In December 1883 the Bridgend Chronicle carried a story under the heading "Extraordinary Apparition at Maesteg". Rachel Taylor found it while researching the town for her Hauntings and History newsletter.
The trouble centred on a house in Maesteg. A man was repeatedly seen outside it, and sometimes inside. With the sightings came noise: "a loud, rumbling noise, banging of doors, and clattering of windows". At one point a figure was seen sitting on the windowsill, and when someone approached, it disappeared. The tenants were so alarmed that they left the house.
What made the story more than a passing scare was what the neighbours said when they heard the description. They recognised it as Edward John, a man who had been murdered about twenty years earlier, around 1863, after an evening's drinking at that very house, which in those days had been a licensed premises. Nobody was ever convicted of his killing.
The report does not name the house or the tenants, so the location is given here as Maesteg generally.
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