The parish of Llanelian-yn-Rhos sits on the high ground above Colwyn Bay, and for most of its history its holy well was unremarkable. Pilgrims brought a groat, or bread to the same value, and asked the saint to heal a sick child. Somewhere in the 18th century the reputation turned. By the 1790s people were travelling to Ffynnon Elian not to be cured but to do harm, and the well's keeper had become a kind of agent for ill will.
The procedure, as later folklorists pieced it together, was simple and businesslike. The client named the person they wanted cursed and paid a fee. The keeper read from the Bible, gave the client water from the well to drink three times, and recorded the victim's name. Names were written in a register and on scraps of paper or slate that were dropped into the water, sometimes pinned. The victim, if they heard about it, and in a small community they usually did, would fall ill with worry. The cure was to come back to the same keeper and pay to have the name removed. It was a closed loop, and a profitable one.
The most famous keeper was John Evans, known as Jac Ffynnon Elian. When the local Methodist minister and his congregation had the well broken up around 1828 or 1829, Jac simply diverted the spring onto his own land and reopened for business. He was prosecuted and gaoled for fraud, at least once for charging people to lift curses that had never been laid, and eventually confessed publicly that the whole thing had been a sham. The trade was finished by about 1850.
What makes Ffynnon Elian unusual is how well it is documented. The court cases, the Methodist campaign against it and the recollections gathered by John Rhys and other Victorian writers mean this is not a vague legend but a real 19th century racket that frightened people genuinely. The well site today is on private land and there is little to see.
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