The corpse candle, canwyll corff, was the most widely reported death omen in south Wales: a small light, sometimes described as a candle flame without a candle, seen moving from a house along the road to the churchyard, tracing the path of a funeral yet to come. Its size and colour were said to show whether the person due to die was a child or an adult.
Marie Trevelyan was told by an old man that he remembered one autumn in particular, when he was a little boy, because of the stories going round Bridgend. Numerous corpse candles were being seen on the roads that led to the various burial places in the town. He was young, but old enough to know that people were seeing a great many of them. One night he overheard his father telling an older brother that not fewer than "six candles, two abreast" had come out of a neighbour's house and gone towards the east.
That winter smallpox swept through the district and carried off large numbers of people. In the old man's memory, the candles had been counting them in advance.
No year is given. Smallpox epidemics hit Glamorgan's towns repeatedly in the first half of the nineteenth century, which fits the old man's age when Trevelyan was collecting.
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