Castell Coch stands above the gorge where the Taff breaks out of the hills north of Cardiff, among thick beech woods. The medieval castle had been a ruin for centuries when the 3rd Marquess of Bute and his architect William Burges rebuilt it in the 1870s and 1880s as a romantic summer retreat, with conical towers and lavish painted rooms.
Its best-known modern ghost is a white lady. In the version given by Future Inns and the Total Guide to Cardiff, she is Dame Griffith. Her son drowned in a pond, and she died of a broken heart. Ever since, her spirit has searched the castle and the woods around it for him. The Total Guide rates Castell Coch its most frightening Cardiff location on the strength of her.
Other accounts are less sure who she is. The HauntedPlaces.org listing describes "a lady in white" thought to be the wife of the 3rd Marquess of Bute, or perhaps a mother looking for her lost child. The Bute identification seems unlikely, since the Marchioness outlived the castle's rebuilding by decades, but it shows the story attaching itself to the best-known names.
None of the guides give a date or a source for Dame Griffith. There was a pond in the castle woods, but no record of a drowning has been matched to the story. It sits alongside much older Castell Coch traditions collected by Wirt Sikes and Marie Trevelyan, of a ghostly Royalist and of treasure guarded by eagles, which have their own records here.
Comments