In 2010, my cousin and I went to Wales on vacation. My family have been visiting Wales almost every year for decades, but this was my first trip (although I had been to England on my own). Whenever they go, my family always pays a visit to St Davids in southwest Wales, and they stay in a holiday cottage, which is where we stayed this time too.
The cottage, at around 500 years old, is said to be one of the oldest in St Davids. First I have to describe the layout in order for the rest of my story to make sense.
The cottage is roughly L-shaped, two stories, and built from stone, with a stone floor on the ground level and a wooden floor on the second story. A steep wooden staircase connects them right at the corner of the L. There is a bedroom on the ground floor which occupies the short arm of the L. The upstairs, which only occupies the long arm of the L, has two dedicated bedrooms and a little curtained nook which acts as a third. Both floors have their own bathrooms. My cousin and I were the only ones staying there. She has bad knees, so we agreed that she would take the ground-floor bedroom and I could have the upstairs.
Being a night owl, I was up late one night, and my cousin had already gone to bed. I was in an upstairs bedroom lying on the bed watching TV shows on youtube. My door was open and the rest of the cottage was dark and quiet.
Next thing I know I hear footsteps coming up the stairs. My first thought is that my cousin was coming up, but I dismissed that right away because the stairs would be really hard on her knees, and there was no reason for her to come up. It's not a big cottage, and she could have just called me from the foot of the stairs and I would have come down. Also, I was sure she was asleep... There was no way the footsteps came from what I was watching because, first, it wasn't the subject matter of what I was watching, and second, I muted the sound as soon as I heard something, yet the footsteps continued... Right across the second floor until stopped at my bedroom door.
Well, nothing else happened so although I was stunned, I went to bed and eventually fell asleep. I still couldn't quite believe it happened to me.
The next morning I asked my cousin if she had come upstairs in the night (though I knew it couldn't have been her, as the footsteps creaked their way right up to my door and I would have seen her standing there since the door was open). She said no, she hadn't, and why did I ask? So I told her what happened and then she told me HER experience that night:
Lying in bed, in that state between waking and sleeping, she said, she saw a man standing in the doorway of her bedroom. She described him as shortish and "hobbity-looking," wearing old-fashioned clothes. He spoke to her in Welsh but the only part she could remember sounded like "tee." (I'm a quick study language-wise so I had already learned that "ty" (pronounced "tee") means "house" in Welsh.) She had chalked it up as a dream, even though she knew she hadn't been fully asleep, until I told her my story.
Later that day, or maybe it was the next day, we were about to leave the cottage when we found the keys weren't hanging on their hook by the door. That was weird because we always left them there. We checked our pockets, we checked every room, we checked our purses, we checked the yard, we even checked inside the washing machine! For an hour we literally turned that place upside down. Finally my cousin said she was going to try her purse one more time. This time when we looked, the keys were sitting right on top. Now I am not exaggerating when I say we had both checked her purse, together and separately, at LEAST three times. Not only were the keys not there, but if they HAD been there, we would have had to go past them to get deeper into the bag. They simply had not been in her purse two minutes before.
"Ha ha, very funny," we told the ghost. "But please don't do that again." Thankfully the ghost was very obliging and didn't pester us anymore.
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