The ghost most people have heard of is Robert Scott. The park's website says he is often seen "purposefully ascending the Gothic staircase", that psychic investigators insist he is consumed with rage over his unjust killing, and that he is the spirit blamed for slamming doors and for rocks thrown at people holding seances. Visit Wales repeats that he throws stones at those who try to contact him. Besides Scott, staff and visitors report the giggling of children in the family corridors and children in Victorian dress darting in and out of doorways, a large figure of a blacksmith seen by the gardening staff in the grounds, and, according to security guards, running footsteps and chattering voices at night in an empty building.
The real Robert Scott was a 39 year old Scot who worked as a gamekeeper on the Margam estate. During the coal strike of 1898, when many out-of-work colliers turned to poaching, he was patrolling the mountain above the estate on the evening of 9 June with an under-keeper and an estate constable. He came face to face with a poacher near Cwm Phillip, was shot in the face, crawled along the foot of a wall, and was shot again. His body was found the next morning in a gully near Blaenmallwg farm, not in the castle. Joseph Lewis, a collier lodging in Maesteg, was convicted at the Glamorgan Assizes in Swansea and hanged at Swansea prison on 30 August 1898. Around 800 people followed Scott's coffin to Margam Abbey church.
Popular retellings often say Scott crawled towards the castle before he died, which the contemporary evidence summarised by Cymru Uncovered does not support. Nobody has explained why his ghost should haunt a house where he did not die rather than the mountainside where he did. The castle's reputation is heavily promoted for its paid ghost nights, and Wikipedia's article on the house remarks drily that "the credulous suggest it may have ghosts". It is tagged contested for that reason, though the volume of reports is large.
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