The Insole family made their fortune shipping coal out of Cardiff, and in 1855 James Harvey Insole began building a Gothic house in Llandaff that his family expanded over the following decades into Insole Court. After the family left it passed to the council and was used for offices and as a civil defence base, and in recent years it has been restored by a community trust and opened to the public.
Dark Wales Tours runs evening ghost tours of the house, and its website describes three kinds of experience it says staff, visitors and guests have reported. The first is sound: children's voices coming from rooms that are empty. The second is a woman in black, seen watching from the staircase. The third is a black dog that is seen in the house and then vanishes into thin air.
The tour company is careful to say it does not stage a paranormal investigation and cannot promise anything will happen. It gives no dates or names, and no older account of ghosts at Insole Court has been found. Phantom black dogs, though, have been reported across Glamorgan for centuries, from Marie Trevelyan's fiery-eyed road dogs in the Vale to the hounds of Arawn.
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