Craig-y-Nos Castle

The castle was built in the early 1840s by Captain Rice Davies Powell as a country house in the fashionable Gothic style, on a dramatic site in the upper Swansea Valley. Its transformation came in 1878, when it was bought by Madame Adelina Patti, an immensely popular Italian soprano at the height of her fame. She renamed it Craig-y-Nos, "Rock of the Night", and over the decades she owned it spent more than £100,000 on additions, including winter gardens, a generator that provided the first domestic electricity in the district, and her ornate private theatre, completed in 1891, which could seat around 150 guests and is now Grade I listed.

Patti died at Craig-y-Nos on 27 September 1919. One account, repeated on Spooky Isles, has her dying after a fall downstairs and her embalmed body kept for a time in the cellar. In March 1921 the castle and grounds were sold to the Welsh National Memorial Trust for £11,000 and converted into a sanatorium for the treatment of tuberculosis, named the Adelina Patti Hospital; it is described as operating under the King Edward VII Welsh National Memorial Association from 1922 until 1959, before continuing as a hospital until it finally closed on 31 March 1986.

The sanatorium years are the root of much of the haunting. TB patients, many of them children, lived and died in the wards, and one of Patti's own employees, John Mellon, is said to have suffered an untimely death in the house. Since the hospital closed the castle has been restored as a hotel and wedding venue, with the theatre once more used for performances.

Craig-y-Nos came to national attention when Most Haunted investigated it for Living TV in an episode filmed by Antix Productions and first broadcast on 30 March 2004, reportedly watched by more than a million people on its first showing. The episode's most memorable moment came in the room associated with John Mellon, where Derek Acorah said he felt as though he was being pushed out of the window. The castle has since hosted many other ghost-hunting programmes and independent groups, among them the Rugeley Supernatural Society, and markets itself frankly as the most haunted castle in Wales.

The phenomena reported are strikingly consistent: the voices and laughter of children, unexplained noises and singing, shuffling footsteps on the staircases, full-bodied apparitions and dark shadow figures. Adelina Patti is claimed to have been seen on the theatre staircase and in the wards, and her arias are said to be heard when the house is quiet. Guests who have joined the castle's overnight investigations describe the old hospital wing and the children's ward as the places where they felt most uneasy.

A sceptic would note that Craig-y-Nos is a large, draughty Victorian building that has been sold to the public as haunted for two decades, and that a night in a former sanatorium is bound to make the mind wander. The castle's own approach is to treat the ghost hunts as a serious pastime, with what it describes as scientific tests and spiritual experiments carried out through the night using investigative equipment, and to let visitors draw their own conclusions.

Craig-y-Nos Castle is a hotel and wedding venue in the upper Swansea Valley near Pen-y-cae, between Ystradgynlais and Brecon on the southern fringe of the Brecon Beacons in Powys. Non-residents can visit for a drink or a meal and to see the theatre and the grounds; history tours focusing on Adelina Patti are offered on certain dates, and the adjoining Craig-y-Nos Country Park, once Patti's pleasure grounds, is open to walk. Check the castle's website for current opening arrangements and tour dates.

You can stay in the castle itself: it has hotel bedrooms in the old house, and this is the natural way to experience it after dark. The castle runs regular overnight paranormal investigation events, and outside companies such as Haunted Rooms also organise ghost hunts here, some packaged with an overnight stay. Halloween sells out early.

The building is large and rambling with plenty of stairs, so ask about accessible rooms when booking. There is parking on site. Ystradgynlais and Brecon are the nearest towns for alternative places to stay.