A PRESENT DAY PHANTOM FUNERAL.
A young man who lives in the Gwaun Valley, between Pontfaen and Fishguard informed me in the beginning of November, 1905, that he had just seen a phantom or a spirit funeral only a few weeks previously.
A friend of his, a young porter at a Railway Station in the neighbourhood of Cardiff, had come home ill to his native place in Pembrokeshire, and his friend, my informant, one night sat up by his bedside all night. About three o’clock in the morning the patient was so seriously ill that my informant in alarm hurried to call the father of the poor sufferer to come to see him, as the old man lived in a small cottage close by. As soon as he went out through the door into the open air, to his great astonishment he found himself in a large crowd of people, and there was a coffin resting on some chairs, ready to be placed on the bier; and the whole scene, as it were, presented a funeral procession, ready to convey the dead to the grave. When the young man attempted to proceed on his way, the procession also proceeded, or moved on in the same direction, so that he found himself still in the crowd. After going on in this manner for about a hundred yards, he managed to draw one side from the crowd and soon reached the house of his sick friend’s father, and nearly fainted. Three days after this vision the seer’s friend died; and on the day of the funeral the young man noticed that the crowd stood in front of the house and the coffin resting on chairs exactly as he had seen in the apparition. I may add that my informant who had seen the phantom funeral was so terrified even at the time when I saw him, that he was too much afraid to go out at night. It so happened that I was staying in that part of Pembrokeshire at the time, so I went to see the man myself, and a clergyman accompanied me.
AN APPARITION!
I obtained the following account of a phantom funeral from the Rev. John Phillips, Vicar of Llancynfelyn, North Cardiganshire. The scene of the story was Cilcwm, Carmarthenshire:—