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Welsh Folk-Lore a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales An Evil Spirit in Llandysilio Church, Montgomeryshire.The history of this Spirit’s proceedings is given in Bye-Gones, Vol. ii, p. 179, and the writer’s fictitious name is Gypt. “This church,” says Gypt, “was terribly troubled by a Spirit in times gone by, so I was informed by a person who took me over the church, and, being curious to hear the story, my guide related the following:— “To such extremes had things come that it was resolved to send for a well known and expert person to lay the Spirit. But the Spirit nearly overcame the expert, and the fight continued hard and fast for a long time. The ghost layer came out often for fresh air and beer, and then was plainly seen, from his bared arms and the perspiration running down his face, that there was a terrible conflict going on within the church. At last success crowned the effort, and the Spirit, not unlike a large fly, was put into a bottle and thrown into a deep pool in the River Verniew, where it remains to this day, and the church was troubled no more.” Gypt adds:—“As a proof of the truth of the story, my informant showed me the beams which were cracked at the time the Spirit troubled the church.” In these tales we have a few facts common to them all. An Evil Spirit troubles the people, and makes his home nightly in the church, which he illuminates. His presence there becomes obnoxious, and ultimately, either by force or trickery, he is ejected, and loses his life, or at least he is deposited by his captors in a lake, or pool of water, and then peace and quietness ensue. There is a good deal that is human about these stories when stripped of the marvellous, which surrounds them, and it is not unreasonable to ask whether they had, or had not, a foundation in fact, or whether they were solely the creations of an imaginative people. It is not, at least, improbable that these ghostly stories had, in long distant pre-historic times, their origin in fact, and that they have reached our days with glosses received from the intervening ages. They seem to imply that, in ancient times, there was deadly antagonism between one form of Pagan worship and another, and, although it is but dimly hinted, it would appear that fire was the emblem or the god of one party, and water the god of the other; and that the water worshippers prevailed and destroyed the image, or laid the priest, of the vanquished deity in a pool, and took possession of his sacred enclosures. It was commonly believed, within the last hundred years or so, that Evil Spirits at certain times of the year, such as St. John’s Eve, and May Day Eve, and All Hallows’ Eve, were let loose, and that on these nights they held high revelry in churches. This is but another and more modern phase of the preceding stories. This superstitious belief was common to Scotland, and everyone who has read Burns has heard of Alloway Kirk, and of the “unco sight” which met Tam o’ Shanter’s eye there, who, looking into the haunted kirk, saw witches, Evil Spirits, and Old Nick himself. Thus sings the poet:—
But in Wales it was believed that a Spirit—an evil one—certainly not an Angel of Light, revealed, to the inquisitive, coming events, provided they went to the church porch on Nos G’lan Geua’, or All-Hallows’ Eve, and waited there until midnight, when they would hear the Spirit announce the death roll for the coming year. Should, however, no voice be heard, it was a sign that no death would occur within the twelve succeeding months. A couple of tales shall suffice as illustrative of this superstition. |
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