GET ME OUT OF FEAR!
The bone-chilling secrets of I’m a Celebrity’s haunted castle...
SPRAWLING across a stretch of Welsh hillside, backed by forest and looking out to the wild Irish Sea, Gwrych Castle is the stuff of fairy tales. The battlement walls punctuated by turrets and towers — 18 of them — wend their way 1,500ft across the landscape, looking every inch a home fit for a Disney princess.
But, rather than a princess, it will soon be playing host to a mixture of soap stars, fading pop stars and former athletes.
Yesterday, after weeks of speculation, ITV confirmed Gwrych Castle as the site of this year’s I’m A Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!.
If the (as yet unnamed) contestants think home soil might be a less scary prospect than the Australian Outback, they might want to think again. As the Mail has discovered, all is not as it appears at this magnificent edifice, perched above the town of Abergele.
When the sun sets, things happen that can’t easily be explained. People claim to have seen spectral figures hovering, furniture moving, horses galloping where none reside and dogs have been said to refuse to enter some corners of Gwrych (which means ‘hedge’ in Welsh).
All of which should make for entertaining viewing when cast and crew arrive in November for the 20th series of the reality TV show.
Covid-19 restrictions mean Down Under is out — as presumably are white bikinis and witchetty grubs. Step forward North Wales, with ice-cold streams, mud and mystery galore.
Producers must be rubbing their hands at the thought of depositing 12 celebs within the eerie Gwrych estate, just as winter sets in across the Conwy hills.
It’s safe to say that past I’m A Celebrity challenges — such as Mineshaft Misery, the Catacombs of Doom or the Terror Tombs (all on a theme of being trapped, surrounded by creepy-crawlies, rodents and snakes) — will have nothing on what exposed-to-the-elements, bone-chillingly scariness Gwrych has to offer.
WHO needs a scriptwriter to come up with drama when you have a laundry block claimed by psychics to be the site of a 19th-century murder, where visitors have reported a terrifying sense of being strangled?
Then there are the wine cellars which once passed as a Chamber of Horrors tourist attraction and where ghostly figures have been seen. Or the dining room where the morning after a 1970s séance, the oak door was found ripped from its frame.
And that’s before you even start to explore the wider reaches of the land around Gwrych, out to the caves where legend has it the Devil himself lived.
James Griffiths, who has overseen ghost hunt nights at the castle for four years, has seen an ethereal woman in white, among a host of other apparently paranormal happenings.
‘It’s got a very strange atmosphere and almost its own climate,’ he says. ‘I’ve been up in the winter, and in the castle it’s warm.
‘It’s not just one place [that’s haunted], it’s lots of different sites around the grounds. There is one place in the grounds we call the coven. Sometimes you will hear the sound of stomping down the hill. I’ve had grown men who are very much sceptics say to me: “I don’t feel safe here now.”
‘When I go up to the castle, I park with my car facing down the driveway so when I leave, I can run to the car, put everything in the boot and drive out!’
The Mail has delved into the castle’s history to find out what contestants can expect and found a catalogue of intrigue stretching back to the death of its most prominent resident, Winifred, Countess of Dundonald, in 1924.
Many believe it is Winifred who haunts the castle, angry perhaps with the actions of her husband, the man she cut from her will, but who then bought back the castle, only to strip it of her possessions and sell its contents.
But who was Winifred? Her grandfather, Lloyd BamfordHesketh, built Gwrych in 1812 and continued to add to the castle until his death in 1861, when his son and heir Robert, with his wife Ellen and their daughter Winifred, took up residence.
Her family’s money made Winifred a wealthy and desirable heiress who was persuaded into an arranged marriage at the age of 19 with a Scottish nobleman, the 12th Earl of Dundonald.
Despite having five children, it would seem the marriage was unhappy. So when she inherited the castle, she moved back in, her husband preferring to live in Scotland. By all accounts, Winifred was the kind of woman who would have made short work of one of I’m A Celebrity’s Dingo Dollar Challenges. During World War I she founded two military hospitals at her own expense (and thought nothing of rolling her sleeves up to muck in). The great schism between husband and wife was laid bare in Winifred’s will. When she died of diabetes in 1924, she left the castle to King George V and the then Prince of Wales. The gift was turned down, and it passed to the church, before being bought back for £78,000 by her estranged husband
(he claimed she had gone mad), who stripped it of all his wife had treasured. Their eldest daughter,
Lady Grizel Hamilton, recalled her father saying: ‘No member of the family should live there again.’ During the 1930s and 1940s, a caretaker, Bill Price, remained on site. But, like his employer, he did not enjoy an amicable relationship with the Countess. After her death, he would report that when he went in the mornings to air the large rooms, he would mysteriously find doors unlocked and items displaced. There are tales of Winifred’s familiar violet scent lingering in rooms; and, when entrepreneur Leslie Salts bought the castle in 1948 — it was a success for 20 years as a show home and events location — her personal suite of rooms saw little use. ‘Disturbances were felt and it became too uncomfortable for people to stay there,’ wrote Dr Mark Baker, in his book Myths and Legends of the Castle Gwrych Estate. ‘Noises were heard, as well as objects being moved and the heavy scent of violets hung in the air. The room was closed off and not used again.’
Then there are the sightings of ghostly figures. As far back as the 1950s, there have been reports of a female form being seen around the castle. Among the ghost-spotters, was one man not easily spooked — British heavyweight boxing champion Bruce Woodcock.
He was training at the castle in 1950 for his world title fight with U.S. fighter Lee Savold when he encountered the ‘Gwrych Lady’.
In reports from the time, his sparring partner Ted Greenslade said: ‘We had walked right round the castle when we came to a lonely path and saw the bent-up figure of a young woman sitting on a fallen tree trunk.
‘It looked as though she might be in difficulties, so we went up to her. When we got about six yards away she just disappeared. Bruce and I just turned and ran for it.’
Some say the ghost is that of a servant girl who died falling off a horse on the estate, but others remain convinced the woman is the late Countess.
Whoever she is, if ever a castle were fit for a television role it is this one.
Gwrych has been through several transitions, including hosting ‘medieval’ jousting tournaments in the 1970s and 1980s. There was a failed attempt to develop the site as an opera centre, before the site was abandoned to New Age travellers and others who looted the property, stripping everything from roof slates to floorboards, not to mention the marble staircase where visitors reported seeing a ‘woman in white’.
A more recent attempt at turning the site into a hotel came in 2006. But the developer went bust and the Gwrych Castle Preservation Trust, which was already working to restore it, was able to buy it on behalf of Wales in 2018.
In 2010, one visitor claimed to have taken a photo showing a ghostly woman standing in the window of a room with no floor.
The picture was met with scepticism. But that may not be the attitude of a celebrity contemplating three long weeks in the grounds and dark halls of a ‘haunted’ castle.
In recent years, the apparently supernatural happenings have been attributed to spirits unsettled by restoration work, so goodness knows what said spirits might do when the cast and associated crew of a large TV show move in.
Dr Baker, whose schoolboy fascination with Gwrych led him to head the Castle Preservation Trust, revealed: ‘We’ve had reports of people seeing a woman in white walking around the garden.
‘During the summer, I was walking with someone and we saw a bright light hovering above the garden, which I just can’t explain.
‘One dog walker was with their pet and it suddenly bolted, jumped over a tower and fell 50ft. Luckily, it hit some branches on the way down and survived.’
DOGS are a feature of the sinister happenings, whether it be unexplained growling at the site of the former kennels, or the guard dogs who lived there in the 1980s and wouldn’t enter either the stables or the room in the main castle reputed to be where the Countess’s spiritual healer held séances.
In 2017, a paranormal investigation team armed with special equipment including cameras, voice recorders and ultra-violet lights took to the historic site.
The group began to call out to any spirits, asking: ‘How are you feeling about the renovations to this castle?’ To which, apparently, came the reply: ‘Happy.’
A year later another ghost hunter, Sean Owen, spent a day and night at Gwrych, with his team from Afterlife Paranormal.
He says: ‘As we were exploring during the day we heard the sound of horses hooves walking up the cobbled path at the back of the castle. It lasted for a second or so then faded away.
‘Later that evening we had a similar experience when we heard what sounded like a horse blowing through its nose.
‘We don’t assume everything is paranormal and there is always a reasonable explanation for most of the things we hear. However, there was no mistaking that these noises were 100 per cent sounds from a horse. Needless to say there are no horses at Gwrych Castle.’
There is, however, one buried within the grounds — Lord Dundonald’s cavalry horse is in the pets’ cemetery within the grounds, having been brought home from South Africa, where it died from injuries suffered in the Boer War.
Equine ghosts, canine spirits and a spectral Countess — it’s fair to say that participants on this year’s series of I’m A Celebrity will have a lot more to worry about than a few creepy-crawlies.