Phantom funerals, the toili of Welsh tradition, were among the most widely believed omens in nineteenth-century Glamorgan: a procession seen or heard at night along the route a real funeral would later take. Marie Trevelyan collected dozens of them, and this one, from the coast near Porthcawl, is one of the most striking because of how exactly the vision matched what followed.
Her informant was a man living near Porthcawl. One evening late in September he was walking home from Sker when the moon, shining on the sea, showed him the huge dark shape of a wrecked vessel lying among the rocks. He stopped to look. Then he saw a group of men lifting something from the rocks and carrying it up onto the land and on towards Porthcawl. Curious, he followed at a distance, and was startled to see the bearers halt at his own door. He hurried to catch up, but when he reached the house the men and their burden were gone.
He told his father what he had seen and begged him not to mention it to his mother. A week later a ship was wrecked on the rocks of Sker. Among those drowned was his own brother, who had been away on a two year voyage and was lost within sight of home. His body was carried to Porthcawl in the moonlight, along the same way the phantom bearers had gone.
Trevelyan does not give a year or name the ship, and the story reached her many years later from the man himself, so it cannot be checked. It is typical of how a real drowning on a dangerous coast was remembered afterwards as having been foreseen.
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