The Trwyn is a hill farm high above Abercarn in the valley of the Ebbw. In the 18th century it was in the large upland parish of Mynyddislwyn, and it became the home of the most famous goblin in Monmouthshire.
Edmund Jones, writing in the 1770s, heard the story from the family and was careful to say he would only repeat what he thought likely to be true. A spirit came to the house of Job John Harry at the Trwyn some time before Christmas. At first it knocked at the door by night, and the family were fooled again and again into opening it. Then it spoke to one of them at the door, and the news brought neighbours in to watch. One of them, T. E., foolishly brought a gun to shoot the spirit and sat in the corner. That night the spirit met Job in the lane and told him a man had come to shoot it, and promised to beat him. Stones flew at the man with the gun, striking him and no one else, until he had to go home late at night.
The spirit spoke rarely and mostly from the oven beside the hearth. It played music at night on Harry Job's fiddle. It once struck the cupboard with stones, leaving marks. When Job went to bed it gave him a gentle stroke on the toe; Job said "Thou art curious in smiting", and the spirit said "I can strike thee where I please". An old man threatened to stick it with his knife and was told "Thou fool, how can thou stick what thou cannot see with thine eyes?" It said it came from Pwll y Gasseg, the Mare's Pit, on the mountain. The family grew used to it and found it entertaining. On Easter Wednesday it left, saying "Dos yn iach Job" (Farewell Job), and Job answered "Where God pleases". Jones later spoke to Job's son David, who confirmed the substance of the story and said the spirit came because his brother Harry had been using magic spells.
By the time Wirt Sikes visited in the 1870s the story had become a fairy tale about a Pwca, the Welsh Puck. A servant girl used to leave Master Pwca a bowl of fresh milk and a slice of white bread. One night she drank the milk and ate most of the bread herself and left him water and crusts. Soon after, invisible hands seized her under the arms and gave her a thorough beating, with a warning in good Welsh not to do it again. Sikes also heard that the Pwca had come to the Trwyn from Pantygasseg, near Pontypool, carried in a jug of barm, or rolled there inside a ball of yarn dropped by a servant. He wrote that there was not a Welsh peasant in the parish who did not know all about Pwca'r Trwyn.
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