The white lady of Oystermouth castle. Now a part of Swansea, Oystermouth is best known as the burial place of Dr Thomas Bowdler who "Bowdlerized" the immortal bard in his famous expurgated Family Shakespeare (1818). Oystermouth castle was founded by William de Londres about 1094 and completed by the De Braose family towards the end of the thirteenth century. It is still possible to visit the gatehouse, banqueting hall, Chapel and dungeons. As might be expected, the ancient pile is haunted and many are the stories told of the White Lady being encountered in the castle precincts. One story relates that a family was having a picnic and while the parents rested after the meal the two young children ran off to play but soon returned, much distressed. They told that a lady was crying behind a tree. When they led their father to the spot, sure enough he too saw the woman dressed in a long white robe with a cord tied at the waist, seemingly sobbing her heart out, although he heard no sound. As he approached her she turned her back to him and he was shocked to see the top part of her dress was ripped to shreds and her back was raw and bleeding from countless lacerations. He stood for a moment then decided to go and take the children back to his wife. When he returned a few seconds later though, there was no sign of the anguished lady in white and it seemed quite impossible for her to have disappeared normally from the scene. Yet another incident concerned a local man taking his dog for a walk near the castle. He lost sight of the dog for some moments and when he whistled and the dog did not return, he began to search for it. After a little while he heard it whimpering, and he found it behind a tree petrified with fear, it's eyes fixed on a part of the castle wall. It was starting to get dark, but he was curious to know what could have frightened his little dog so. He went towards the spot on the castle wall that seemed to have attracted the dog's attention, and as he did so, he saw a white shape on the floor just in front of the wall. As he got closer the dog began to howl, and the white shape, which he thought may have been a large piece of paper or something similar, rose up from the ground. It was a woman dressed in a white robe, and almost before he could recover from his surprise, she seemed to "melt" into the castle wall. When he reached the place where she disappeared, he saw that there was no way she could have passed through the wall, as he put it to the original author of this story, "the earth just swallowed her up". Another time a young couple were having a cuddle beneath a tree one evening when they heard the sound of sobbing. The sound seemed to originate from behind them on the other side of the tree. When they looked behind the tree there was no one there, but they saw a woman dressed in white, with her head in her hands, disappear behind another tree. They waited for her to re-appear, but she did not. They decided to investigate and walked to the tree in question and when they rounded it, there was no sign of the figure they had seen mom
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