Plas Mawr stands on the steep High Street inside Conwy's town walls, a tall whitewashed house with stepped gables, built by Robert Wynn of the Gwydir family after he had made his fortune. Its plasterwork and layout survive largely as he left them, which is one reason it is so often described as the finest Elizabethan town house in Britain.
The story told about it runs like this. Robert Wynn was away from home. His wife, heavily pregnant, came down a dark staircase holding the hand of their first child, missed her footing and fell, bringing the child with her. Both were badly hurt and were carried up to the small room at the top of the house known as the Lantern Room. A servant ran out for a doctor and could only find a young one, new to the work, who some versions call Dr Dic. He did what he could, but mother and child died.
The doctor, alone with the bodies and the knowledge that the master was on his way home, panicked. The Lantern Room had only one way out apart from the stair, and that was the chimney. He climbed in to hide and was never seen again. In the fullest versions his remains stayed there, and Wynn, returning to find his family dead, went mad with grief.
People describe sounds, cold spots and a sense of oppression in the Lantern Room and the tower, and the feeling is attributed variously to the doctor, the wife or the grieving husband. None of the sources used here gives any documentary evidence for these deaths, and the tale is recorded as a traditional house legend.
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