Shon was working in North Wales, for he was a quarryman at the time, but he came home occasionally to spend his holidays with his wife, especially about Christmas time.
On one occasion, however, when Shan expected her husband home the day before Christmas as usual, Shon came not. Nine o'clock in the evening she went out to meet him or to search for him and to prevent him spending his money on beer at a public house which his friend, a saddler kept at Tyngraig. But her husband was not at the public house, nor was he seen anywhere, so the old woman had to return home in disappointment. It was a cloudless moonlight night, almost as light as day, but the road was lonely and the hour late, and when she had walked some distance, to her great terror, she noticed a ghost in the field making his way nearer and nearer to her till at last the strange object came to the hedge on the roadside quite close to her. Frightened as she was, she struck the ghost with the strong walking-stick which she held in her hand, saying "D----l! thou shalt follow me no longer."
When Shan struck the ghost her walking-stick went right through the head of the strange object, but she did not "feel" that it touched anything--It was like striking a fog; but the spirit vanished into nothing, and Shan walked on. The ghost was now invisible, but the old woman "felt" that it still followed her, though she could not see it; but when she was crossing a brook she became aware that her pursuer left her.
Two young women, daughters of a farmer in the parish of Llandyssul, were walking home one night from Lampeter Fair. After reaching the very field in one corner of which the house in which they lived stood, they wandered about this field for hours before they could find the building, though it was a fine moonlight night.
It seemed as if the farm house had vanished; and they informed me that they were convinced that this was the doings of the Goblin, who played them a trick.
Among the most important of the superstitions of Wales are the death portents and omens; and this is perhaps more or less true of every country. About a generation or two ago, there were to be found almost in every parish some old people who could tell before hand when a death was going to lake place; and even in the present day we hear of an old man or an old woman, here and there, possessing, or supposed to possess, an insight of this kind into the future.