Plas Teg

Two of the most detailed descriptions of Plas Teg ever written say nothing at all about ghosts. Cadw's Grade I listing runs to some two thousand words on plan, fabric, staircase, doorcases and fireplaces; the Royal Commission's site record adds the architectural history and the scholarly literature. Neither mentions a haunting, and neither records any judicial use of the house. Everything supernatural attached to Plas Teg comes from other material, and that material can be dated. An Open Library full-text search for the phrase "Plas Teg", run on 1 October 2026, returns 410 pages in 409 digitised books. Of those books, 265 were published before 1986, going back to Thomas Pennant's history of the parishes of Whiteford and Holywell (1796); Thomas Nicholas's Annals and Antiquities of the Counties and County Families of Wales (1872), J. Y. W. Lloyd's history of Powys Fadog (1881) and Henry Taylor's Historic Notices (1883) are among them. The books in the set whose titles announce ghosts or hauntings all come later: Simon Marsden's Phantoms of the Isles, with photographs of the gardens and of Cornelia Bayley in the Great Chamber (the scanned copy is the 1993 Boxtree edition); The Ghosthunter's Almanac (1993); The Good Ghost Guide (1994); The International Directory of Haunted Places (2000); Susan Smitten's Ghosts of the World (2006), whose entry says Bayley bought the house "almost 20 years ago"; and Richard Holland's Haunted Wales (2011). The same index cannot pair words: on the same day a search for "Plas Teg" together with ghost, ghosts or haunted returned nothing, although Smitten's page carries both. The test is therefore by title, and by title the first ghost books on the shelf follow Bayley's purchase of the house in 1986. A first-hand account survives on a page of the BBC's North East Wales "Weird" guide, archived on 13 June 2004, in which the medium Carl Fletcher describes a vigil at the house. In his second paragraph Fletcher explains that before the public arrived he took "the layout and itinerary" from John of the Cheshire Paranormal Society, whose members "have visited for about seven years", and then writes: "The point of mediumship is to prove survival of the physical, so information should never be fed to a medium." He goes on to report a figure "in long blue clothes" on the stairs, and a few lines later notes that "the figure in the blue dress has her portrait in one of the bedrooms". The same page already tells of the daughter who loved a farmer and was found dead in one of the two wells, and of the farmer who hanged himself. It also says the house was once a "sanitorium" for women "who had children out of wedlock", and calls one room "the Judge's bedroom", "once also supposedly a hanging room". Neither Cadw's listing nor the Royal Commission's record mentions either use. The road ghost has a named source and an unstable description. Richard Holland, of Mold, told BBC North East Wales in September 2009 that the region's best-known grey lady is "an old woman said to be seen gliding across the A541 dual carriageway" outside Plas Teg. In his telling a driver was so sure she had run someone over that she phoned the police, who searched with tracker dogs and a helicopter, and the officers "already knew about the ghost" and reassured her on that basis; the story as printed carries no date, no name for the driver and no police record. The women of the house's own stories are younger. In January 2025 the Daily Post made Dorothy Trevor, who fell into the well while eloping, the Woman in White "occasionally reported by visitors", hedging it with "it is now imagined"; the auctioneers Rogers Jones & Co told the same elopement on their sale page under the heading "If you believe in that sort of thing…". The Judge Jeffreys connection has the same shape. The house's own website had a page on "Judge George Jeffreys" by 1 May 2004, the date of its earliest archived capture: a straight biography giving his birth on 15 May 1648 at Acton Park in Wrexham, about nine and a half kilometres south-east of the house, and never placing him at Plas Teg. In Smitten's Ghosts of the World, another entry mentions "the notorious Judge Jeffries" and points to "the story of Plas Teg". The auctioneers' timeline of 2025 says the house "served as a courthouse during and after the Monmouth Rebellion" of 1685, and the Daily Post the same year speaks of its "reputed use as a local court"; neither names a source. The Daily Post also gives, as something that "reputedly" happened, the 1815 drowning in the well of a sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Trevor-Roper, again without a source. An Open Library full-text search for that name on 1 October 2026 returns six pages, in peerages and directories, all of them about women of later generations; the control in the same index, "Charles Blayney Trevor-Roper", returns 39 pages, among them his birth on 22 September 1799 in Ruvigny's Plantagenet Roll of 1905. Finally, the income. The Daily Post reported in January 2025 that Bayley, "dependent on her small pension", supplemented it by holding paranormal evenings in her home. The house's own site in 2021 priced them at 45 pounds a head for about six hours, from 8 pm to a 2 am finish, over-18s only, usually eight to twenty guests. The same page opens with the phrase the press would later repeat, "Plas Teg is said to be one of the most haunted houses in Wales", and closes with "We employ no tricks ~ we don't need to. Whatever happens is for real!"