Grave watching was a real practice in the early 19th century, when bodysnatchers stole fresh corpses for the anatomy schools. Families paid men to sit up with a new grave for the first few nights. This story takes that ordinary custom and turns it into something much older.
At Llanishen, according to the version given by the Great British Ghost Tour, a man agreed to keep watch over a woman's freshly dug grave from inside the church. The vicar did not simply wish him a quiet night. He gave the man a Bible and drew a circle on the floor around the chair where he would sit.
Nothing happened until midnight. Then a dog appeared, a demon in the shape of a dog. It dug down to the body, skinned it and ate the flesh, leaving the skin lying beside the grave. The watcher, staying inside his circle, managed to hook the skin and draw it in to him, so that the dog could not get it back. When dawn came the dog was gone. The vicar returned and told him to burn the skin, because evil spirits used such skins to appear to the relatives of the dead and frighten them.
This is a folk tale rather than a ghost report, with no date or names, and the source does not say where it first appeared. It is one of the darker stories in the Monmouthshire collection.
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