I’m an alien... get me into here
JENNY RANDLES starts to untangle a web of weird connections to Gwrych Castle in North Wales
The first photograph that I took at the age of 11 was on an old Kodak Brownie camera, and by fortean coincidence it was linked to themes that would come to dominate my life. They are worth relating here, as in Autumn 2020 fate decreed a connection with UFOs thanks to long-running ITV series I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here, the programme presented by comedy duo Ant and Dec, who starred in the movie
Alien Autopsy (see FT395:32-36), loosely based on dubious footage of an alien body supposedly recovered from the Roswell crash.
In August, the UK media went to town with news that the Covid pandemic had prevented I’m A Celebrity filming deep in the Australian bush as it had for two decades. Given its 11 million viewers, ITV decided to find the show a new home in a ‘top secret’ location. That new home proved to be the very spot where my 1963 photograph was taken on a caravan holiday to North Wales and which was now, the media claimed, haunted by UFOs and other supernatural phenomena. It was Gwrych Castle in Abergele, a once palatial, now largely ruined, 19th century building on the coast that held multiple connections for me.
One national newspaper referred to the Gwrych Castle campsite as having been “targetted” in a “chilling alien invasion”, and said that a spaceship had “landed there”; which, when you know the alleged event occurred 30 miles (48km) away seems like artistic licence, to say the least. Another report even claimed the castle was attracting UFO enthusiasts to settle nearby. Well, the reason I lived there between 2002 and 2014 had absolutely nothing to do with UFOs: it was because my mother had worked for a charity with a base just a few hundred yards from the castle and I used to help her raise funds for them. When she wanted to retire to the coast, it was an area we knew well.
As for the evidence of a hotspot around the castle, it included a sighting in 1988 at Dwygyfylchi, 10 miles (16km) down the coast, where three boys saw a swiftly moving ‘flying saucer’ cross the hills. Then there was the story of an undersea UFO base at Puffin Island, even farther away off the coast of Anglesey, where some claim to have watched UFOs diving in and out of the Irish Sea like gulls (as perhaps, some actually were). One UFO researcher even told the media that alien bodies might have been recovered from this location during an exercise that coincided with the infamous events of January 1974 in the Berwyn Mountains around the village of Llandrillo (see FT252:30-35). The whole media story of the ‘UFO castle’ was pretty thin. The sightings mentioned are no different from others you could find in any location over a few decades, especially if distance is no object. They also missed more telling connections that might actually be a little extraordinary.
Back in the 1970s, we had a family caravan at Llandrillo – the small village linked via Berwyn to Gwrych and Puffin Island. When staying here we saw many ‘UFOs’ – most were actually low-level training missions from RAF Shawbury in Shropshire or RAF Valley on Anglesey. Peter Hough and I gave a talk to airmen and officers at RAF Shawbury at their request and had an interesting chat about how exercises sometimes were mistaken for UFOs. This was just amusing for the RAF fliers, who also knew that army ground exercises on the Berwyn Mountains using flares and searchlights could confuse witnesses. They understood how these things triggered myths and legends, but their main concern was to defend the UK.
So the media seeking an angle and linking the TV show with ET was nothing new, but they seemingly didn’t know that one of Britain’s most famous alien contact witnesses – a dedicated researcher for decades – had actually lived within yards of the castle. In fact, I was kindly allowed to stay at her home in Kent, before she moved to Abergele, when I attended the London premiere of Close Encounters of the Third Kind – decades before, by chance, I ended up living less than a mile from her at Gwrych Castle.
This was all just a coincidence, of course – I wasn’t ‘lured’ to Gwyrich by ET – as was the fact that I also filmed my final TV show (on aliens) near the castle in 2005. Not for a moment did I contemplate any hidden meaning in such events; although, when they reach a certain number, you do start to wonder – as I am now doing.
UFOs have been seen flying over Abergele itself – as is true of pretty much anywhere. In the years I lived there, I investigated several, reported some in this column and even filmed a mysterious ‘phantom aircraft’ (not a flying saucer; I witnessed countless flights over the coast that were certainly odd, but clearly terrestrial).
However, Gwrych Castle has plenty of real associations with the paranormal and these inevitably factor into my links with the place. As well as that first photo I took in the castle grounds – which happened to be of actors Doris Speed and Arthur Leslie, who played the first tenants of the Rovers Return Inn, Jack and Annie Walker – there was another link to what in 1963 was a brand-new ITV soap: Coronation Street. The actors happened to be there that day, and by chance the mother of Pat Phoenix (who played Elsie Tanner in the soap alongside them) was a neighbour as I grew up. Pat used to come and visit her often and so I wanted to show her my photo on her next visit; it’s why I’d been so eager to take it.
This was not my only link to the TV series still gripping millions of viewers six decades later. MUFORA, the Manchester UFO group, used to plan case investigations in the studios and I chatted with several of the Coronation Street cast about the paranormal, including Pat Phoenix, whom I invited onto my radio show. The only cast member still in Corrie who was there back in 1963 – Bill Roache, aka ‘Ken Barlow’ – even attended one of our lectures. Many felt the set was possessed and Most Haunted filmed a vigil there.
However, this was far in the future on the day I took that photo at Gwrych. What I could not know then was how life would connect me both to Gwrych Castle and its supernatural associations in many more weird ways. And even that Coronation Street would play a fortean joke of its own.
As I was writing this column, a new Corrie storyline made me chuckle: it was set in a caravan at Abergele, but filmed in Stockport – the place I moved to from Abergele in 2014! Yet that coincidence was just amusing and nothing compared with the spooky things to follow – a story with darkly weird overtones that I will tell next month...