St Donat's Castle stands above the sea on the Glamorgan coast, and it has been lived in almost continuously since the Normans. For most of that time it belonged to the Stradlings, and the family's end was dramatic. In 1738 the young heir, Sir Thomas Stradling, was killed in a duel at Montpellier, and under a pact he had made with his travelling companion Tyrwhitt the estate passed out of the family, leading to decades of lawsuits.
By the time Wirt Sikes wrote British Goblins the castle had, in his words, more than one ghost, as any respectable old Welsh castle should. The favourite was a Lady Stradling who had been got rid of by members of her own family "in those wicked old times when families did not always dwell in peace together."
She was an omen as much as a ghost. She appeared when some mishap was about to befall a member of the house of Stradling, dressed in high-heeled shoes and a long, trailing gown of the finest silk, and walked up and down the great halls and rooms. As long as she was walking, the castle hounds would not settle, and their howling roused all the dogs of the village below.
Sikes points out the flaw in the story himself: the direct Stradling line had died out generations earlier, a fact "not very well apprehended among the neighbouring peasantry". No surviving record identifies which Lady Stradling was meant, so this is a family legend rather than a traceable death. Marie Trevelyan recorded other omens at St Donat's: the gwrach-y-rhibyn, foxes barking in the village, and the night huntress Mallt-y-Nos (see their own records).
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