Efenechtyd is a tiny parish just south of Ruthin, with a small church that Elias Owen knew well; he lived nearby for years and many of his informants came from the parish. Rowland Williams, the old parish clerk, told him this story. He gave the name of the man it happened to, but Owen did not write it down and later forgot it.
One Sunday the man was walking to Efenechtyd church when he saw a hare crouched in its form, the shallow hollow a hare lies up in. It was not the sort of thing a man ought to do on the Sabbath, but he went back home for his gun and fired at it.
The following Sunday, on the same walk, there was a hare in the very same spot. This time it raised its head and looked at him, straight in the eye. He was frightened and hurried on to church. On the third Sunday it was there again, in the same form, and again it stared at him boldly.
That was enough. He was convinced there was something wrong about it, and after that he went a different way. Owen offered it as one of a string of hare stories from around Denbigh and Ruthin, part of the widespread belief that a hare might be a witch in disguise and that meeting one on the road was bad luck.
Owen collected other small supernatural relics in the same parish. Workmen pulling down a farmhouse called Y Bwlch gave him a tiny old clay pipe they called cetyn y Tylwyth Teg, a fairy pipe, and a Brynffynnon man found another on Coed Marchan.
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