Hairy and scary

The latest article in the 'Weird Creatures' section of Uncanny UK is about Woodwoses: wild, hairy people who feature in medieval myth. Some think they may be a race memory of pre-Homo sapiens homonids still to be found living in deep, remote forests when prehistoric man first began his intensive cultivation of the British Isles.

Apparitions of hairy, half-humans are occasionally reported to this day. In the Uncanny UK article I refer to such a case reported from North Wales a few years ago but this will have to wait until I've interviewed the witnesses and made sure they are happy for me to quote them. In the meantime, though, here is an interesting little story from Elias Owen's 'Welsh Folklore' of 1896 that may have some bearing on the phenomenon:

'Richard Roberts, Coederaill, Bylchau, when a young man, worked in Flintshire, and instead of going to a place of worship on Sunday he got into the habit of wandering about the fields on that day. One fine autumn Sunday he determined to go a-nutting. He came to a wood where nuts were plentiful, and in a short time he filled his pockets with nuts but perceiving a bush loaded with nuts, he put out his hand to draw the branch to him, when he observed a hairy hand stretching towards the same branch. As soon as he saw the hand he was terribly frightened, and without turning round to see anything further of it, he took to his heels, and never afterwards did he venture to go a-nutting on Sunday' (p. 152).

Mr Roberts was convinced that the Devil had come to him for not attending church (there are many tales of apparitions appearing to frighten 'Sabbath-breakers' into mending their ways) but his rector tried to convince him 'that a monkey was in the bush'.

Perhaps it was a 'manimal', or the spectral appearance of one. Or perhaps it was just some unfortunate, homeless individual living wild - the origin, I suspect of many other accounts, and accounts of werewolves, too.

To read more about Wild Men of the Woods, visit: www.uncannyuk.co.uk/article.php?id=51

Haunted Anglesey

The latest true ghost story on Uncanny UK has been taken from the book 'Haunted Anglesey' by Bunty Austin. The weird encounter described actually took place in Scotland, not Wales, but was told to Bunty by an Anglesey resident.

It's ironic that in my 'Haunted Wales' book (which appears to be currently unavailable, much to my annoyance), I state that ghost stories from this ancient and magical isle are remarkably thin on the ground. Well, that remains true for the pre-War stories on record, anyway. But Bunty, who has lived on Anglesey for many, many years, has succeeded in gathering a considerable collection of superb first-hand accounts of ghosts from Ynys Mon,as well as some historical sightings. 'Haunted Anglesey' is the sort of book we should have for every county in Wales - indeed the whole of the UK - a volume of previously unfamilar stories collected over many years from the witnesses themselves.

As far as current hauntings are concerned, Anglesey appears to be a very scary place indeed! When I was writing my 'Wales of the Unexpected' column in the 'Daily Post', most of the first-hand accounts of ghosts I received came from readers came in Anglesey. These are now gathered together in the book 'Wales of the Unexpected' - check out the strangling horror of Lofft Pinc!

'Haunted Anglesey' by Bunty Austin is published by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch (ISBN 0-86381-883-8). 'Wales of the Unexpected' by Richard Holland is also published by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch (ISBN 1-84527-008-8)

For more accounts of ghosts from around Britain, visit www.uncannyuk.co.uk

The Carmarthenshire Ghost train

The most recent ghost story on Uncanny UK concerns a poltergeist that caused mayhem in an old farmhouse near St Asaph over the Christmas period of 1812. I took the story from a manuscript letter that describes the disturbances first-hand. The exceedingly rare nature of this source material makes it a favourite of mine and I have mentioned it in many of my books as well as on the Uncanny UK website.

Another recent article describes a few 'ghost trains', apparitions of locomotives that have long since shunted into the Great Beyond. Briefly, I mention a phantom train that was seen in Carmarthenshire. This ghost was recorded by the folklorist J C Davies, who got it first-hand from the witness, 'an old man named James'. Here I repeat the story verbatim from his book 'Folklore of West and Mid Wales', which was published in 1911:

'Some years ago when he [James] happened to be out about midnight once, he saw a train passing, which came from the direction of Carmarthen, and went towards Llandilo, and as no train was to pass through the station of Nantgaredig at that hour, he enquired of the Stationmaster next morning what was the special train that passed at midnight. In reply he was told he had been either dreaming or had seen the spirit of a train, as no train had passed at that time of night.
'A few days after this a special train passed through the station conveying a large funeral from Carmarthen to Llandilo; and James and his friend were convinced that the train he had seen in the night was nothing but an apparition of the real train with the funeral!'

James's belief was that the ghost train had taken the form of a - for then - hi-tech version of the phantom funerals that commonly reported as shuffling through Welsh lanes at twilight to warn of real funerals to come.

To read about the Christmas poltergeist, please visit: http://www.uncannyuk.co.uk/article.php?id=47 ; to read more about phantom trains: http://www.uncannyuk.co.uk/article.php?id=46 ; and to read more about phantom funerals, visit: http://www.uncannyuk.co.uk/article.php?id=22

Odd coincidences still intrigue

Since writing the previous Haunted Wales blog, I have cause to mention the Johnson family again but this time in my Uncanny UK blog at http://uncannyuk.blogspot.com

The story ties in with an article I've written for the More Uncanny section which is accessible to Registered Readers at www.uncannyuk.co.uk (it's free to register and all you have to do is fill in your email address and choose a password).

The article revives two stories I originally uncovered in the obscure old journal called 'Bye-gones', which has proved an absolute treasure trove of ghosts, folklore and weird incidents from Wales and the border counties. Both stories feature men who experienced a dream so vivid that it forced them to take action, thereby saving a complete stranger to them from imminent death.

One of the stories features a minister who nearly drowned when overtaken by the rising tide in the Dee Estuary and the other a young girl who nearly suffocated in the cellar of a house in Welshpool, Montgomeryshire.

Return of the ghost of Ty Gwernen

In 1992, my book 'Haunted Clwyd' included a story from Gwernymynydd, in Flintshire. Ty Gwernen, a lovely old house on the hillside overlooking Mold, was lovingly restored by Dave and Ann Johnson and is still their home, although their three sons Daniel, Matthew and Edward have now found homes of their own.

In 1990 the boys were all in their teens. Matthew told me that one evening he had been frightened by the sight of 'a horrible face' peering in through his bedroom window. He said it was 'very wrinkled, ugly and, in my frightened state it also looked very evil'.

Coincidentally, a few hours after telling of his experience, he went home to discover younger brother Edward in a state of shock after seeing a ghost. Matt phoned me up from Ty Gwernen that night and put Ed on to me.

Ed told me: 'I was on my own in the house watching television in the sitting room when suddenly this old woman walked into the room. She was very old and white haired, with a thin face. She walked into the middle of the room and stood in front of the fire, staring at the wall.

'It was terrifying, she was just a few feet in ront of me. But she didn't seem to be aware of me at all. After a few monents, she slowly disappeared. I've spent the rest of the night hiding in the kitchen!'

Eldest brother Daniel admitted to hearing mysterious tappings and scratchings in an upstairs room but had never seen a ghost. Neither had Dave or Ann, who naturally played the incident down and assumed an air of healthy scepticism.

Seventeen years later, however, and the ghost has been seen again - this time by Dave. When Matthew got married on November 17 (to the lovely Emma), the whole family came home and Dave wasted no time in telling me that his own doubts of the ghost of Ty Gwernen had been dispelled by the 'seeing is believing' rule.

Dave told me that earlier in the year, he had been repairing a set of glass sliding doors overlooking the garden and which filled the original entrance to the building. He had been steadily, quietly working away for a while but then looked up to glimpse an elderly lady watching him. She seems to have been the same figure seen by Edward back in 1992. She too vanished on being spotted.

'I think she was just seeing what I was up to,' said Dave. 'Making sure she was happy with what I was doing to her old home.'

It is true that building work often brings ghosts 'out of the woodwork'!

(The picture reproduced here from 'Haunted Clwyd' shows Matthew and Edward standing outside Ty Gwernen - at the very spot where their father Dave saw the ghost this year. 'Haunted Clwyd' is still in print and published by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch).

Alien Big Cats on the prowl

One of the two articles recently uploaded on www.uncannyuk.co.uk gives a brief outline of the so-called Alien Big Cats that are so often reported prowling round the countryside.

Almost every county in Britain seems to have had reports of people glimpsing panthers, pumas or whatever they might be in the fields and hills. My own small county of Flintshire is no exception.

A few years ago I was talking to a young chap called Callum who told me he had seen a strange animal one evening in his home village of Cymau. Cymau is very much a rural village, on a B-road from the main road connecting the towns of Mold and Wrexham. It is in a fairly wild corner of pastoral Flintshire, surrounded by wooded hills.

Callum told me that he and a few friends were walking along a path that skirts 'the park', an open area in the village with a few swings and a slide. It was early evening. As they walked past a house, a security light came on, causing Callum to glance up to a spot where it had illuminated the top of a bank at the far end of the park.

He said: 'I saw a silhouette of some animal. It was dog-shaped but three or four feet high. The thing is, it was bounding like a cat, not running like a dog. And it was very fast: it cleared the width of the park in seconds. Then it disappeared into shadow. No one else saw it.'

This was in 2003. A year previously reports had been circulating about a big black cat spotted by several witnesses around the village of Leeswood, about eight miles from Cymau as the crow flies (or the cat bounds).

There is a string about big cats in the area on the BBC North-East Wales website, including a sighting at Alex's Pool, Leeswood by a teenager named Matthew. Matthew says: 'It was black and had a tail about one metre long, and its body was even bigger. I heard something rustling in the bushes and when I looked around there it was. It stopped and then just made its way through the trees away from me.'

Maybe it was the same animal, for big cats can cover a large territory. What intrigues me, though, is Callum's description of his creature's being 'dog-shaped', although it moved like a cat, and that he saw it at twilight. This brings us smartly into the territory of the Gwyllgi, the mysterious Black Dogs of Wales that appear to be more ghost than substance, and include the strange beast seen by Malcolm Jones at Brymbo (which is only four miles from Cymau).

Perhaps some of these black cats are actually Black Dogs, or variants of them, and not real animals at all. There are quite a few articles on Black Dogs to be found on Uncanny UK at http://www.uncannyuk.co.uk/
If you have seen what you believe to be an Alien Big Cat or a Black Dog, in Wales or elsewhere, please let me know.

Visit the Big Cat string for North-East Wales at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northeast/guides/weird/mythsandlegends/pages/panther.shtml

The Gwyllgi, Black Dogs of Welsh folklore

The second part of the 'Beast of Brymbo' story has been uploaded on Uncanny UK, with witness Malcolm Jones's account of a huge, unidentifiable animal he saw one evening in the early 1970s.

His description of this creature, seen on a lane leading into the Wrexham village, echoes those of the Gwyllgi, the mysterious dog-like apparitions of Welsh folklore. These commonly reported yet inexplicable spectres have their counterparts in England, where they go by a variety of regional names, including Padfoot, Skriker, Trash and Black Shuck. In the literature, they are usually simply referred to as Black Dogs.

In Wales, as elsewhere, they are usually described as being black in colour, with a shaggy pelt and closely resembling a dog of the mastiff breed but much larger, about the size of a calf. They are said to haunt lonely lanes at night or twilight. Mr Jones's spook has many of these characteristics, although his had a leaner outline, more like a lurcher. There are other variants throughout Wales. In the Afan and Margam district of South Wales, for example, they were described as being blood red in colour. The most grotesque is that which haunted a green lane near Llysworney in Glamorgan: this was described as having the hind-quarters of a spotted dog but the head of a man.

When I was writing my 'Wales of the Unexpected' column in the Daily Post newspaper, I received accounts from readers of two separate Gwyllgi seen on Anglesey. These accounts are reproduced in my book of the same name (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, ISBN 1-84527-008-8).

The word Gwyllgi, incidentally, first appears in a rare book, 'The Vale of Glamorgan', published in 1839. I believe the best translation of the word would be 'Dog of the Twilight'.

The are several other stories of the Black Dogs to be found on the Uncanny UK website, including one that could fly! To read more visit www.uncannyuk.co.uk
To buy a copy of 'Wales of the Unexpected' from Amazon, visit: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wales-Unexpected-Richard-Holland/dp/1845270088/ref=sr_1_1/202-3642153-2258216?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194708087&sr=1-1