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Guest writer RP SERIN recalls a mysterious holiday in North Wales where he and his family may have encountered the infamous Gwydir witch
The farmer stared at me with tired eyes. “No,” he said after a few moments of awkward silence. “That wouldn’t be a good idea.”
It was a cold, ashen afternoon. The second day of our autumn holidays in Betws-Y-Coed, a small village in the heart of North Wales, popular with tourists like us who swarm there in barely manageable numbers during the school holidays. My younger sister, who was ten at the time, looked at me expectantly. Her friend, who was staying with us for a week, smiled.
I’m not sure how much the girls wanted to look at the cows – they were probably too old to be interested, but my mother had insisted. A howl came from the large barn behind the angry-looking farmer.
‘Come on, let’s go back. The tea will be ready soon.’
I thanked the farmer for his time, apologized for the trouble and headed back up the path, the damp slate sliding roughly under my feet.
Our accommodation was on the side of a road which seemed quiet until a car raced past, speed limits and the like clearly of no importance. The Gwydir Forest stretched across the high hills and mountains beyond, adding to the picture book scene of country house bliss. It had two windows from top to bottom and a centrally placed door leading directly into a modestly sized living room.
To the left was a ground floor bedroom, where my wife and I had chosen to sleep. To the right were the kitchen and adjacent shower room. A wooden staircase, leading to the upstairs bedrooms, filled the back wall. All six of us – my wife and I, my parents and the two girls – could barely fit in the room together, but no one minded. Although it was small, it was also inviting and homely. Cozy instead of cramped.
That evening we decided to take a walk through the woods. The vast pine trees hid an endless gloom beneath their emerald spiers. Poppy and Ruby, my mother’s dogs, ran ahead as we shone torches into dark spaces. I told stories about the Gwydir Witch, an old witch who wandered the forest at night, looking for children to take and do whatever such creatures do. It was all a fabrication, of course, but it can be hard to resist the temptation to think about such things when exploring such places. The Blair Witch Project has a lot to answer for.
It was later, as we sat together in the compact living room enjoying the warmth of the fireplace, that the cows started barking. The contented howls of the past had been pushed aside by anguished howls. I’d never heard anything like it before. No wonder the farmer wouldn’t let us look.
Finally they fell silent.
The next day was spent exploring the beautiful countryside of Snowdonia, stopping for a tour of an old, disused slate mine. A rickety cart took us to the depths of the earth, where we could walk around the dimly lit caverns, carved by the calloused hands of a world that no longer exists. In the cold, the damp, and the dark, you felt like you could almost touch it, even though it remained forever out of reach.
Back at the cottage, as the evening grew dark again, we sat in the glow of the fire in the living room. A gentle breeze, easily heard through the old single pane windows, caressed the walls outside.
The Scrabble board was out and although not everyone was playing, the room was filled with lively, good-natured conversation. Then, without intervention from any of us, the front door swung open to reveal a dense darkness clawing at the humble glow in which we sat.
“It must be the Gwydir witch,” Dad joked. “Or the wind.”
We all giggled, though I couldn’t be the only one who thought the breeze barely seemed strong enough to blow a dying leaf from the weakening grasp of its once life-giving branch, let alone open a door.
I stood up to close it, making sure the flimsy-looking latch was secure.
As we went into the evening, pouring more wine, eating more snacks, and playing more Scrabble, the door was forgotten.
Until it opened again.
This time I turned the key to lock it properly. It did the trick.
The following days passed without incident. The doors did not swing open of their own accord and the cows remained silent.
It was around 2am when I woke up. Mouth dry, need to drink. I cursed myself for not taking a glass of water to bed. Not that it was a big problem. Since we were in the downstairs bedroom, the kitchen wasn’t far away.
The fire had gone out and the house was left fresh and cold. I made my way through the darkness, wiping my hands carefully in hopes of avoiding a noisy – or painful – collision with a hidden piece of furniture.
Once I reached the kitchen, I blindly knocked on the wall and found the light switch more by chance than anything. The long fluorescent bulb buzzed and crackled and flickered wildly before bathing the room in its artificial glow.
I squinted into the bright light and the scene before me slowly came into focus.
As expected the door to the shower room was closed. The sink and dish rack were still decorated with that evening’s dishes. What I didn’t expect was that every cabinet door had been pulled wide open and every drawer had been fully extended; the weight of the contents pushed them precariously toward the ground.
I stared for a moment. Who would have done this? My wife and I were the last to go to bed, and then they were closed for good. I walked around the room, closing every drawer and door as I went. I filled a glass with water from the tap, took a big sip and headed back to bed. I fell asleep with ease.
During breakfast I described what I had seen and asked who had done it. No one came forward. Still, it made for an interesting topic of conversation; a new thread in the ongoing Gwydir Witch story we were all spinning now.
Ghost stories around a campfire, and other than whimsical folk tales, I was sure it wasn’t anything supernatural. The wind must have blown open the old door of the cottage, and either someone had sabotaged the kitchen as a playful prank, or they were going through a particularly active phase of sleepwalking.
What happened on the last night proved more difficult to explain. There was a subtle charge of frenetic energy as people rushed around the cottage, sweeping things off the floor and stuffing them into bags, while others lingered in the living room and tried to relax, knowing that the next day would be a return to their lives. to take. the normality that such excursions had to escape.
I don’t remember what I was doing when it turned out the shower room was locked (although I know I wasn’t packing bags – that’s a job considered too advanced for my abilities), and I don’t remember who it was noticed. But I do remember what happened next.
I knocked on the door, but there was no response. The shower didn’t seem to be in use so whoever was there should have been able to hear it. I yelled. Nothing.
Curiosity turned to confusion and confusion turned to panic. Did anyone get hurt? Perhaps they had slipped on the wet floor and hit their heads on the porcelain sink as they fell. I screamed for help and prepared to break through the door.
My father arrived and tried the handle himself. It didn’t open. I looked back. All six of us were sitting around now. The kitchen felt claustrophobic.
If we were all in the kitchen, who the hell was in the shower room?
It was impossible to lock from the outside, and it couldn’t have happened by accident. A long brass hook, hanging on the other side of the door, had to be hoisted into an eyebolt attached to the door frame. And yet, when we loosened the handle and pushed, the door shifted slightly before stopping, leaving a small gap between the door and the frame. It was just wide enough to see that the lock had been lifted into place.
We called again and still no answer. Since everyone was safe, burglary didn’t seem necessary. The shower room had no windows and it didn’t seem likely that someone could sneak past and lock themselves in.
My father, who was always more practical than me, stretched out a coat hanger and slid it into the opening. With the door ajar, even by such a small margin, the hook pulled tight, jamming it firmly into the eye. It wasn’t easy, but with a bit of trial and error and a touch of frustration, he finally managed to do it. The hook swung down with a satisfying rattle.
We stepped inside. Everything was completely normal. The lock functioned well and could be easily opened from this side. We tried it from the other side to be sure, but it was impossible. Even if you somehow managed to turn the hook upwards, which in itself was an unlikely feat, it couldn’t possibly catch your eye.
Once again we joked, and again we blamed the Gwydir witch – it seemed as good an explanation as any, and then we moved on and made the most of our last night before heading home.
We never really talked about what happened. Back then, I was the kind of skeptic who questioned everything, that is, everything except my own materialistic dogma. I couldn’t explain these events in a way that I considered “rational,” so I ignored them, like any good materialist.
I suspect that other members of the group, who are more open to alternative possibilities, have not brought this up for very different reasons. If you don’t talk about it, maybe it didn’t happen.
But it did happen, and I still can’t explain it. Since then, I’ve moved away from my old rigid assumptions. My skepticism has matured, allowing me to wonder what, for many, is still the indisputable. There is a growing body of evidence, collected from a wide range of reputable sources (and even published in peer-reviewed journals) that our current scientific models are ill-equipped to explain every phenomenon in our universe.
I wouldn’t like to guess what happened in that old cottage in the heart of Snowdonia, on the edge of the Gwydir Forest, but I am now prepared to accept that it may well have been the result of forces far beyond what we can understand. be real. Maybe it was even the Gwydir witch.
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RP SERIN (he/him) was born in 1981. He lives in Shropshire, UK with his wife and two children, and has worked in the NHS for over 15 years as an Operating Department Practitioner. In 2018 he graduated from the Open University with a first class Honors Degree in History and is an affiliated writer of the Horror Writers Association. His work has previously been published in Hellhound Books, Dream of Shadows Anthology, Paranormal Magazine, Horrified Ezine and elsewhere. He was diagnosed with autism in 2019. His website, rpserin.com, is here.
