Once upon a time it was risky to walk at twilight along a lane that led to a graveyard
By Richard Holland
We complete our discussion of the gloomy subject of death omens with another commonly reported apparition, especially from Wales and Ireland – the phantom funeral.
This portent takes two forms: either the shadowy spectre of a funeral procession, or the sounds of such a procession. In either case they warn of a real funeral that is shortly to occur in the parish and, in the case of a visual apparition, resemble in every way the procession that is soon to take place for real. They follow the route that will be taken by the cortege and witnesses have no difficulty in recognising details such as the faces of the mourners.
In Ireland, and parts of the South Wales, they were known as ‘fairy funerals’ because it was believed the appearance was created by the fairies as a warning to the neighbourhood. They could be quite dangerous. After dark, many superstitious people would only walk along the sides of some lanes, rather than down the middle, in case they encountered a phantom funeral – people have been trodden underfoot by the relentless tread of the ghostly mourners.
I uncovered many reports of these grim apparitions when researching my ‘Haunted Wales’, but I did not include many in that book for fear of trying the reader with repetition. There now follows a good example which I did not use, one of several which centre on an old chapel at Bethesda ar Fro, in the Vale of Glamorgan. According to Marie Trevelyan in her ‘Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales’ (1909), the chapel had a reputation for this phenomenon.
An old lady told Trevelyan all about an adventure she had at Bethesda in or about the year 1871. It was quite late and she saw dim lights burning in the chapel and a crowd approaching. A moment later she found herself jostled ‘unmercifully’ by a mass of mourners. She struggled to get through them, eventually reaching the chapel gates. But her adventure was far from over, for here she was startled by the sight of a huge white dog chasing after a piebald pony, which was kicking and rearing in terror. The crowd surged back out of the frantic pony’s way, and the woman took advantage of the sudden gap to make her escape, running as fast as she could past the chapel. She was horrified, however, to feel stones hurled after her as she did so. By the time she reached her friends’ house at Boverton, she was so overcome that she fainted.
Naturally she told all her friends about her experience, and the details were so striking that they remembered them three weeks later when they were all called upon to attended a funeral at Bethesda. Everything came true. A big white dog snapped at a piebald pony, sending it careering through the crowd, scattering some newly laid stones as it did so. The stones hit the woman.
Similar apparitions from England are rare, however. A A MacGregor, who provided the interesting stories regarding corpse candles in Scotland (see Death Lights), recounts one interesting story from Norfolk, which bears some relation. According to an informant of MacGregor’s, a Mr Arthur Longe, Spixworth Hall, near Norwich, was haunted by several ghosts. Longe himself saw the apparition of a night-watchman who continued to do his rounds, checking everything was well with the hall, centuries after his death. Unfortunately, the old house fell into disrepair and was demolished in 1950, so the poor spook must now be unemployed – unless he does the round of the many holiday cottages converted from Spixworth’s outbuildings.
But I digress. The story which interests us here concerns a phantom hearse which on certain nights could be seen and heard coming up the drive. Writes MacGregor: ‘A sister-in-law of the family, disturbed by its approach one night, claimed to have seen it from her bedroom window, and to have heard distinctly the clop-clop of the horses’ hooves, and the crunching of wheels upon the gravel drive. A succession of such nocturnal manifestations so alarmed the servants from time to time that they would not stay.’
Unlike other phantom funerals, the Spixworth hearse does not appear to have been an omen – the only effect it had was to disturb the rest of the owners and upset the servants. As an aside, I notice on the map of the area round Spixworth that there is a White Woman Lane – another ghost to add to the roster?
[SOURCES: Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories by Marie Trevelyan, p. 188-9; The Ghost Book by A A MacGregor p. 167]
© Richard Holland 2008
