True vampire stories are rare in Welsh folklore, which makes this Cardiff tale stand out. Trevelyan presents it without names, from one of her informants' collections.
A man in Cardiff bought an old four-poster bedstead at a bankruptcy sale. It dated from the reign of James I, and it was handsome but very heavy. He got it for next to nothing, set it up in his best bedroom, and liked showing it to friends.
Some months later part of the floor had to be taken up in the room he and his wife usually slept in. He was away, so his wife moved into the best bedroom with their only child, a baby of four months. On the first night the baby was restless. On the second it cried out violently and she could not settle it for a long time, and in the morning she sent for the doctor, who gave something for it. The third night the baby was calmer but still uneasy. On the fourth night it screamed, and she picked it up at once. A few moments later it was dead. At its throat she saw a large mark with a red spot in the middle, from which blood was seeping. The doctor could not account for it. "It is just as though something had caught at the child's throat and sucked the blood, as one would suck an egg," he said.
Time passed and the couple had another child. This time it was the husband who slept in the best bedroom. On the first night he woke feeling something clutching at his throat, and put it down to a nightmare. The second night it happened again, and he began to worry but said nothing. On the third night he was nearly suffocated. He jumped out of bed and went to the mirror, and saw a patch of skin on his throat that looked as if it had been sucked, with blood oozing from the centre. He told a friend, who asked to sleep in the bed, and had exactly the same experience.
Someone who knew about folklore told him it was a "vampire bed". The bedstead was kept, but nobody slept in it again, and it was regarded as an "uncanny piece of furniture." Trevelyan tells it straight after the story of a "vampire chair" from elsewhere.
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