More from the Beast of Brymbo
An animal-like spectre which may have been an earlier sighting of ‘The Beast of Brymbo’
By Richard Holland
Last time I introduced a bestial apparition (if such it was) seen in Brymbo, a village in North-East Wales. On the night I spoke to two of the witnesses of ‘The Beast of Brymbo’, I also interviewed Malcolm Jones, a resident of the village who encountered something equally unearthly some years previously.
In the summer of 1971 Malcolm was walking home from visiting his girlfriend’s house in the neighbouring village of Minera. The time was about 9 o’clock and it was twilight. As he walked up a lane which led into Brymbo, the silhouette of ‘a big thing’ emerged from the hedge on his right-hand side.
‘At first I thought it might be a cow,’ said Malcolm, ‘but it wasn’t. It was the wrong shape: too tall with long, thin legs. It had a similar silhouette to our lurcher dog when you see it running along the beach. But it was a bigger animal: not as big as a cow, perhaps, but certainly bigger than a dog. It had shaggy hair. It didn’t make a sound, just stopped in the middle of the road and seemed to stare at me, although I couldn’t see its eyes. Then it lost interest and carried on walking across the lane, where it disappeared into the vegetation on the other side.
‘That’s what made it so spooky. Apart from looking weird, it didn’t behave like an ordinary animal. The way it looked at me, as if it was weighing me up. It wasn’t fazed by a human presence and most animals are. I remember I just stood in the road for a fair while after it had gone, a little afraid to carry on walking. I’m not saying it was anything supernatural; I don’t really believe in that sort of thing. But it was very strange. That’s why I’ve never forgotten it. Just talking about it now, I can feel my hairs pricking up.’
In the daylight, Malcolm examined the scene and found no gates or openings in the hedges bordering the lane, nor are there any today. There is a steep bank on the side from which the animal emerged but Malcolm says that the way it walked into the road didn’t suggest it had walked down a bank - but as if it had walked straight out of the bank. The present author has examined this bank and it appears to be of industrial origin (Brymbo had an important steel works until recently), but it would be interesting if it did, in fact, turn out to have some antiquity, for the mysterious Black Dogs of British folklore are often reported as haunting prehistoric earthworks. Malcolm’s’ ‘beast’ certainly resembled the Black Dogs, or Gwyllgi as they are known in Wales: it appeared at twilight haunting a lonely lane, it was the right size (they are commonly recorded as being ‘the size of a calf’) and it had shaggy hair (unlike the apparition seen in the village in the 1980s).
Of course, no one can say for sure whether this spook has any connection with the Beast of Brymbo. It is possible the latter was simply a rare variant of a Gwyllgi. In the 1920s, an archaeologist saw something one bright, moonlit night on a lane in Pembrokeshire, South-West Wales, which bore striking similarities to both apparitions. He described it as a ‘large black creature’, about the size of a St Bernard dog, ‘but its head and forequarters were more like a goat’s or a calf’s and it had short horns’.
[SOURCE: Personal communication with the author and ‘Haunted Wales' p. 74]
© Richard Holland 2008 / The old engraving used to illustrate this article may help show the shape in profile of a lurcher dog.
Tags: Black Dog ghost, British ghosts, Brymbo ghost, ghosts in Britain, Ghosts of Britain, ghosts of Wales, ghosts of Wrexham, Gwyllgi, Haunted Britain, haunted Wales, Havorfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Welsh ghosts, Wrexham ghosts
