Google Street View arrived in British cities in 2008 and 2009, and almost at once people began combing it for oddities. One that caught on in Cardiff was a figure outside the Wales Millennium Centre, the arts centre with the copper-coloured roof that opened on the Cardiff Bay waterfront in 2004.
According to Future Inns, a figure caught on the 2009 imagery was examined because it seemed to show a woman in Victorian-looking clothes: a long skirt, a blouse, a bow tie, a hat and a scarf. Some viewers thought she appeared to be gliding above the pavement rather than walking on it. A 2019 blog repeated the story, placing it on Google Earth and connecting it to the "historically dark" past of the old docks, where visitors say they feel watched or followed.
The area has plenty of history. Before redevelopment, Cardiff Bay was Tiger Bay, the crowded, multicultural dockland that shipped Welsh coal around the world. But the image itself is easily explained. The Millennium Centre is a theatre and events venue, and people in costume are common around it, while the automatic stitching and blurring of Street View photographs regularly produces people with missing feet or floating bodies. The sources do not link to the original image, and Street View has been updated many times since 2009.
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