On the third night there was a knocking at the window several times, and it was much louder or more violent than it had been on the two previous evenings. The tailor and the young man who was his assistant decided now to keep their eyes on the window, and as soon as they did so there was no more knocking; but the moment they ceased looking and resumed their work, the knocking was heard again. There were several young men present in the room this evening, and they heard the knocking, and even the wife heard it from another apartment of the house.
These “spirit knockings” had been now noised abroad everywhere, and amongst others who went there in order to hear them was the farmer on whose land the tailor lived. The farmer did not believe in superstition, but when he heard the knocking he was convinced that there was something supernatural about it.
On the fifth night a very loud knock at the door was heard as if some one attempted to break through; and on the sixth evening when my informant went out for a short walk he heard such noise as if two hundred horses were rushing by him.
On the seventh and eighth evenings the knocking still continued; and on the ninth evening, Thomas went out with a gun in his hand, and found that there was no one to be seen anywhere, but he heard some groaning voice in the air, and doleful wailing. The man returned to the house quite frightened.
There was no more knocking after this evening.
In the beginning of January, 1883, at the very time when these strange knockings, sound, and wailing were heard at Pen’rallt Fach cottage, a woman whose old home had been this very house before she had left her native land was dying in America; and her crying on her death-bed in that far-off land was heart-rending, when she found that she was too ill to return to Wales, to die at her old home in Cardiganshire, and to be buried with her husband, who had died before she had left for America. One Mr. Lloyd, from Newcastle Emlyn, happened to be at her death-bed in America, when she was longing in vain to die in her old home in Wales. This solves the mystery of the “spirit knockings,” and it also confirms the truth of the old belief that Death makes his presence known by knocking at the door of the relatives of friends of those he is about to strike.
LLEDRITH—WRAITH.
Lledrith is an apparition or the spectre of a person seen soon before his death or about the time he is dying.
A most remarkable tale of an apparition of this kind is given in “Ysten Sioned,” an interesting Welsh book written by the late Rev. Chancellor D. Silvan Evans, and Mr. John Jones (Ivon).