Cyfarthfa Castle stands in its park above the site of the Cyfarthfa ironworks, which in the early nineteenth century made Merthyr Tydfil the largest iron town in the world. William Crawshay II built it in 1824 and 1825 as a statement of the family's wealth: a battlemented Gothic mansion with fifteen towers and seventy-two rooms, looking down on the furnaces that paid for it and on the crowded, unhealthy town where his workers lived. The council bought it in 1908, and since then it has housed a school and the borough's museum and art gallery.
Its ghost stories are almost all about the Crawshays. Spooky Isles records that the ghost of "William Crawshay", known as the Iron King, is said to haunt the building and is regularly seen around the castle. The most personal account comes from a reader whose grandfather was caretaker of Cyfarthfa Castle School during the Second World War. His father, then a young boy living at the castle, ran indoors one day badly frightened, saying he had seen "the Bogeyman" in a window. Later, taken round the museum, the boy stopped in front of a portrait of a Crawshay and said that was the Bogeyman.
Other reports are less specific. Staff and visitors have described unexplained footsteps, items falling, cold spots and the feeling of being watched. On the Old Merthyr Tydfil forum, local people describe a young boy dressed in grey who appears behind the bookcases, and a servant who is said to have died in the round tower, where visitors feel "others" present. Spooky Isles also tells of a Chinese vase found in the cellar that gave people a strange sensation of falling, said to have been used to catch the heads of executed Boxer rebels. That last claim has no source behind it that we can find.
Two cautions. Spooky Isles names the ghost as William Crawshay, but the best known Crawshay legend of a man held down in his grave belongs to Robert Thompson Crawshay, the last ironmaster to live at the castle, whose grave at Vaynor is covered by a massive stone; see the separate record. The story that a Crawshay was buried upside down has no source we can trace. And the story of a gamekeeper, John Lloyd, suspected of boiling his missing wife's remains, is repeated online without a traceable source, so we have left it out.
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