According to Morien, some time before the explosion several workmen said they had heard strange noises in the workings, and a number were so frightened that they left of their own accord and went to work in the Rhondda. It was also said that an apparition in a black oilcloth suit had come up the shaft on the cage beside a tram, and had been seen walking across the yard to the building later used as a mortuary after the explosion. After the disaster, Morien noted, one of the colliery officials dressed exactly like that had done exactly that. The Great British Ghost Tour lists the other reported signs: phantom trams, ghostly horses, corpse candles, odd smells and noises, and, most alarming of all, a Dog of Darkness, unusually red in colour, said to appear before an underground explosion and remembered as the Red Dog of Morfa.
In December 1895 the fear returned. Two men said they had heard groans from an unoccupied part of the workings, a heavy door on one of the roads was seen to open and shut by itself, and on the Sunday night a dove was found perched on a tram near the pit mouth. Doves at the pit head were widely taken as a death omen in the south Wales coalfield; Trevelyan says one was seen at Morfa before its disaster. The men refused to descend. A Government inspector, the manager, the miners' agent and eight workmen spent several hours underground and came back saying they had seen and heard nothing. One collier told Morien that ninety per cent of the men believed in the noises, and that the editor who had called them superstitious should try sitting in the dark of the workings and hearing groaning below him.
Morien was half amused, but he took the colliers seriously, and the episode shows how the memory of 1890 shaped the way the men heard their own pit. It is recorded here for that reason, not as entertainment.
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