Flying Glasses, Phantom Music & Real Ghosts: We Investigated Wales' Most haunted Pubs

0:00Welcome back to another episode of Haunted Pub Crawl. Tonight, we're heading back into Wales in search of haunted pubs with more than just a creepy reputation. These are places where the stories are tied to real buildings, real history, and in some cases, very specific reports that have kept the legends alive for decades. And the first of them is one of the locations where the haunting almost feels inseparable from the building itself. We're at the Prince of Wales in in Kenthig, a place that stands on the edge of lost medieval world and carries with it centuries of memory, tragedy, and strange claims that refuse to fade. The Prince of Wales in is not simply an old pub with a ghost story attached to it. He began life as Kenthig's town hall, built to replace the earlier civic centre, after the old borough was overwhelmed and buried by the nearby sand dunes.

1:01The in-zone history says the buildings date back to around the 15th century and that the upstairs room, the old town hall, has served as a guild hall, courtroom, market, coroners in quest room, dance venue, Sunday school room, and, on occasion, even a mortuary for shipwreck mariners, brought in from the nearby coast. So before you even get to the hauntings, this is already a place that's steeped in law, trade, grief, ritual, and death. This is exactly the kind of building where you can imagine layers of emotion settling into the stones over hundreds of years. And then comes the reports that turned the Prince of Wales into one of Wales's better known hauntings, a Kenthig heritage piece, reproducing reports from 1982 say landlord Mickey Evans and his wife were here in ghostly organ music and strained voices in the building after hours, long after the pub should have fallen silent. That alone is eerie enough, but the story goes further.

2:04Two local men, one described as an electrical engineer and the others an industrial chemist, became interested enough to investigate the sounds for themselves. They reportedly set up recording equipment in a room above the bar, and according to those accounts, the tape captured voices, organ music, and even the sound of a ticking clock. The point here is not whether we can prove what was on those recordings. It is not just an old local tale muttered in passing. At the time, people actively tried to document what they believed was happening inside that building. And there are also public references to a BBC archive television report on the hauntings at the Prince of Wales from the 1980s, which gives the whole story another layer of credibility in terms of public record. It suggests that whatever was being claimed at Kenthig had grown large enough to attract wider media interest beyond the village itself. That does not prove the paranormal, of course, but it does tell us that the haunting has been taken seriously

3:08enough to be discussed outside simple public folklore. And that is part of what makes Prince of Wales so compelling. It sits in that fascinating space between history, legend, and investigation. The stories are old, the buildings are older, and the claims are strong enough that people try to test them rather than just repeat them. What deepens it more is Kenthig itself. This is a place forever associated with loss. The old medieval town was gradually swallowed up by sand, leaving behind ruins, fragments, and memory rather than a surviving townscape. So the Prince of Wales feels like one of the last standing witnesses to a vanished settlement. When people talk about voices in the night, phantom music or unexplained sounds in the old town hall is hard not to imagine the building almost reclaiming pieces of its own past. The echoes of court sessions, gatherings, celebrations, arguments, and the grim silence of bodies laid out after shipwrecks.

4:12Whether you believe in stone tape theory, residual haunting, or simply the power of suggestion in a building loaded with history, Prince of Wales has a sort of backstory that makes every claim feel more potent. It's not hard to see why people still talk about it. So from South Wales, we head now to the walled town of Canavan, and to a pub whose name, age, and haunting stories have all helped keep it in the spotlight for years. The Black Boy Inn. Set within Canavan's historic streets near the castle and the old town walls, the Black Boy is generally described as dating to around 1522, making it one of the oldest in Wales. History points notes that the building was once formed from two neighbouring inns, the King's Arms and the Fleur de Lise, for later becoming one larger pub. So again, it's not a modern venue dressed up with spooky branding. This is genuinely old building in a town already saturated with history, and that gives the haunting stories a very strong setting before they even begin.

5:16The name itself has its own history and uncertainty. The Inn says that there's no single confirmed explanation for the origin of the name Black Boy. One theory is that it referred to a black buoy, or boy, in the harbour used as an navigation marker for the ships entering Canavan. Another is that it referred to Charles II, who was sometimes nicknamed the Black Boy because of his dark hair and complexion, with the suggestion that royalists may once have used the inn as a secret meeting place. The Inn has also published material linking the name to John Stumelein, sorry, a 5th ruined that name. An African-born man who became a notable figure in north Wales. At the same time, another article on the Inns' own site argues that Charles II's theory is the likeliest of the competing explanations. What seems clear though, is that the name is very old and deeply rooted in the town's past.

6:19And then there are the haunting claims which are much more active and varied than the usual vague pub folklore. In the 2022, news report landlord John Evans, who had owned a pub, and managed the Inn for around 20 years, said he'd heard many strange stories from staff guests and customers over that time. Those reports included glasses, flying from shelves, bangs and knocks, voices, pictures moving, guests waking to find an old lady sitting at the end of the bed and other guests here in a little boy crying. One member of staff, in that same report, also described taking a family photo in the Inn, and later noticed this in an unexplained gap in the image where nobody had apparently been sitting. Again, none that proves the supernatural, but gives the Blackboy something important for storytelling. Multiple kinds of phenomena repeated over time, described in public news piece, and attributed to a named people associated with the Inn.

7:19That range of claims is what makes the Blackboy so effective as a haunted pub story. You have a classic poltergeist style detail of objects moving the atmosphere at sounds of knocks and voices. The visual apparition of an old lady on the bed and the almost heart-breaking image of a child heard crying somewhere in a building. Set that against Canavern's stone walls, the castle nearby and a pub that stood there for half a millennium, and the whole place starts to feel thick with the suggestion of lives layered one upon another. Old-ins often gava stories because people pass through them, sleep in them, celebrate in them, mourn in them, and leave pieces of themselves behind. The Blackboy feels like one of those places where the stories had centuries to accumulate. There's also something striking about the contrast between the two pubs in this episode. The Prince of Wales at Kemfik feels like haunting of echoes, phantom music disembodded voices, and room heavy with civic and maritime history.

8:21The Blackboy Inn, by comparison, feels like a haunting of presence, movement, disturbance, figures sing, sounds heard, rooms that do not feel empty when they should be. One seems to be tied with the long memory of a lost place, the other feels tied to the restless traffic of a building that has lived in and passed through for generations. There are both haunted pub stories, but they haunt in very different ways. So if you ever find yourself again in Wales with a taste for history and the paranormal, there are the two pubs well worth known about. The Prince of Wales stands as a surviving fragment of a town that's sand-tried to erase, and stories of organ music and voices in the old town still cling to it. At Kanavan, the Blackboy Inn sits with the ancient town walls, with half a millennium behind it carrying tales of flying glasses, phantom crying, and a woman who may still be visiting the bedside of sleeping guests. Whether these places are truly haunted, or simply saturated with the atmosphere of age, grief and memory, they have exactly what the best haunted pubs always seem to have a sense that the past is not entirely finished with them, just yet.

9:38During this next time, when we hit a couple more pubs in Wales, Ash will be back next time. As it is, there's lots going on in everybody's lives, coming to the end of winter, there's moves, there's all sorts happening. But when we're back together, and if you haven't already watched it, head over to Investigate UK's YouTube channel, where you will see the House of Christ video where me and Ash might just guest on there for a little bit. Anyway, thanks for listening, if you've made it as far, really appreciate everything you do on our social medias, all the posts, all the comments, all the likes, all the shares. Please make sure that you share these episodes out, it really does help us. And if you really can, drop us a comment, drop us a rating on your podcast app, that is perfect and really helps us out. Anyway, thank you for now, I'm great, and I'll see you later.