Llanelly House, built in 1714 for Sir Thomas Stepney, is one of the finest early Georgian town houses in Wales, standing opposite the parish church in the middle of Llanelli. Its ghost is a young woman whose story is on record.
In 1851 Mira Turner was working at the house as upper housemaid. Stories began to circulate in the household linking her with the married butler, Charles Howell. In August she took a quantity of laudanum. The Cambrian newspaper reported the inquest under the heading of a melancholy case of suicide; the jury's verdict was that she died from the effects of poison while in a state of temporary insanity. She was buried on 9 August 1851, aged 22. Accounts of the last moments differ: some say she fell down the stairs while under the effect of the poison, others that she threw herself from a window. As a suicide she was buried without a gravestone.
Staff at the house say her presence is felt in the attic rooms where the servants slept, and some visitors have felt faint there. Listing sites also mention a woman heard playing the organ. In 2011 a photograph showing a pale girl at an upstairs window, said to be Mira, went round the internet and was taken up by the press, before it was shown to be a hoax. The real Mira is a sad, well documented case; the ghost belongs to the house's reputation.
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