A 60-year-old woman died after becoming trapped in an airing cupboard ‘for a number of days’ at a Pennal spa resort, an inquest has heard.

It happened after she arrived for a one-week stay at Plas Talgarth.

Coroner Dewi Pritchard Jones at Caernarfon said Elizabeth Mary Isherwood, of Warmsley Close, Wolverhampton, a part-time care worker, arrived alone on 23 September and knew the apartment from previous visits.

“What I believe happened is some time during the night or during the morning she had got up and gone to the bathroom,” Mr Pritchard Jones said. “From there she went to the airing cupboard.”

The door opened inwards and it closed behind her. The cupboard was a “very confined space”.

Mr Pritchard Jones said the round part of the door knob seemed to have come off the internal mechanism which was still attached to the door and she couldn’t turn the door spindle.

“Being unable to turn the lock and realising she was trapped and there was no light, at some stage she first of all pulled the shelves off. Whether she used them to try and get out, I can’t say.

“What she did do was she pulled the copper piping and a piece was broken off. This was used to try initially to open the door because there were marks on the door but also used to try and break a hole through the wall of the airing cupboard.

“I believe she knocked some of the plaster of one wall to find blocks behind.”

Mrs Isherwood managed to make a hole in another wall.

“Unfortunately on the other side of the wall was a picture. She had been able to break a hole completely through that wall but I think the presence of the picture meant she didn’t realise. She probably thought she couldn’t get out.

“My belief is what happened, being locked in the airing cupboard, happened during the night of the 23rd to 24th and more than likely during the early hours of the 24th.

“I don’t know how long she was in the cupboard.”

The coroner recorded a conclusion of misadventure because of “the sheer bad luck of the knob disintegrated while Mrs Isherwood was in the cupboard, although I can’t say why she was there.”

Home Office pathologist Dr Brian Rodgers told the coroner: “I can’t tell you when she went in that cupboard but she may well have been in there a number of days trying to get out.

Dr Rodgers declared: “The cause of her death is hypothermia. It had been accelerated by her being naked, stuck in a cupboard and sprayed by water.

“She may have been dead by the Monday. It could have been more protracted,” Dr Rodgers said.

A shocked maintenance man found her body after water poured through a ceiling.

Family members made no comment as they left the hearing on Tuesday afternoon.