As a rule, new bricks and mortar create an environment particularly uncongenial to a self-respecting ghost. Ivied walls, gabled roots, dim and musty passages leading to gloomy, oak-panelled rooms, supply the kind of setting that the spook of convention demands, and nobody passing a certain little house close to the road, just outside the seaside village of Aber----n would ever think of its being haunted. Built some fifteen years ago by a retired seaman named Captain Morgan, this very ordinary dwelling (of the five-windows-and-door-in-the-middle style of architecture, absolutely unrelieved by gable, porch or balcony) is certainly far from suggesting any thoughts of the uncanny. Yet I remember hearing, soon after it was built and occupied, that it was supposed to harbour a ghost, though inquiry could elicit little beyond the fact that Captain Morgan had remarked to a friend: "I don't know what it is about my house, but we do hear the queerest noises that we can't account for. We begin to think it is haunted." Then people who heard about these "noises" remembered rather a curious thing. Soon after the house was begun, while the workmen were engaged on the foundations they came across the skeleton of a man, buried in the earth, and examination revealed that the skull had a hole through the forehead. Instead of keeping these remains together, and having them interred in consecrated ground, the finders carelessly left the bones lying about until they crumbled away and were hopelessly scattered. Whether this discovery had anything to do with the disturbances of which Captain Morgan and his family complained one can but conjecture; time has long since closed the page on which is written the fate which overtook some unknown individual on that spot perhaps a century or more ago, and there is no local tradition to help one to frame a reason for any such deed of violence. However, the inexplicable sounds are no longer heard; and it is said that their cessation dates from the day of a terrible thunder-storm when the house was struck by lightning (though not much damaged), an electric disturbance which seems to have effectually laid, or at least frightened away, the ghost.
Carmarthenshire abounds in tales of ghosts and ghostly happenings. I know one house of great antiquity and historic interest in that county which possesses a spectre of most approved pattern in the person of a headless lady, who, report says, may be met walking along a certain path in the garden by an old yew-tree, at the uncomfortable hour of one in the morning. She is also supposed to account for mysterious footsteps sometimes heard in an upstairs passage. Two people of my acquaintance have heard these footfalls, and declare they are produced by no human agency. A family tradition says that dancing must never take place in the drawing-room; if it does, the ghost will surely appear among the company.