Mynydd Llanhilleth is a whaleback of moorland between the Ebbw valley and the Afon Llwyd, not large, and crossed by old tracks between Pontypool market and the valley farms. By Edmund Jones's account it was one of the most feared places in Monmouthshire, because of the old woman who walked on it.
She looked like a poor old woman going for milk: a four-cornered hat, oblong in shape, ash-coloured clothes, her apron thrown over her shoulder and a pot or wooden can in her hand. She always walked ahead of the traveller, and sometimes called "Wow up", a cry Welsh folklorists have compared to a shepherd's shout. Anyone who saw her, whether at night or on a misty day, lost their way, however well they knew the road. The ground seemed to change, so that people believed they were near home when they were going in the opposite direction. People who first saw her thought she was a real woman who knew the way and hurried after her, but they could never catch up, and she never looked back, so no one saw her face. Sometimes they heard her cry close by and then far away on the opposite mountain in Aberystruth parish.
Tradition said she was the ghost of Juan White, who had lived in those parts long ago and was thought to be a witch, because the mountain was not haunted until after her death. She was seen as far away as the Black Mountains; Robert Williams of Llangattock near Crickhowell chased her over the mountain one night until he slipped in a bog and heard her laugh at him like an old woman, and only when he happened to draw his knife did she vanish. A man she led to and fro in mist on another hill made a song complaining about her and her four-cornered hat.
Jones himself lost his way on Llanhilleth Mountain two or three times in daylight, though he knew it well, and he says it is only a mile and a half long. Once, lost, he came to a strange house, offered to pray there and was welcomed, and much good came of it, so the old hag got nothing by leading him astray that time. Another time, riding over in mist, he said aloud, "Do thy worst thou Old Devil, I will not lose my way", and did not. By his old age, he thought, the Gospel had driven her into the coal pits.
Wirt Sikes, retelling the story in 1880, records that a friend born in Monmouthshire around 1850 knew her as "Shui White", and that boys near Pontypool pointed out a ruined cottage on Lasgarn hill as her house, where she appeared at midnight carrying her head under her arm.
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