Newport in the 18th century was a small port town under the hill of St Woolos, and its churchyard, like many, had a charnel house where bones turned up by new burials were stacked. Two of Edmund Jones's Newport stories concern skulls taken from places like it.
The first came to him from a Mrs Morgan. Some men were drinking in a public house, two of them excise officers, the tax men who policed the smuggling trade on the Severn. One of the officers, to show he was not afraid, said he would go to the charnel house and bring back a skull, and he did. They passed it round and decided it was probably a woman's. When he took it back, a sudden wind like a whirlwind rose around him and a great terror came over him, so that he swore he would never do such a thing again. His wife told Mrs Morgan that his cane, hanging in the room, beat against the wall that same night, loudly, and she was sure no accident caused it. Jones concluded it was the spirit whose skull had been disturbed.
The second story is darker. A man in Jones's own time, whom he describes as estranged from all good, was believed to use a dead man's skull for some magical purpose. He fell ill and took to his bed, and while he lay there a man appeared to him with a skull in his hand and struck him a violent blow on the head that made his nose bleed. The household heard the blow downstairs and were terrified. He died soon after.
The public house and the church are not named. The pin is placed approximately in the old town below St Woolos.
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