Few buildings in Glamorgan look more like a haunted house than Sker. It stands almost alone behind the dunes west of Porthcawl, a tall, grey medieval house that began life as a grange of Neath Abbey, passed through several families after the Dissolution and was left derelict for much of the twentieth century before being restored as a private home.
The ghost belongs to Elizabeth Williams. The story goes that at a mabsant, a parish festival, held at Kenfig's guildhall, she met and fell in love with Thomas Evans, a harpist from Newton Nottage who worked as a carpenter. Her father Isaac Williams, a man of standing, thought Evans far beneath her. In the version most often told, he locked his daughter in an upstairs room at Sker to stop her running away, and she wasted away there of grief. Some tellings add chains. Her figure is said to appear at the window of that room, and the clanking of chains has been reported inside the house. The Great British Ghost Tour also repeats a claim that in 2002 a BBC crew was forced out of the great hall by a high pitched noise with no obvious source, after a medium with them said they had "disturbed something evil".
The paper trail does not support the imprisonment. The Kenfig Times, working from parish records, gives Elizabeth's birth as around 1747 and shows that she was married, against her own wishes according to tradition, to Thomas Kirkhouse, a mining engineer, on 9 September 1766. The couple had four children between 1768 and 1773, and Elizabeth died on 6 January 1776 at Llansamlet near Swansea, where she was buried. The legend says she died of a broken heart after nine years of marriage. A run of pregnancies in quick succession is the more likely explanation.
R. D. Blackmore used the name for his 1872 novel The Maid of Sker, which is a very different story, and a 2020 video game of the same name has fixed the house in a new generation's imagination. The real Elizabeth never haunted Sker in her lifetime, as she left it on marriage, but the idea of her at the window has proved impossible to shift.
Comments