History
Various halls have occupied this site since the 12th Century and the site has been the ancestral home of the Blayneys and the Traceys since the 15th Century. The current hall was built in the 1840s and is one of the earliest examples of a concrete clad building. The original estate was once over 18,000 acres but is now only about 750 acres, which is made up of mostly mature formal gardens and countryside featuring a sunken garden and an arboretum.
The Hall was given to the University of Wales in 1963 and is now used as a conference and study centre for students. Since 1932 the Gregynog Music Festival has been held here and has attracted names such as Vaughan Williams, Holst, Britten and Elgar.
Paranormal Activity
Staff at Gregynog Hall have reported a growing number of strange happenings and investigators have come back with reports of many strange light and orb anomalies, unexplained movement in an upstairs room and even a photograph of what looks like a horse in the courtyard area. Rachael Davies, one of the investigators, said: “That night it was very frosty, we’d been all around the grounds, we walked into the courtyard to take pictures. When you see the picture you try to find logic, like is it breath? After we took the picture we looked and found that the courtyard is where the horses were stabled, which explains the horse.”
It is said a number of ghosts reportedly haunt Gregynog including a man dressed in a long black coat called William who is said to not like other men very much. It is said that he wanders up and down the corridors and reportedly used to knock the shoulder of the previous male director of the hall, Tom, as he left his office. He has also been spotted by the current manager’s father during a Christmas security patrol, Tom reports: “I caught him holding a door open for a man in a black coat that clearly wasn’t there. My father didn’t believe in ghosts until that day”.
A female servant is also said to haunt the hall who wears a blue staff uniform of the period 1882-1963 and guests have complained of hearing a crying child, who is said to reside in room seven, so much so that the next morning, not knowing the story, they have gone to the conference office and requested to move rooms due to the noise. The cellar is also said to be host to a rather mischievous ghost and the first room on the top floor is said to be host to the spirit of a lady who is seen from the outside when it has been closed to the public. Some believe her ghost to be that of a nurse who is looking after wounded soldiers when the hall was once used as a Red Cross convalescence home in the 1940s. It is believed her life ended suddenly as she jumped to her death from the top floor window. It is also believed that her lover, that of a deceased soldier, wanders the upper corridors looking for her.
Director of Gregynog Hall, Karen Armstrong – a sceptic herself – maintains that certain occurrences are just unexplainable such as birds flying into relatively inaccessible windows and brand new camera batteries ceasing to work almost immediately inside the hall. She adds: “Many of our staff members have worked here for a long time and they keep telling the same corroborated stories. Whenever I remind them that ghosts don’t exist, they knowingly smile at me”. One of the house managers at the hall has also sensed the feeling of rainfall in the annex corridor, an area in which investigators have stated that a presence comes and goes. It is said that this sensation is a classic sign of paranormal activity moving around.
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