Within Haunted Caernarfonshire
Why Are Caernarfon's Old Inns So Haunted?
The Black Boy Inn and Anglesey Arms stories show how pub hauntings draw power from old town walls, quays, punishment sites and repeated local telling.
On this page
- The nun, child cries and Strangler of the Black Boy Inn
- The Anglesey Arms and the Hanging Tower connection
- Ghost walks, pub memory and public punishment
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Introduction
Caernarfon’s old inns feel “haunted” because their ghost stories are not isolated pub tales. They sit inside a compact landscape of town walls, quays, former prison buildings, execution places and narrow streets where public memory has had centuries to gather. The Black Boy Inn is associated with a nun, a throat-squeezing “Strangler”, child cries and other reported presences; the Anglesey Arms gains its darker charge from its position beside the town wall’s Hanging Tower, where convicted prisoners were executed. These stories should be read as local traditions and reported experiences, not verified proof of ghosts. Their power comes from how closely the inns stand to Caernarfon’s physical history: Edward I’s walled borough, the working harbour, red-light district memories, the old jail, and the move from public hangings at Y Morfa to executions hidden inside the penal landscape.[black-boy-inn.com]black-boy-inn.comThe Black Boy Inn Say hello to the Black Boy Inn’s ghosts! | Black Boy InnThe Black Boy Inn Say hello to the Black Boy Inn’s ghosts! | Black Boy Inn
Why Caernarfon’s Inns Make Such Strong Ghost Settings
Caernarfon is a small town with an unusually dense haunted geography. The castle and town walls were not decorative backdrops: Cadw describes the walls as part of Edward I’s plan for a complete fortress town, with an almost complete circuit of eight towers and two gateways still shaping the old borough. That matters for ghost lore because the pubs are not imagined in open countryside or anonymous streets. They sit inside a hard-edged medieval enclosure, close to gateways, the quay, the castle and the sites where law, trade and punishment were visible parts of town life.[Cadw]cadw.gov.walesCadw Caernarfon Town Walls and Porth Mawr Tower | CadwCadw Caernarfon Town Walls and Porth Mawr Tower | Cadw
The Black Boy Inn is the best-known example. It stands at the north end of Northgate Street in the walled town, and the Cadw-derived listing records it as a Grade II building, a rare surviving seventeenth-century structure in Caernarfon retaining early interior detail and contributing to the historic integrity of the walled town. That listed-building context helps explain why ghost stories cling so easily to it: heavy walls, old beams, passages, altered rooms and centuries of hospitality give visitors a believable stage on which to imagine older lives returning.[British Listed Buildings]britishlistedbuildings.co.ukBritish Listed Buildings Black Boy Inn, Caernarfon, GwyneddBritish Listed Buildings Black Boy Inn, Caernarfon, Gwynedd
The Anglesey Arms works differently. Its haunting reputation depends less on a cast of named pub spirits and more on adjacency. History Points records that the building was originally a Custom House, possibly dating from 1736, standing by the quay where imports entered Caernarfon and customs officers monitored cargo. By the mid nineteenth century, as the old quay became more of a visitor promenade and customs work moved elsewhere, the building became the Anglesey Arms Hotel. Its ghostly charge comes from that shift: an official waterfront building becoming an inn beside the town’s execution tower.[History Points]historypoints.orgHistory Points The Anglesey Arms, CaernarfonHistory Points The Anglesey Arms, Caernarfon
The Nun, Child Cries and Strangler of the Black Boy Inn
The Black Boy Inn’s modern haunted reputation centres on a small group of recurring figures rather than one single definitive legend. The inn’s own account says the most common stories include a ghostly nun, the “Strangler” who makes himself known by a sensation of pressure around the throat, the cries of a small child that stop when living people offer comfort, an elderly man watching the bar, and a ghostly barmaid returning to her old workplace. The same account is careful in its phrasing: it speaks of sightings, “feelings” and stories rather than presenting the haunting as proven fact.[The Black Boy Inn]black-boy-inn.comThe Black Boy Inn Say hello to the Black Boy Inn’s ghosts! | Black Boy InnThe Black Boy Inn Say hello to the Black Boy Inn’s ghosts! | Black Boy Inn
The nun is the most place-specific of these figures. The usual story has her passing through the inn towards a religious house that supposedly once stood behind it. The Black Boy Inn’s historical page preserves the tradition but adds an important caution: it says there is no evidence that Caernarfon had a nunnery there, though a priory was located where a shop now stands. That tension is exactly what makes the tale useful as folklore. The apparition may not prove a lost convent, but the story shows how a half-remembered religious landscape can become attached to a building where visitors already expect old secrets.[The Black Boy Inn]black-boy-inn.comOpen source on black-boy-inn.com.
The child cries belong to a different kind of haunting. They are not tied to a named historical event in the sources found, but to an emotional pattern: distress heard by the living, then silence when comfort is offered. Such stories are common in haunted-inn traditions because they turn a public commercial space into a place of private care. The listener is not merely frightened; they are invited to respond. In a busy hotel, where strangers sleep in rooms used by generations before them, the sound of a crying child becomes a powerful way of suggesting that domestic memory has soaked into the building.[The Black Boy Inn]black-boy-inn.comThe Black Boy Inn Say hello to the Black Boy Inn’s ghosts! | Black Boy InnThe Black Boy Inn Say hello to the Black Boy Inn’s ghosts! | Black Boy Inn
The “Strangler” is the darkest Black Boy figure because the reported experience is bodily. Rather than a shape seen at the end of a corridor, the story involves the sensation of a throat being squeezed. Some secondary tourism accounts connect this figure with nineteenth-century violence against women in the town’s former red-light district, but that claim is much less securely evidenced than the existence of the broader pub tradition. The safer reading is that the Strangler story draws on the known atmosphere of Northgate Street as a sailors’ and lodging-house area, then gives that social memory a threatening supernatural form.[Royal Victoria Hotel Llanberis]theroyalvictoria.co.ukOpen source on theroyalvictoria.co.uk.
What Northgate Street Adds to the Haunting
The Black Boy Inn’s ghosts make more sense when Northgate Street is treated as part of the story. The inn’s own history describes Caernarfon’s heyday as a port town and repeats the local explanation of the street’s Welsh name as “Four and Sixpence Street”, linked to a sailors’ bargain for a bed, gin and a woman for the night. The detail should be handled carefully, because it is a remembered local story rather than a court record of individual lives, but it shows why later ghost traditions gravitate towards women, barmaids, sexual commerce, loneliness and danger.[The Black Boy Inn]black-boy-inn.comOpen source on black-boy-inn.com.
That does not mean every Black Boy apparition can be traced to a real person. The strongest evidence is not for a documented murder behind each ghost, but for a building and street that have accumulated stories because they were repeatedly used, slept in, drunk in, restored, investigated and retold. During restoration work, the inn says workers found items under dining-room floorboards, including a child’s shoe, clay pipes and animal jaw bones; it also says 1990s excavations nearby found the skeleton of an old woman thought to have been buried there to avoid funeral costs. Such finds do not prove hauntings, but they deepen the sense that ordinary lives, poverty and death were physically close to the inn.[The Black Boy Inn]black-boy-inn.comOpen source on black-boy-inn.com.
This is why the Black Boy’s haunted reputation feels more durable than a single Halloween anecdote. The ghosts are embedded in the building’s commercial identity, local art and visitor experience. In 2022, the inn described buying a painting by local artist Glain Roberts that depicted four of its ghosts in the bar, turning oral and online traditions into a visible object inside the premises. That is how pub hauntings often survive: not through one perfect primary source, but through repetition in the place itself.[The Black Boy Inn]black-boy-inn.comThe Black Boy Inn Say hello to the Black Boy Inn’s ghosts! | Black Boy InnThe Black Boy Inn Say hello to the Black Boy Inn’s ghosts! | Black Boy Inn
The Anglesey Arms and the Hanging Tower Connection
The Anglesey Arms is haunted by proximity to punishment. The pub stands by the town walls near the tower known as the Hanging Tower, north of the inn. History Points states plainly that the tower gained its name because convicts were executed there, and that it stood alongside the former jail. Before the nineteenth century, the same source says public hangings were carried out at Y Morfa, open land south of the town centre; later, execution memory concentrated around the prison and tower.[History Points]historypoints.orgHistory Points The Hanging Tower, CaernarfonHistory Points The Hanging Tower, Caernarfon
That shift matters. A public hanging ground on open land creates one kind of ghost landscape: communal spectacle, crowds, warning and shame. A tower by a jail creates another: enclosed punishment, final footsteps, buried bodies and institutional silence. The Anglesey Arms sits at the edge of both worlds. It began as a Custom House connected with the quay, trade and maritime movement, then became a hotel beside a tower remembered for death. The haunted story is therefore less about a ghost wandering randomly through a pub and more about an inn absorbing the atmosphere of the wall, prison and execution route around it.[History Points]historypoints.orgHistory Points The Anglesey Arms, CaernarfonHistory Points The Anglesey Arms, Caernarfon
The named execution most often attached to the tower’s haunting is William Murphy. History Points identifies Murphy as the last person executed at the Hanging Tower and says he had killed his mistress, Gwen Ellen Jones, in Holyhead on Christmas Day 1909 before being hanged in February 1910 by Henry Albert Pierrepoint. People’s Collection Wales gives a closely related material trace: Murphy was sentenced to death at Beaumaris courthouse in 1910, hanged at Caernarfon, and his gravestone was later excavated during 1930s conversion work on the prison site.[History Points]historypoints.orgHistory Points The Hanging Tower, CaernarfonHistory Points The Hanging Tower, Caernarfon
A Nation.Cymru report on the former Gwynedd Council headquarters, which occupied the old penal site, also notes the local claim that Murphy’s ghost still haunts the area. The article gives the modern civic afterlife of the place: a site associated with executions became council offices, meaning the haunting is now attached not just to an inn or tower but to the awkward reuse of a death-site for ordinary administration. That is a common mechanism in British haunted-place traditions: the ghost marks a past function the present building would otherwise make too easy to forget.[Nation.Cymru]nation.cymruHangings and hauntings: The grisly history of GwyneddHangings and hauntings: The grisly history of Gwynedd
Public Punishment Became Pub Memory
Caernarfon’s execution landscape is unusually legible because the places are close together. The town walls still guide movement; the quay still frames the Anglesey Arms; the Hanging Tower remains named for execution; the Black Boy Inn still trades inside the walled town. A visitor can move from hospitality to punishment memory in minutes, which gives ghost walks and pub stories a ready-made route. The stories do not need elaborate invention because the built environment already supplies the drama.[Cadw]cadw.gov.walesCadw Caernarfon Town Walls and Porth Mawr Tower | CadwCadw Caernarfon Town Walls and Porth Mawr Tower | Cadw
The chronology also helps explain the tone of the hauntings. At Y Morfa, execution was once public and open-air. At the Hanging Tower, it became attached to the jail and the enclosed machinery of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century criminal justice. Around the inns, the same memories are softened, repeated and made social: a drink at the bar, a story from staff, a local tour stop, a room with old beams, a painting on the wall. What began as punishment becomes atmosphere.[History Points]historypoints.orgHistory Points The Hanging Tower, CaernarfonHistory Points The Hanging Tower, Caernarfon
That does not make the stories false in a simple sense, nor does it make them historically secure. They are better understood as layered traditions. William Murphy is a documented condemned man; the Hanging Tower is a documented execution site; the Black Boy Inn is a documented historic inn; the nun, Strangler and crying child are reported or retold apparitions. The haunting lies in the connection between those categories: hard records of buildings and punishments on one side, folkloric interpretation and visitor experience on the other.[britishlistedbuildings.co.uk]britishlistedbuildings.co.ukBritish Listed Buildings Black Boy Inn, Caernarfon, GwyneddBritish Listed Buildings Black Boy Inn, Caernarfon, Gwynedd
How Credible Are the Stories?
The most credible parts of Caernarfon’s haunted-inn landscape are the physical and historical anchors. The Black Boy Inn is a listed historic building in the walled town, with seventeenth-century fabric and early interior details. The Anglesey Arms has a documented earlier life as a Custom House beside the quay. The town walls survive almost complete. The Hanging Tower is locally and historically identified as an execution site beside the former jail. Those points can be separated from belief in apparitions and checked against heritage sources.[britishlistedbuildings.co.uk]britishlistedbuildings.co.ukBritish Listed Buildings Black Boy Inn, Caernarfon, GwyneddBritish Listed Buildings Black Boy Inn, Caernarfon, Gwynedd
The apparitions themselves are thinner evidence. The Black Boy Inn’s ghosts are preserved mainly through the inn’s own storytelling, ghost-tour material, travel writing and tourism accounts. That does not make them worthless; it tells us how the stories circulate. But it does mean they should be presented as claims, traditions and experiences, not as established events. The nun story is a good example: it is memorable and widely repeated, yet the inn’s own history notes the lack of evidence for the supposed nunnery behind it.[black-boy-inn.com]black-boy-inn.comOpen source on black-boy-inn.com.
The Anglesey Arms and Hanging Tower story has a stronger historical spine because executions at the tower and Murphy’s death are better documented than the pub apparitions. Even there, the ghost claim is separate from the execution record. It is historically sound to say that Murphy was hanged at Caernarfon and that the tower is reputed to be haunted by him or by others executed there; it would be too strong to say that Murphy’s ghost has been proven to appear.[historypoints.org]historypoints.orgHistory Points The Hanging Tower, CaernarfonHistory Points The Hanging Tower, Caernarfon
Why These Stories Still Work
Caernarfon’s haunted inns endure because they turn the old town into a walkable map of memory. The Black Boy Inn gives the tradition intimacy: voices, pressure on the throat, a nun crossing through the building, a child who seems to respond to comfort. The Anglesey Arms and Hanging Tower give it public gravity: condemned prisoners, the former jail, the movement of execution from open land to enclosed tower, and the later reuse of penal space. Together they show how Caernarfonshire’s haunted history is often less about remote ruins than about ordinary places where people still eat, drink, sleep and pass by without quite escaping what the stones remember.
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Haunted Inns of Britain and Ireland
First published 2004. Subjects: Guidebooks, Haunted hotels.
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Endnotes
1.
Source: black-boy-inn.com
Title: The Black Boy Inn Say hello to the Black Boy Inn’s ghosts! | Black Boy Inn
Link:https://www.black-boy-inn.com/say-hello-to-the-black-boy-inns-ghosts/
2.
Source: black-boy-inn.com
Link:https://www.black-boy-inn.com/the-black-boy-inn/
3.
Source: nation.cymru
Title: Hangings and hauntings: The grisly history of Gwynedd
Link:https://nation.cymru/news/hangings-and-hauntings-the-grisly-history-of-gwynedd-councils-hq/
4.
Source: historypoints.org
Title: History Points The Hanging Tower, Caernarfon
Link:https://historypoints.org/index.php?page=the-hanging-tower-caernarfon
5.
Source: cadw.gov.wales
Title: Cadw Caernarfon Town Walls and Porth Mawr Tower | Cadw
Link:https://cadw.gov.wales/visit/places-to-visit/caernarfon-town-walls-and-porth-mawr-tower
6.
Source: cadw.gov.wales
Title: Cadw Castell Caernarfon | Cadw
Link:https://cadw.gov.wales/visit/places-to-visit/castell-caernarfon
7.
Source: britishlistedbuildings.co.uk
Title: British Listed Buildings Black Boy Inn, Caernarfon, Gwynedd
Link:https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/300003905-black-boy-inn-caernarfon
8.
Source: historypoints.org
Title: History Points The Anglesey Arms, Caernarfon
Link:https://historypoints.org/index.php?m73248detailpage=6006&m73248number=3&m73248pagenumber=277&m73248returnid=805&mact=News%2Cm73248%2Cdefault%2C1&page=805
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Source: theroyalvictoria.co.uk
Link:https://theroyalvictoria.co.uk/journal/wine-or-spirits-north-wales-pubs-with-spooky-stories
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18.
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20.
Source: britishlistedbuildings.co.uk
Link:https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/wales/caernarfon-gwynedd
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Source: kids.kiddle.co
Title: Black Boy Inn
Link:https://kids.kiddle.co/Black_Boy_Inn
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Source: medievalheritage.eu
Link:https://medievalheritage.eu/en/main-page/heritage/wales/caernarfon-city-defensive-walls/
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Additional References
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Source: youtube.com
Title: The History of The Black Boy Inn in Caernarfon
Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-2mMoRqGZo
Source snippet
FlightPub trip to Caernarfon August 2025 Part 2 - The Black Boy Inn, Bar Bach & Scenic Snowdonia...
Published: August 2025
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Source: youtube.com
Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krHwIPUJELc
Source snippet
The Real Story Behind Wales' Most Controversial Castle...
Published: August 2025
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Source: youtube.com
Title: Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd (UNESCO/NHK)
Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDVriJnnTkM
Source snippet
[Caernarfon Castle]({{ 'castle-ghosts-ba5ae2/' | relative_url }}) History / King Edward I's Mighty Medieval Fortress...
27.
Source: youtube.com
Title: The Real Story Behind Wales’ Most Controversial Castle
Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nJnRH8idJw
Source snippet
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Source: gazetteer.org.uk
Link:https://gazetteer.org.uk/place/Caernarfon%2C_Caernarfonshire_7458
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