Croft Castle's link to Owain Glyndwr, the great Welsh prince who led a national uprising against English rule in the early fifteenth century, comes through marriage rather than conquest: one of his daughters married into the Croft family, and Glyndwr himself is said to have taken refuge at the castle after his last stronghold finally fell in 1409, a fugitive prince sheltering within the walls of his own daughter's new family. The figure reported at Croft ever since is described as an extremely tall man dressed in a leather tunic, estimated at a striking seven feet in height, seen only a handful of times through the 1920s, and once, quite remarkably, by the then Archbishop of Sydney himself, a witness whose own position lent the sighting an unusual degree of credibility within its own era. A skeleton uncovered at the base of a tower during early twentieth-century renovation work was floated at the time as a possible explanation for the haunting, though nothing has ever conclusively linked those particular remains to Glyndwr specifically.
The castle's other reported ghosts are considerably less dramatic individually but far more numerous collectively. Herbert Croft, the seventeenth-century Bishop of Hereford who personally rebuilt the castle after Civil War damage, was reportedly seen by a security guard during 2013 renovation work, gazing quietly out from an attic window; the guard only connected the figure to Croft afterward, on recognising him from a portrait hanging elsewhere in the house, with local tradition holding that the Bishop still watches to make sure no unwanted development ever encroaches on the view he worked so hard to restore. Staff have separately reported a wailing baby heard through the building at various times, a spectral figure dressed in grey doublet and hose, and a woman in crinoline with a close-fitting cap seen standing at a window.
Sir James Herbert Croft, who died in 1941, is said to have experienced loud, deliberate knocking on the windows of the Oak Room during a Ouija board session he was holding together with his sister, one of the very few accounts in this whole collection tied directly to a named, datable individual describing his own first-hand paranormal experience rather than being reported secondhand by someone else. Between Glyndwr's leather-clad giant, Bishop Croft's watchful attic figure, the wailing baby, the grey doublet, the crinoline woman, and Sir James's own Ouija board knocking, Croft Castle stands as one of the more genuinely crowded and well-documented multi-ghost houses recorded anywhere in this county.
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