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Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales

Chapter 101: SPIRIT OF A LIVING WOMAN SEEN ON A MOONLIGHT NIGHT, NEAR LLANYBRI IN CARMARTHENSHIRE.
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About This Book

A compilation of folk beliefs, tales, and customs gathered across western and mid-Wales from elderly informants and local tradition. It presents translated Welsh narratives and organized material on fairies, mermaids and water‑horses, ghosts, witches and wizards, omens, animal superstitions, and popular spells, alongside accounts of wedding, birth, funeral, inheritance and sheep‑shearing customs, divination practices, augury, and prophecies. The emphasis is on literal fidelity to oral testimony and on preserving vanishing traditions rather than offering theoretical interpretation.

SPIRIT OF A LIVING WOMAN SEEN ON A MOONLIGHT NIGHT, NEAR LLANYBRI IN CARMARTHENSHIRE.

A woman named Mrs. M. Davies, who lives in the small village of Llanybri, in Carmarthenshire, informed me that her mother when a young woman, was going home one evening to Llanybri, on a moonlight night. As she walked along, to her great surprise, she saw an old woman known in the neighbourhood as Rachel Y Gweydd, or the weaver, sitting by the roadside and busily engaged in knitting a stocking. The young woman ran home as fast as she could and told her mother what she had seen. “Och y fi” said her mother, “something strange is sure to take place after this.” Within a few days a man named Thomas Davies, of Cwmllan-wybryn, died, and was buried at the Capel Newydd. As the funeral procession passed along, there was Rachel Y Gweydd sitting by the roadside, and knitting her stocking at the very same spot where her spirit had been seen by the young woman on the moon-light night. The old woman had gone to sit by the roadside in order to watch the funeral procession passing.

A sister of the above Mrs. Davies, Mrs. Weekes, of Llangynog, also gave me the following account of her mother’s experience of seeing “Yspryd dyn byw.”