A LLANGATHEN TALE.
The following appeared in “Apparitions in Wales” by Rev. Edmund Jones, and it is a story of long ago:
“Some years ago one Jane Wyat, my wife’s sister, being nurse to Baronet Rudd’s three children, and his Lady being dead, his house-keeper going late into a chamber where the maid servants lay, saw five of these lights together: while after that chamber being newly plastered, a great grate of coal fire was kindled therein to hasten the drying of it. At night five of the maid servants went there to bed as these were wont, and in the morning were all found dead, and suffocated with the steam of the new tempered lime and coal.”
This was at Llangathen, in Carmarthenshire.
THE CORPSE BIRD.
The most common death prognosticator throughout Wales in the present day is a peculiar bird known as “Deryn Corph” (Corpse Bird)—a bird flapping its wings against the window of the room in which there is a sick person. This was considered an omen of death. Even in the present day most people dread to see or hear a bird flapping its wings against the window when there is a sick person in the house; but every bird is not a corpse bird.
An old woman in Pembrokeshire, Miss Griffiths, Henllan, near Eglwyswrw, told me this bird is a little grey one and that it came flapping against her own window before the death of her father, and also before the death of each of her three uncles.
I have met with people in almost every district throughout the country who have heard the flappings of this mysterious bird before a death.