The Bute family turned Cardiff Castle into a Victorian fantasy, and one of its ghosts is a Bute.
John Crichton-Stuart, the 2nd Marquess of Bute, was the man who built Cardiff's docks and made the family's fortune from coal. He died suddenly at the castle in March 1848. The room in which he died, a dressing room behind the library, was later turned into a small chapel, where a bust commemorates him. He is said to have been seen there in a red coat, and to walk from the chapel through the fireplace and the thick wall into the library, as if following a door that is no longer there.
The Spooky Cardiff site lists nine other ghosts. His second wife, Lady Sophia Rawdon-Hastings, is described drifting like a mist along the corridors at dusk. A presence nicknamed Sarah by visiting psychics is blamed for rearranging things in the storerooms. A woman was reported in the clock tower when it was used by a music college. A custodian identified as Mr Edwards described hearing footsteps in a passage and the Banqueting Hall around midnight, seeing a grey shape slowly dissolve in a guest room, and having his Alsatian refuse to enter the library. A 2016 forum post described a smiling uniformed "soldier" by the military displays who vanished. The same site also lists a grey lady by the Taff bridge, discussed in its own record here.
Other guides add a faceless woman who roams the halls, heavy furniture and stock that move by themselves, lights that flicker, and doors in the main dining room that are said to open and close at 3.45am precisely each morning even when locked. The Total Guide to Cardiff says the 3rd Marquess, an enthusiast for the occult, carried out experiments in the clock tower's smoking room to contact the dead.
Hardly any of these stories come with dates or named sources, and several are traceable only to online forums. They are gathered here as the castle's modern ghost tradition.
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