Big Pit: The Ghosts That Never Left the Mine

Big Pit at Blaenavon was a working coal mine for more than a century. It closed on 2 February 1980 and reopened three years later as a museum. Today visitors put on a helmet and cap lamp, ride the cage about 300 feet down the shaft, and walk the old roadways with a former miner as their guide. It is often listed among haunted sites in Wales, with tales of lamp lights in sealed roadways and voices in the dark. When we went looking for those stories, we could not find them in any source. What we did find was a real mine with a hard history, and a genuine body of Welsh mining ghost lore from the valleys around it.

The working pit

Coal and iron were mined around Blaenavon from the early nineteenth century to feed the Blaenavon Ironworks. Big Pit grew out of a network of older workings run by the Blaenavon Iron and Coal Company. Historians disagree about when it first worked steadily. It may have grown from a pit called Kearsley’s Pit, named in company records of the 1860s. The oldest part of the workings, Forge Level, dates from 1812.

The name comes from the shaft. A mines inspector’s report of 1881 is the first to call it the Big Pit. Its shaft was elliptical, 18 feet by 13 feet, and it was the first in Wales wide enough for two tramways side by side. In 1878 it was deepened to reach the Old Coal seam at 293 feet.

At its height Big Pit was a large concern. It employed 1,122 people in 1908 and about 1,400 by 1923, and it produced more than 250,000 tons a year. Coal from Blaenavon was shipped as far as South America. Until 1908 all the work underground, including cutting the coal, was done by hand. The pit was among the first to use electricity, and by 1910 its fans, haulage and pumps were electric. Pithead baths came in 1939, so men no longer walked home wet and black from the seam.

The National Coal Board took over the mine in 1947, when it employed 789 men. By 1970 the workforce was down to 494 and working only the thin Garw seam, no more than 30 inches thick. Coal winding at the shaft stopped in 1973, when a drift mine took over. The pit closed on 2 February 1980 with the loss of more than 250 jobs.

The museum

The Big Pit (Blaenavon) Trust opened the site to the public in 1983. In 2001 it joined the national museum of Wales, now Amgueddfa Cymru. It is part of the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape World Heritage Site. The underground tour is led by a former miner and takes visitors 300 feet down through the original workings.

What the ghost stories say

Earlier versions of this page described a crowded haunting. Guides saw cap lamps moving in sealed areas. Visitors heard picks on coal, trams on rails and men talking in Welsh accents. A Victorian supervisor with a ledger appeared by the winding gear. Knocking came from behind a wall where trapped men had died. The pithead baths filled with phantom voices and the smell of coal dust. The page said much of this centred on a roof collapse in 1968 that killed several men.

We searched for all of this. We found no account of any of these ghosts in a book, a newspaper, a museum publication or the main British ghost catalogues. The italic quotes from guides, staff, a cleaner and visitors had no names and no sources. We also found no record of a fatal roof collapse at Big Pit in 1968. Men certainly died at Big Pit over its working life, as at every deep mine in South Wales, but we could not confirm that event. We have removed it, along with the ghost stories built on it.

Mining ghosts in the valleys

There is real ghost lore from the South Wales mines, and it is worth knowing.

The Paranormal Database records a case from Blaenavon itself. In 1904 a newspaper reported that “uncanny” sounds were unnerving local people at a colliery, and smashed and removed windows were blamed on a ghost. A related entry describes houses on Darkfield Terrace in November 1904 having windows smashed or taken out. Some blamed a person. Others blamed a spirit, because the culprit was never seen. Neither entry names Big Pit.

The writer Mark Rees, who studies Victorian Welsh ghost reports, has quoted an account from 1894 of a belief among Welsh miners. They held that the spirit of anyone killed in a pit stayed near the spot until the body was buried. That was one reason work stopped in a district after a fatal accident, with the men coming up and not going back down until after the funeral.

The best-known haunted mine in Wales is not Big Pit but Morfa Colliery at Port Talbot. Explosions killed men there in 1858, 1863 and 1870, and 89 people died in 1890. Before the 1890 disaster, according to the press reports Rees has collected, men spoke of noises like distant thunder and air doors slamming, and some left the pit because of “visions.” At the inquiry, witnesses said the men had asked for an inspection because they believed there were spirits in the mine. In 1896 a paper reported that six ghosts of miners killed in an explosion were wailing and knocking in the workings.

How to read it

Big Pit is a real, well-documented mine, and a powerful place to visit. Its ghosts, as described on this page before, seem to have been invented for it. They have no dates, no names and no sources.

That does not make the mine any less haunted in the older sense of the word. A deep pit is full of strange noises. Water drips, timber and rock creak and settle, and air moves through the roadways. In total darkness the mind fills the gaps. Welsh miners built a real tradition of omens and spirits from those conditions. Visitors who want ghost lore will find it in the stories of the valleys. Visitors who want the pit itself will find it underground.

We class the haunting as unverified.

Visiting

Big Pit National Coal Museum is in Blaenavon, Torfaen, near Pontypool. Check the museum’s website for opening times and tour booking.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Big Pit National Coal Museum - history of the working pit, the 1881 inspector’s report, the 1878 deepening, workforce figures, the 1980 closure and the museum
• Visit Wales, Big Pit National Coal Museum - the underground tour, led by a real miner, 300 feet down
• The Paranormal Database, Gwent (entries #13775 Smashing, Blaenavon Colliery, and #14495 Glass Smashing, Darkfield Terrace) - the 1904 Blaenavon reports
• Mark Rees, “The Pit of Ghosts: Exploring the Haunted Mines of Victorian Wales”, #FolkloreThursday, 4 January 2018 - the 1894 miners’ belief and Morfa Colliery