Nanteos is a handsome Georgian house in a wooded valley south east of Aberystwyth, for two centuries the home of the Powell family and now a country house hotel. It is best known for the Nanteos Cup, but it has a crowd of ghosts too.
The principal one is the Grey Lady, Elizabeth Owen, wife of the Reverend William Powell, who lived at Nanteos in the mid eighteenth century. Her husband loved her and gave her jewels, and she could not bear to think of them going to anyone else. Knowing she was dying, she got up from her deathbed and hid them somewhere in the house, and died that night. Her ghost walks the corridors looking for them still. A woman seen carrying a candlestick down the staircase was taken as a warning of a death in the Powell family, and the Pink Room has its own presence. According to the Cambrian News, a guest in the 1930s saw a female apparition and died the same evening.
In the woods, on still nights, harp music is heard. The house history site says this is Gruffydd Evans, the official harper to the Powell family, who played in the music room for sixty nine Christmases, lived to ninety two and is buried at Llanbadarn Fawr. The Cambrian News instead calls the harpist Gruffydd Jones and says he drowned in the lake, and a separate listing names a drowned man seen by the lake as David Rowland, died 1899. The Cambrian News also names William Griffiths, a groom said to have been murdered with a rake by the head gardener in 1782. A TV crew once reported a cloaked gentleman disrupting their filming. The accounts conflict on names and details, so the haunting is recorded as contested.
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