Bethesda'r Fro is a small Calvinistic Methodist chapel in the countryside between St Athan and Boverton, and Roger's Lane is the byway that joins it to St Athan. In the nineteenth century both had a reputation for phantom funerals, the processions of the not-yet-dead that Welsh people believed could be seen or heard before a real burial took the same road.
The first story Trevelyan gives is set "long years ago". A man was walking through Roger's Lane after dark in late autumn when he heard people singing a funeral hymn in the distance. Then, from the opposite direction, came the sound of a different hymn. Soon he found himself in a crowd, and realised he was caught between two funerals, one on its way to St Athan and the other to Bethesda. There was difficulty getting past, and one procession had to wait for the other. He felt crushed and oppressed as he pushed his way out, and hurried on ahead of the Bethesda procession. Past the chapel he looked back and saw the funeral going into the graveyard. Some time later he was asked to attend a funeral that had to go by Roger's Lane to St Athan. Halfway along it met a funeral coming from St Athan, the two had trouble passing, two different hymns were sung, and he felt the same crushing weight as before. "All was verified to the letter," he said.
The second came from an old woman who dated it to about 1871. She had stayed late with friends, and it was dusk on a September evening when she passed Picketston. Near the chapel she saw a crowd coming, and dim lights burning inside the chapel windows. Summoning her courage she walked on, and found herself pushed and jostled "unmercifully" by a very large crowd. At the chapel gates a huge white dog ran in front of a piebald pony, which reared and kicked so that the crowd surged back. She took her chance and ran past, and stones came flying after her. She ran all the way to Boverton and fainted in the first house by the bridge.
Her friends noted what she said about the dog and the pony. Three weeks later there was a funeral at Bethesda, which they attended. A big white dog ran in among the mourners and set a farmer's piebald pony rearing, and in the confusion the stones newly laid on the road were scattered, several of them hitting her.
Trevelyan also mentions a farmer who heard a Welsh funeral hymn at first light, saw a procession stop at a house at the west end of St Athan, and three months later saw a neighbour's son, who had died in Cardiff, brought home past the church in the early morning and buried from that house.
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