Bryn Terrace Phantom

According to ‘Phantoms Legends, Customs and Superstitions Of The Sea’ (1972) by Raymond Lamont Brown; ‘In 1955 Jack Rees was a 26-year-old steel erector employed at Carmarthen Bay Power Station.

At the time of his brush with this phantom he was living at a house in Bryn Terrace, Llanelly with his 23-year-old wife and son of seven. For three years the Rees family had lived in this Llanelly house, but for some time before the climax of events they had been perturbed by ‘knockings at the door with no one there, and smashed crockery galore’.

This down-to-earth family, however, little suspected that their lives were being affected by the occult, the first manifestations of which had been poltergeist activity—poltergeist being a compound of the German verb potters, to rattle, and Grist, a ghost.

At midnight on June 2 1955, Jack Rees was awakened by what he took to be the sound of dripping water and made to get out of bed to investigate. In moving to pull of the bedclothes, however, he saw to his horror, an apparition some three feet from the bed.

‘I stared at it’, he later reported to the Western Mail and South Wales News, ‘and studied it for some three minutes . . . It did not move. I jerked my head suddenly and it backed away. My wife woke up, took one look at it and screamed. It then disappeared’.

Once before, the Reeses had seen the apparition, this time on the landing. The bedside visitation, however, was quite enough for the Reeses—they moved!

Investigations in the neighbourhood of Bryn Terrace uncovered the theory that the apparition was the ‘malevolent spirit’ of an old retired sea captain. The captain had been a well-known miser when he had lived in the house around 1886. It was thought that this phantom returned from time to time to seek the money the captain had once mislaid in the house.’