Sir John Wynn was the head of the Wynn family of Gwydir at the turn of the 17th century, a man who built and bought his way to control of much of the Conwy valley and wrote a family history to justify it. His neighbours remembered him differently. As the Gwydir family history itself admits, people came to believe he had oppressed them.
They found a punishment for him after his death. The belief recorded in Llanrwst in the late 18th century was that his spirit had been condemned to lie beneath Rhaeadr y Wennol, the Swallow Falls, a few miles up the Llugwy from Betws-y-Coed. There, under the weight of the water, it would be battered and cleansed until the wrongs he had done were washed out of it. Philip Yorke put it memorably in 1799: the spirit was there "to be punished, purged, spouted upon and purified".
Elias Owen, repeating this, observed that there was hardly a river pool or lake in Wales without a spirit laid in it, and gave another example from the same district: the spirit of Abel Owen of Henblas, laid by a conjuror named Gruffydd Jones of Cilhaul in a bottle and buried in a bog near Llanrwst. The same Gruffydd Jones was said to have struggled all night and the next day to lay a spirit at Hafod Ucha between Llanrwst and Conwy, and only managed to bind part of it. The rest, people said, was still loose.
The falls are now a paid attraction. Modern ghost hunting claims about an apparition on the footpath exist, but they should be treated as a modern addition to a genuinely old story.
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