An elderly woman living in a grand 17th-century house has left people horrified by revealing she’s never washed her bedding.
Cornelia Bayley, who is a retired antiques dealer bought the Grade I listed Jacobean mansion ‘Plas Teg’ in Flintshire, North Wales, for £70,000 in 1985.
She has since poured tens of thousands of pounds into preserving the aesthetic of the 10-bedroom house.
Cornelia, in 2013, appeared on Channel 4’s Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners: Country House Rescue and enlisted cleaning addicts Hayley and Dan to help.
‘200 years ago there’d have been 20 or 30 people looking after the house, now there’s just me and the cat,’ she said.
After greeting the duo, she took them upstairs and made a shocking confession.
She told them: ‘This is where you’ll be staying – this room and the room downstairs are the two most haunted rooms in the house, so you might get a visitor.’
Hayley gasped as she walked into the dark room filled with musty smell and asked: ‘Cornelia, when was the bedding last washed in here?’
‘Never,’ the house owner replied and Hayley wondered if she has ever cleaned the mattresses, to which Cornelia said: ‘Of course not!’
At this point, Dan chimed in and wondered: ‘How old is the mattress?’
‘It could be a 100 years old or something. You know, this is how people used to live years ago and I still live like that,’ she admitted.
‘The house means so much to me because I’m a collector.
‘I almost think furniture and things are as important as people, you see.
She conditioned Hayley and Dan to only use soap and water to clean everything in the house, adding: ‘I hate modern smells and I hate things that make rooms smell nice.
‘I think they are ghastly. I don’t like products used, I like a bit of dust anyway,’ she concluded.
