The Romans built a fort at Caersws, where their roads through Mid Wales met in the Severn valley, and one of those roads is said to have run through the ground where Maesmawr Hall now stands. A businessman staying at the hall, who by his own account did not believe in such things, looked out of his window one night and saw a road that should not have been there, running under the building, and a Roman legion marching along it.
Inside, the ghost most often described is a housekeeper in Elizabethan dress, seen going through the wall in the panelled hallway. Others have reported a man with a dog and a servant in the cellar, and the Davies sisters, who lived in the hall in the early twentieth century, still keeping an eye on things.
The oldest story belongs to the woods. A wicked man known as Robin Ddrwg, Wicked Robin, haunted them after his death, and took the form of a bull. It took seven parsons to master him. They laid his spirit in a pool which has been called Llyn Tarw, the Bull's Pool, ever since. Seven clergy, a spirit in animal form, and a pool as its prison are all standard parts of the Welsh ghost-laying tradition that Elias Owen collected across Montgomeryshire in the nineteenth century, which suggests this piece at least is older than the hotel's ghost hunts.
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