The corpse candle, canwyll corff, was usually a single light that followed the road a funeral would take. Sometimes the number mattered. Wirt Sikes gives a Carmarthenshire tradition in which it mattered very much.
The coach that ran between Llandeilo and Carmarthen was passing Golden Grove, Gelli Aur, the great house of the Earl of Cawdor in the Tywi valley, when the passengers saw three lights on the surface of the water of the stream beside the road, gliding down with the current. Every passenger saw them, and there was no one on the water to carry them.
A few days later some men were about to cross the river near there in a coracle, the little round boat of the Tywi. The river was in flood. One of them said he was frightened to venture and stayed on the bank. The others set off, and so the fatal number crossed: three men, as three candles had foretold. All three were drowned.
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