Beaumaris Gaol

Beaumaris Gaol was built in 1829 to designs by Hansom and Welch as Anglesey’s county jail, a few streets back from the waterfront of the old town of Beaumaris. Though it was considered a humane improvement in its day, its regime included chains, whipping, solitary confinement in a pitch-dark cell for up to three days, and a treadwheel — one of the last surviving in Britain — that prisoners worked to pump water to the top of the building. It was enlarged in 1867, closed as a prison in 1878, and then served as a police station and later a children’s clinic before opening as a museum in 1974. It is listed Grade I.

Two men were hanged there. In 1830 William Griffith, convicted of the attempted murder of his first wife, barricaded himself in his cell on the morning of his execution and was half-dragged, half-carried to the gallows. In 1862 Richard Rowlands was hanged for the murder of his father-in-law. He protested his innocence to the end, and local legend says that from the scaffold he cursed the clock on the tower of the nearby church: if he was innocent, its four faces would never show the same time. Both men were buried inside the gaol walls in a lime pit whose exact location is unknown; the iron pins that held the gallows and the doors the condemned men passed through can still be seen from the street.

Locals still like to say the clock has never kept proper time. Inside the gaol, museum visitors and ghost hunters report disembodied voices, shadowy figures, a sense of being watched — especially near the dark punishment cell — and poltergeist-like knocks. A former jailer is said to walk the corridors whistling and rapping on cell doors as if still on his rounds. None of these stories has a documented witness, but the bleak cells make the past easy to imagine.

Disembodied voices, shadowy figures, knocking and whistling (attributed to a jailer on his rounds), feelings of being watched near the solitary-confinement cell, and the legendary clock whose faces never agree.

The dark punishment cell and the condemned cell, the corridors and treadwheel yard, the gallows door on the street side of the wall, and the church clock tower in town.

The gaol and its curse appear in Welsh ghost guides, Halloween features by the Wales Coast Path and Visit Wales, and Spooky Isles; the museum pairs with the nearby Beaumaris Courthouse, where prisoners were tried.