Before Liverpool turned the valley into a lake, one of the wicked spirits that plagued Llanwddyn was the goblin called Ysbryd Cynon. A conjuror known as Dic Spot put it down, shut it into a quill, and pushed the quill under a great stone in the river below the farm of Cynon Isaf. The stone was called Carreg yr Ysbryd, the Ghost Stone. The spirit was to stay under it until the water worked its way between the stone and the dry land. Another version in the parish said until the river dried up. Dic Spot, as Elias Owen remarked, had not foreseen the people of Liverpool.
The stone, fifteen or twenty tons of it, stood in the Vyrnwy at the very mouth of the valley, just where the dam was to be built. The engineers diverted the river into a new channel to clear the old bed, and the Welsh people of the valley noticed that both conditions of the spirit's release had now been met. English and Irish navvies had heard the story too, but they were not worried.
The stone was drilled and packed with dynamite. The first blast did not shatter it; a block about four feet square stayed whole, and the spirit, if it was anywhere, was under that. The men broke it up. When the smoke cleared, the water in the hollow where the stone had been began to move, for no reason anyone could see. The Welsh workmen backed off, watching. Then a large frog climbed out, sat up on a fragment of the stone, and rubbed its eyes with its front feet as if waking from a long sleep. Who ever saw a frog sit up and rub the dust out of its eyes, the men asked. It must be the spirit. Nobody would go near it until it had been driven off, and for nights afterwards, Owen says, the workmen were uneasy.
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