Reunion at Craig-y-nos

The car park was full by the time we got to Craig-y-nos castle at 10.30 this morning for the reunion. For the ex patients were already there.
 
It’s been a highly emotional day, a day of laughter and tears as we re-lived our early childhood of years cut off from the outside world and our families.
 
What we suffered today would be called child abuse though the word was unknown then.
 
Maria, the film director found doing the interviews traumatic: grown men breaking down in tears as they relived those early years when this
was a TB sanatorium, a woman talking abut her 9 year old self running away at midnight down the fire escape with her doll in one hand and her nightie in the other, another who had been treated for worms when in reality he had TB, and the child who woke to find rat in her bed. So the stories rolled out…
 
Today the castle runs ghost tours cashing in on those childhood traumas where they claim to hear the ghosts of dead children crying and strange noises in the night.
 
And today some of those children, now very much older, cried again.
 
But this is not what the owner of the castle Martin Glover, wants to hear.
He has concocted a lucrative business with his ghost tours. The last thing he wants is for the real people to appear telling their own true stories.
 
Ex-patients are not welcome, though he was happy to charge the students a hefty fee to film them here.
 
   
Photo – some ex patients with partners in the Adelina Patti theatre.