Ruthin Gaol stands just off the town centre, a grim block of Victorian cells behind a high wall. It served the counties of north Wales until 1916, when there were only a dozen prisoners left, and afterwards became council offices, a wartime pen factory and finally a museum where visitors can walk the wings and sit in the cells.
Only one man was hanged there. William Hughes, a Denbigh-born collier, had been jailed for deserting his family. After his release he went to find his estranged wife and shot her at point blank range; the shot was so close her clothing caught fire. The jury at his trial in January 1903 took about ten minutes to convict him. Petitions for mercy failed and he was hanged at Ruthin on 13 February 1903. His two surviving children went to the workhouse.
It is Hughes who is most often said to haunt the gaol, particularly the condemned cell. Staff and ghost hunting groups describe recording equipment in the cell switching itself on, and visitors feeling a touch on the arm or back. A second figure is a warder named William Keer, who is supposed to have vanished and to be still on duty. The third is a girl whose laughter has been heard by visitors and mediums and whose identity nobody claims to know.
The gaol's other famous inmate was John Jones, known as Coch Bach y Bala, a thief and poacher who had escaped from prisons several times. In 1913 he tunnelled out of Ruthin and went over the wall on knotted bedclothes; he was shot in the leg by a young man in the hunt near Pwllglas and died of the wound. The man who fired was acquitted. The documented history here is solid; the ghost reports are recent and informal.
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