The corpse candle, cannwyll gorff, was a small light believed to travel the route a coffin would take, or to appear near someone about to die. Wirt Sikes was struck that the belief was alive on the edge of a busy seaport, and he took Caerau as his example.
In the 1870s Caerau was a small village of perhaps a hundred people at the foot of a steep hill with the earthworks of an ancient camp on top. On the summit stood the parish church, with a heavy square tower that could be seen from the streets of Cardiff, about three miles away. In the church Sikes met a talkative local woman who told him her experiences.
One night her sister was lying very ill at her house. Her husband was in the asylum in Cardiff, and she was alone with the children. She had put them to bed and set her candle on the floor before getting into bed herself, when there was a "swish" along the floor like the rustle of grave-clothes and the candle went out. Yet the room still glowed with a faint light, as from a very small taper. Looking behind her, she saw old John Richards, who had been dead ten years, holding a corpse candle and staring at her coldly. She woke her eldest boy and asked, "Don't you see old John Richards?" The boy looked, saw him, and cried out, "O wi! O Dduw! I wish I may die!" The ghost disappeared with its candle, her own candle on the floor burned brightly again, and the next day her sick sister died.
The second time, her mother-in-law was dying of cancer and asked her to sleep beside her because she was afraid. As they lay there she saw at the foot of the bed the faint flame of a corpse candle, which gave off no light at all. She stared at it, then slowly sat up and reached out to see if she could hold it. Her fingers touched it, and it went out in a little shower of pale sparks that fell downwards. At that moment her mother-in-law groaned and died.
She also told Sikes about Thomas Mathews, who used to live at Caerau and had moved to Crwys, on the other side of Cardiff. He had seen a corpse candle come out of his dying father's mouth, go to his feet and away a little, and then come back and melt into his body.
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