The corpse candle, canwyll corff, was the most widely believed death omen in south west Wales: a light that travelled the route a coffin would later take, from the house of the dying to the churchyard. Some of the best accounts come from Pembrokeshire, and this one has the virtue of being told in the first person by a man who says he did not believe in such things before.
Morris Griffith was schoolmaster in the parish of Pontfaen, in the Gwaun valley, and later became a Baptist preacher. Coming back one night from a place called Tre-Davydd, he reached the top of a hill and saw a great light down in the valley, very red, standing still in the road towards the church for about a quarter of an hour. It came into his head that this was a light before a burying. He hurried to the other side of the hill to get a better view and watched it go along to the churchyard, stand, go into the church, come out again, go to a particular part of the churchyard, stop a little, and vanish.
A few days later, teaching at noon, he heard a great noise over his head as if the roof of the house was coming in, but nothing was wrong in the garret. Soon afterwards the son of Mr Higgon of Pontfaen died. When the carpenter came to fetch the coffin boards, which were stored in the garret, he made exactly the same noise handling them. At the funeral the procession had to stop exactly where the light had stood, because water was running across the road and the mourners had to wait to be helped over by those in boots. The child was buried in the precise spot where Griffith had seen the light pause. The account comes down through the preacher Edmund Jones and was printed again by Wirt Sikes.
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