FOR MORE ON THE GHOSTS, CLICK HERE

Some years later, the owner of the house found some bones in the cellar during the restoration and had them sent away for analysis. The result came back saying they were the bones of a dog. Conscious that the bodies of animals were often used in the foundations of houses to ward off evil spirits, she restored the bones to where they had been found and the spectral dog has not been seen since.

We went on to visit Conwy Castle (where I nearly lost the boys to a harrassed school teacher in charge of a large school group), Ruthin Castle (complete with hokey medieval banquet), Harlech Castle (Men of…) and my favourite castle, Denbigh Castle but if I look back at that trip, it is the quiet, brooding menace of Gwydir Castle that stays with me more than any of the others!

HAVE YOU EVER VISITED A PLACE THAT JUST “STAYED WITH YOU”?

MORE GHOSTLY TALES...ESMERELDA OR Was it really the butler...?

The elegant nineteenth century mansion, Grosvenor (or Lanark as it was originally called) still graces Queens Road, Melbourne, although now a tizzed up shadow of its former glory, it forms nothing more than a facade to a large apartment complex.

Grosvenor - just after the Army moved out.

Built in 1887, Grosvenor was acquired by the Australian Army in 1942 for the princely sum of £25,000. Since that date it was used exclusively by the Army until it was finally sold in the late 1990s.

I was posted to Headquarters 4^th Brigade, the last unit to occupy Grosvenor, in the mid 1990s, as the Brigade’s first legal officer. I was assigned a small, chilly office in what would have been the servant’s quarters. It was a room that resolutely refused to warm up, even on the chilliest day and I would often find my computer switched on after I was sure I had switched it off. The more experienced members of staff would just shrug their shoulders and blame it on “Esmerelda”.

There had been stories of Esmerelda in circulation for many years before I came to Grosvenor. She was reputed to have been a parlour maid with whom the master of the house had a dalliance. The story was that the butler killed her and concealed her body in the swamp which is now Albert Park Lake but her restless, unrequited spirit returned to the house. A LTCOL Thomas wrote a brief history of the house and although sceptical to the point of scathing about the existence of a ghost, did find a report in the Police Gazette of 1890-1910 of the body of a female child being found in the swamp on 19 June 1900. An autopsy revealed she had been suffocated but there did not appear to be any link to the house.

The Servants Wing from the carpark

One crusty old warrant officer who was posted to the house from the early 70s to 90s was convinced of supernatural occurrences in the cellar and the area behind the bar of the officers’ mess (the old butler’s pantry). He would frequently hear footsteps emanating from this area. One evening around dusk, he and an officer were leaving for the day. The building was deserted and locked up. As they got into the car he looked up and saw the shadow of a girl holding a candle holder in one of the upstairs rooms of the servant’s annexe. 

Esmerelda’s presence would be felt in other ways. From the bathroom next to the billiard room the staff were irritated by the persistent sound of a dripping tap. On investigation the taps were found to be firmly turned off. Before and after the building was carpeted, the sound of footsteps crunching on sand would be heard about the building.

The "Pink" Bathroom

Before my time there had been at least two sightings of Esmerelda, one in the dining room and one in the “pink bathroom” (attached to the commander’s office which would have been the master bedroom to the house). Both witnesses described a “white lady”. In the 1980s a soldier checking the pink bathroom was unable to open the door which was never locked. Once inside, he retreated hastily when the cups and saucers stored on a bench inside the bathroom began rattling and dancing.

Which brings me to my own time at Grosvenor. I had a young captain working for me who was not a person with a vivid imagination by any stretch. One evening he came up to our office, whitefaced, and told me he had been in the officers’ mess doing up his bootlaces. He became aware of someone entering the Mess and looked up thinking it was one of the other officers. He saw a “grey-white” image of a woman which abruptly disappeared.

(The following photograph is of "The Officer's Mess" where there were many sightings of Esmerelda. I took these photos using an a fairly simple standard film camera - remember those? - not long after the Army had moved out and in this photograph only there is a mysterious white "blob" in the middle of the floor. Just behind the "blob" is the bar area where the Butler's Pantry was situated. You can see the room is heavily curtained. A trick of the light or an "orb"? You be the judge.)

When I mentioned this story to the regular army members of the staff, they were livid. How come he had seen Esmerelda and they hadn’t? Out the stories came.

·     

• One warrant officer told me he had been alone in the building and gone for a shower. When he came out he distinctly heard the sound of voices talking. He prowled the building and found the offices locked and silent.
• The Brigade RSM, a hard bitten English veteran, refused to spend a night in the building after hearing sounds of doors opening and closing and footsteps coming from the servant’s wing.
• A civilian guest, with psychic abilities, claimed on entering the building that she felt a distinct presence in the building. Undeterred she stayed for the Mess Dinner

F   Finally my own son claims to have met Esmerelda. I called in one day with him in tow. In the car going home he said he had seen a grey white blob that had passed through him and felt very cold. Now I am less inclined to believe a 10 year old with a vivid imagination but, at the time, he hadn’t heard the stories of Esmerelda. 

The "Billiard Room" 

Like Netherby (see THE LAST RESIDENT OF NETHERBY), Grosvenor lay empty for many years before the developers moved in. Much of the building was demolished, notably the servants wing where she seemed to have been most active. I wonder if her lonely spirit now lives in the glammed up modernity of the apartment complex?

Grosvenor today...any self respecting ghost would stay away!

Post script: Since writing the article on Netherby, the Sergeant I mentioned in that article got back in touch with me.  When I told him I was planning on putting up the companion piece on Grosvenor, he wrote: "I played a great prank on the the receptionist at Grosvenor who I knew quite well from my posting to 4 Bde (I was there for a short time before coming to Netherby). Terrified the life out of her,rang 4 Bde she answered and I pretended to be Albert, with a growly groaning voice looking for Esmerelda, told her that she was probably upstairs in the pink bathroom and I needed to speak with her. It took her a long time to forgive me and she would not venture into that bathroom for anything. Funny though I never felt Esmeralda's presence at Grosvenor, perhaps it was because I wasn't there long enough as we had recently moved there from Kensington and everything was still quite disorganised."

The Last Resident of Netherby

In my post of 25 June, Me and My Ghosts, I wrote of my experiences of working in two supposedly haunted Army buildings. This week - the tale of "Albert" - the last resident of Netherby.

Netherby House c1999 The orderly room was to the right of the front door, officers mess to the left

 "Netherby" House, in Queens Road, Melbourne is one of the few remaining Victorian mansions that once lined that street. Today it has been beautifully restored and forms part of a hotel.


The building has a chequered history having been variously a private residence, a maternity hospital, ASIO headquarters and since the 1960s had been the home of the Australian Army's Headquarters 3rd Training Group.  When I was a young pay clerk (Army Reserve) at Headquarters 3rd Training Group in the early 1980s (don't you love the uniform?) there were stories of boarded up cellars and secret rooms, reputedly a legacy of its use by ASIO.  

Alison in her days as pay clerk  at Netherby - HQ 3 Trg Gp - 1981

In my early researches about "Albert", staff posted to Netherby during those years complained of cold rooms and unexplained trips on the smooth linoleum floor.  I was just one of a group of youngsters and while we may have wasted time looking for the boarded up cellar and wondered why there was a room  (used as the Officers Mess wine cellar), secured with a safe locking mechanism that any bank would have been proud of, we never saw or experienced anything vaguely paranormal. 


In the mid 1980s a couple of members of the regular army staff, attending a late dinner in another part of the city, returned to retrieve a car one of them had left parked at the back of the building. To their surprise the hallway light was on and as they neared the building they saw a figure sitting near the window in the orderly room. The man wore what looked like a red checked shirt. Concerned about the security, the staff members unlocked the front door and, entering the orderly room, saw the PABX light on the phone in glowing red, as if the Commander was on the phone – unlikely as it was 1.30 in the morning. Thinking it had been left off the hook in his office, they went upstairs and found the phone in place on the hook. Back in the orderly room they noted the light still glowed red so they went back upstairs and this time found the phone off the hook. They replaced it, switched off the lights, locked the door and fled!


I left Netherby in 1982 to do officer training (that's another whole story - no ghosts!). In the early 1990s I returned as a student on a promotion course.  It had not changed at all, still the same linoleum floors and cold, dusty offices I remembered.  The chief clerk at the time was a mild mannered regular army Sergeant who in the latter part of his posting was quite often the only person in the building for days on end.  This is his story.

Alison, seated front row middle, outside Netherby 1992

The sergeant lived quite a distance from Queens Road so he began the practice of sleeping overnight after the Wednesday night parade.  The first night he did this, he chose a small, quiet room at the rear of the building.  About 3.00 am he was woken with a start.  The room was icy cold, despite a heater that was still on.  Struggling to focus, he had the distinct impression of a figure at the foot of the bed staring down at him.  He leapt out of bed, switched on the light and with his heart in his mouth did a tour of the house.  The room and the building were deserted.  He never slept in that particular room again but chose instead another room affectionately called "Netherby Hilton Suite 69".  


3 Training Group was in the throes of moving and this meant that during the day only one or two of the regular staff were present. One of the officers worked with him in the orderly room for company in the large empty building.  On one occasion the Major brought his dog to work.  The dog dozed contentedly in front of the heater.  Suddenly and without warning the dog leapt up, heckles raised and began barking and growling at one of the pillars which extended from the front verandah into the orderly room.  This continued for about 5 minutes before the dog returned to its slumbers in front of the heater.  Both men jokingly began referring to the third resident of Netherby as "Albert".

The massive front door to Netherby

Once the Major moved to the new headquarters building,  the sergeant was on his own during the day for the next twelve months and perhaps thinking the sergeant was lonely and in need of company, "Albert" began his haunting in earnest.  One fine spring morning while working in the orderly room (which was adjacent to the front door), the front door suddenly opened and slammed shut.  Footsteps were heard stomping up the rear service staircase to the area which would have been the old servants quarters.  Upstairs doors could be heard slamming shut and the footsteps descended the stairs again.  The front door, which I recall as being a large, heavy door (see picture), opened and slammed shut again.


Frozen to his desk during this visitation and wondering if he was suffering from an over active imagination, the sergeant went to investigate.  Upstairs he found three office doors which had been left open were now closed.  The front door, which was kept locked to deter salesmen, was still firmly locked and could not be opened without turning the handle.


One Saturday evening after a mess dinner at "Grosvenor" (55 Queens Road), the sergeant and his wife retired to Netherby to save the long drive home to Frankston.  Alone in the empty building, they made a cup of coffee and sat on the bottom step of the back staircase drinking their coffee and talking.  His wife removed her high heels and left them with the coffee cups on the staircase as they both retired to the "Netherby Hilton" for the night.


During the night they were awoken by the sound of a door slamming, but dismissing it as just the noise of an old house, they went back to sleep.  When they awoke the next morning, they found the high heeled shoes neatly placed at the foot of the wife's bed and the dirty coffee cups back beside the urn in the Officers Mess.  


Shortly after this incident "Albert" began to show himself.  The sergeant described him as a grey shadow with a lot of detail.  He appeared to be Caucasian and although his facial features were not easily distinguishable, he was about 175 -180 cm tall and wore a long coat of the style of the 50s and 60s.  I recall the sergeant speculating that he may have been a Romanian "diplomat" who died while being "questioned" by ASIO.  "Albert" was also seen by the sergeant’s young son who was visiting during the holidays.  Both sightings were at the foot of the service staircase, over the sealed trap door that led to the cellars.


"Albert" was not without a sense of humour and would occasionally play tricks.  One Tuesday evening the sergeant and another army reserve member were moving a filing cabinet.  The sergeant recalls that the office they were moving it from was icy cold on this particular evening.  The two men picked the empty cabinet up and as they carried it towards the door, the other man stumbled and fell.  When he recovered himself, he grumbled that it had felt like someone had tripped him.  When the sergeant looked out into the corridor, he had a fleeting glimpse of "Albert".


The telephone system in Netherby was a "PABX Commander" system.  At about 4.00 a.m one morning after a parade night, when the sergeant was quite alone in the building, the phone in his bedroom rang.  Blearily he picked it up.  The voice on the line was more of a grunt than anything else, so dismissing it as a crank call, he hung up.  As he closed his eyes, he realised that the call was an internal call made from another extension in the building.  He shot out of bed, turned on all the lights and did a thorough search of the building.  It was just as he had left it, locked up and secure and quite deserted.


Convinced by now that "Albert" had singled him out for special attention, the sergeant began to acknowledge his existence, greeting him cheerily in the morning and bidding him good night in the evening.  He even invited Albert to accompany him when he had to go out during the day, although whether he ever did is a question for speculation.  I rather like the idea of the spectral "Albert" occupying the passenger seat of an Army vehicle on little excursions.  


Once Albert's existence had been acknowledged the sergeant found that the hauntings ceased and the building became noticeably warmer.  Not long afterwards, the last elements of 3 Training Group moved out.  Netherby was locked up and left empty for many years before being bought by the hotel next door. 

Netherby today

Interestingly, the story of Albert reached the staff at the hotel and some years later, the sergeant and I were invited by the manager of the hotel to lunch and to view the restoration of the lovely old house. Albert, it seemed, had not taken kindly to the disturbance to his home. The builders complained about their tools being moved and unexplained cold spots in the house. One member of staff was on crutches having broken an ankle after being, in his words “tripped”. 


Many years have now passed but I still think of Albert when I pass by Netherby and wonder how he has taken to living in a hotel.


Next week I shall be in Los Angeles attending the Romance Writers of America National Conference. . I am so looking forward to a week with my writerly friends and I hope to bring some interesting information home with me. Just got to get the internet working and I hope I manage to find time to write my Tuesday blog.

Me and my ghosts...Ms. Stuart is at home

I’ve always had a fascination with ghost stories which I suspect began with my mother’s tale of a ghostly encounter in a Youth Hostel in Wales. My mother is an extremely sensible woman and not one given to histrionics or flights of fancy. The story, as she tells it, is that she and a friend on a cycling tour of Wales in the early 1950s stayed the night in a converted castle that was now used as a Youth Hostel. She woke during the night to the sensation of a woman’s fingers brushing her cheek. She could clearly see a woman bending over her and as she watched the figure dissolved into the wall.


My own paranormal experiences have been far less impressive and really take the form of an emotional response to a place rather than ghostly figures. The most powerful occurred when I visited Warwick Castle in my early 20s and like all tourists went down to the "dungeon" below the castle. The feeling of misery was so overwhelming I felt as if I would suffocate. On subsequent visits to the castle nothing and nobody has been able to induce me to go down to those cells again.

Ms. Stuart and friend at Warwick Castle in 2005

I have, to my knowledge, worked in at least two haunted buildings. Both of them were former nineteenth century mansions and both had been used by the Australian Army for many, many years. The first, “Netherby” in Melbourne was the Headquarters of the 3rd Training Group during my time but had been, reputedly, used by ASIO (Australian Security and Intelligency Organisation) or its equivalent in the 1950s. There were stories of soundproofed cellars and secret tunnels but no evidence has ever been found of either, even during Netherby’s more recent conversion to a wing of a modern hotel. Nothing untoward happened to me in all the years I worked at Netherby but I did start to pick up the stories of “Albert” reputedly the lonely ghost of a Rumanian spy. After collecting quite a few eye witness reports of Albert's activities, it started me on a quest to track down more ghost stories from Army establishments. I figured soldiers made fairly reliable witnesses. 


The other haunted mansion is Grosvenor (close to Netherby) which served as Headquarters 4th Brigade when I first went there. Like Netherby it has long since been sold and is now a rather depressed facade to some particularly ghastly apartments. Grosvenor was far grander than Netherby and was reputedly haunted by “Esmerelda”, a young maid servant who had been found drowned in the swamp that is now Albert Park Lake. Esmerelda and I did have some firsthand contact and like Albert she is well chronicled.


I will save the stories of “Albert” and “Esmerelda” for later posts.


One of the more unnerving experiences occurred on a visit to Housesteads Roman fort on Hadrians Wall. No one has ever been able to give me a reasonable explanation of the mark ('the blur") that appears on this digital photograph. It's not present on the photographs taken just minutes before or after... so its not a smudge on the lens. The weather was fine so its not rain.  Frustratingly I can't even say I felt anything...like cold chills.  

The "blur" at Housesteads Roman Fort

Over the years, wherever an opportunity has presented, I have gone on ghost tours some hokey and some downright spooky. You will have found me trailing lantern bearing guides in York, New Orleans, Edinburgh, Port Arthur in Tasmania (now there is a spooky place!) and Sydney Quarantine Station to name a few. Books about ghosts abound on my bookshelves because behind every good ghost there is a potential fodder for a writer and in my September release...GATHER THE BONES, I pulled together a few of these stories and created my ghostly characters. 

Hunting for ghosts - Underground Vaults, Edinburgh

I have written at least two ghostly short stories and one these...THE PROMISE is freely available on my website. Both stories are in TOWER OF TALES. 













Next month in "At Home with Ms. Stuart":  I will share the sad tale of Albert, the ghost of Netherby. Watch this space.