Cardiff Castle. It needs no introduction in Gair Rhydd. If you’re a student in Cardiff, you know the castle. It may be from a freshers’ era date to Winter Wonderland or simply as the background to drunken post-club debriefings, but did you know that inside the walls, phantoms apparently haunt its chambers? And from in slowly darkening dusk to the dead of night, you may be able to catch a glimpse of these flickers of the past?
Ghostly happenings have been occurring in the castle all the way back in the middle of the 19th century. In 1868, a trustee of the Bute fortune was inside the walls of the castle. He heard the arrival of a carriage through the courtyard and it stopping at the door, horses’ hooves skidding and wooden wheels rolling to a creaking stop.
There was no knock at the door. Thinking nothing of it, he entered the hallway, only to be told by a butler that no such carriage had arrived; the doorway was empty of visitors, the courtyard empty of tracks. At the same time, the third Marquess’ only daughter, Lady Margaret MacRae, was in Scotland and heard that same carriage. That evening her father passed away.
There are two theories about the arrival of the carriage. One is that it is the arrival of the ghostly carriage warns of the death of some member of the ancestral family of the Marquess of Bute.
The other is that it predicts bereavement; for those who see it someone they know will die. The grim reader’s grand carriage has been seen since 1956. A man called David Brecon saw the carriage on a frosty night, heard the turn of its wheels, the jingle of its bells, and even the cry of the coachman.
All before turning and, full speed into the castle door, vanishing from sight as if there was no obstacle. So, be wary around the castle. For ghosts now ride round Bute, coaches made of mist, and they may spell doom for you.