phantom

Fancy A Phantom

Jones Court, before its renovation

Courting a Phamtom
South Wales Echo 24 May 1996

They moved into Jones Court, Cardiff, 150 years ago. Eight families whose homes was a street straight out of Dickens.

They suffered in a fetid alley served by a cesspit, the only playground for their multitude of children who survived the fever and disease, common in those days. There lived Elizabeth Round who, at 70 had seen the rise and fall of Napolean. Among her neighbours, was Charlie Smith the Skinner, who shared a cottage with his wife Ann and their three children, Billy, Charlie and Eliza, aged respectively eight, six and four. In the last little house from the entrance off Womanby Street was Ann Thomas, 30 years of age and living with her 3 year old son, Thomas.

Back to modern day, there are people who work late in Womanby Street who believe that one of the former tenants - Elizabeth Round, Charlie Smith or perhaps Anne Thomas may still be in Jones Court. Although, there is another name that is constantly mentioned, Sean.

"I`m convinced there`s something there", said Gary Owen, partner in a club that lies adjacent to Jones Court. He admits that it sounds odd. "But I swear that theres something in one of those cottages. The third from the end. I`ve felt it at two or three in the morning when I`ve gone to fetch my car. It`s like a wave of unbelievable cold coming out at you".

One of the staff, Steve, tended to take the micheal. Until he went up there by himself. Steve insists that he was a total unbeliever. But in the early hours of one morning he pushed the door of the third cottage - just for fun -and it opened. He felt the chill and ran back to Gary and his partner Dave Jones, they went back to the cottage together.
"The door", says Gary, "was rock solid, immovable. It was barred and bolted".
So, is there something there in the old cottage that now houses a modern office - some shade returned from 150 years past?
"Nonsense!" says John Lock Necrews, the architect who designed the new court, restored by E Turner and Sons LTD, the Cardiff builders. His firm occupied offices inside the cottages and he often worked late.
"A lot of us worked late, but never saw or felt anything".
Dave Jones suggests that this might be that the ghost or whatever it is that he feels is present, manifests only in the early hours. No one has lived in Jones Court since the end of the nineteenth centruy, but plenty of people has died there. Occupancy goes back as far as 1830`s when the cottages were built for the labourers coming in to construct the docks.

Traces of 12th or 13th century occupation have been found. Succeeding centuries bought more people who lived and worked around Jones Court. So its history reaches back 700 years, although it was only a "proper" lived-in area for the last 65 years of the 19th century.
Council workmen used the Court as a depot up until 1980 when work on the restoraition started. There are no reports from anyone there of strange goings-on.

And then there is the strange experience of 20 year old Belinda Owen, who works in the Dog and Duck in Womanby Street. She began having dreams in which, one of them was a face that she told her boyfriend Dave that she would never forget.

"We were cleaning up one night, around 2.30am", recalls Dave, "when a friend I hadn`t seen for three years comes in, and Belinda lets out a terrible scream. The face of Daves friend was the face in her dream.

Which doesn`t seem to have a link with any possible haunting - but does suggest, as far as Dave and Belinda are concerned, there is something mysterious in the Court at night.
The friend clearly thought so, as in the best tradition of hauntings, he vanished - quick smart. Dave says that he`s had the feeling of someone grabbing his shoulders in the Court and he will not be shaken in his belief that something strange is definately going on. "The cold we have experienced is unbelievable, absolutely freezing".

Both Dave and Gary wonder whether the restoratiuon work sent out some kind of signal, and that someone, somewhere got the message.

Elizabeth Round? Charlie Smith or one of his family? Anne Thomas, who according to the old Cardiff records opened a grocers shop in the Hayes?

Or someone who`s name can`t be found in the old directories. "We have all had the sense of the name Sean coming through very strongly" , says Gary, "All of us get the same message.