The gwrach-y-rhibyn, sometimes translated as the hag of the dribble or mist, is the Welsh equivalent of the banshee. She comes to the windows of old families at night to screech, flap her leathery wings and call the name of the one who is to die. Wirt Sikes got one of the few first-person sightings on record, and it was at Llandaff.
In the summer of 1878, on one of his walks near Cardiff, Sikes met a respectable-looking man of the peasant-farmer class who told him this. "It was at Llandaff, on the fourteenth of last November, when I was on a visit to an old friend, that I saw and heard the Gwrach y Rhibyn. I was sleeping in my bed, and was woke at midnight by a frightful screeching and a shaking of my window." It was not so much fear he felt, he said, as excitement. He jumped out of bed, flung the window open, and saw her plainly: "a horrible old woman with long red hair and a face like chalk, and great teeth like tusks, looking back over her shoulder at me as she went through the air with a long black gown trailing along the ground below her arms, for body I could make out none."
She gave another unearthly screech, and he heard her flapping her wings against the window of a house just below the one he was in. Then she was out of sight. He kept staring into the dark, and "as I am a living man, sir," he saw her go in at the door of the Cow and Snuffers Inn, and she did not come out again, though he watched a long time.
The next day, he said, he was told that the man who kept the Cow and Snuffers had died in the night. "His name was Llewellyn, sir, you can ask any one about him, at Llandaff. He had kept the inn there for seventy years, and his family before him for three hundred years, just at that very spot. It's not these new families that the Gwrach y Rhibyn ever troubles, sir, it's the old stock."
The Cow and Snuffers still trades on Gabalfa Road in Llandaff North. The claim of seventy years in charge is the witness's own and has not been checked.
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