Gone Medieval - Ghosts of Wales

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

Wales has a wealth of ghost stories, including fantastical animals, flickering death omens and unseen things that go bump in the night. Whether these tales are based on true events, or are the creations of active imaginations, is known only to those who have experienced them – but what is certain is that their power to delight and scare us remains undimmed. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega meets renowned folklorists Delyth Badder and Mark Norman - host of the Folklore Podcast - to talk about their book The Folklore of Wales: Ghosts, which presents a wide panorama of stories and first-hand accounts that shine a spotlight on the unique qualities of folkloric ghost beliefs in Wales.Ghost story told by Janine Cooper-Marshall.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Hear more from Mark Norman on the Folklore Podcast >Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Eleanor Janaga and in today's episode we'll be talking about folklore and whales, the social uses of supernatural stories, the motifs which make Welsh folklore special and ghost stories just like this one. Legends about hen Urach Korsvokno. She rose out of the swamp on foggy and entered houses through every obstacle that was devised to stop her. She breathed in people's faces and caused diseases. She was disturbed once while she was supping on fungus and marsh beets.

She hissed like a serpent and disappeared. She was, they say, seven feet tall and was thin and bony. She had yellow skin. and pitch black hair that curled from her enormous head to her feet, destroys her, but fire. And as she dwells in a bog that is a watery quagmire, there is no hope for her destruction other than the deluge of fire. And that would need to burn for a long time to burn her. It is thought that she dwelt in the thick fog, and that she was rarely, if ever seen, but was heard, screaming loudly, and her scream was always considered an omen of some evil that would befall the person who heard it.

She was monstrous to look upon, her sinewy arms, her long nails, her unkempt hair, her black teeth, and the deathly pallor of her whole countenance was objectively befitting of her lingering wail. which was to freeze the veins of all who heard it. To help us make sense of stories like this, I'm thrilled to be joined by Deleth Batter and Mark Norman, the authors of the absolutely unput-downable book, The Folklore of Wales Ghosts. Out now with Cowan Press. Deleth is a folklorist with an expertise in death omens and apparitions,

as well as the world's first Welsh-speaking, consulted pediatric and perinatal pathologist, which is just unimaginably cool. Mark is the founding curator of the folklore library and archive and is the host of the excellent folklore podcast, which I cannot recommend enough. Deleth and Mark, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Helena. I'm going to start you off with a question about sources because you're working with folklore. But folklore is really kind of tricky, isn't it? Like, how do we get sources from oral cultures, from traditions that have been passed down?

and what's the issue with working with that? Yeah, so in Wales, especially, it's difficult because our particular sources are quite limited in terms of dates to start with. So we don't have many early sources because, as you say, it was an oral tradition. So for the most part in Wales, you had, especially of the lower classes, Welsh-speaking, monoglots, illiterate,

the chance of you getting those stories on paper were slim to none. we only really start to see our folklore being recorded towards the tail end of the 17th century, especially with regards to ghost law. So the first ghost stories really is published by the likes of Richard Baxter, so theologians and scholars, predominantly English,

very few Welsh people recording at that time. So you've got that instant limitation there with regards to the sources and then obviously because of the people that are recording them, that then imparts another limitation. So because they're theologians, because English gentry and English scholars,

they're also imparting their own bias on those stories. So what they record isn't necessarily what that original story was. So you've got to have that understanding of the Welsh history, the Welsh culture and of the language as a baseline before you start to interpret these stories. And it gets slightly better towards the language. late 19th century and getting into the 20th century because at that point you've got what mainly local clergymen and scholars that are providing parish history accounts and that's where you start to

see that sort of regional folklore being recorded probably more accurately for the first time. So you can probably put a little bit more onus on what they're presenting, but even still, they're still clergymen, there's still men of the cloth, they're still presenting those stories in a sort of fairly cynical fashion. So yeah, you've got to be quite careful. There's a few pitfalls when you're looking at Welsh ghost law in particular. But of course, it's worth pointing out as well. That's not just a negative thing either,

because folklore, of course, is a subset of social history generally. So as long as you go in with an understanding of the bias behind these accounts, then actually they help you to paint a picture of the social history of the area from which these stories are emerging. And in terms of Wales, Deleth would agree. This is really important because Welsh social history, Welsh history generally doesn't have the greatest representation. And outside of the borders of Wales, it's just that.

It's that word, Wales. This story might come from North Wales, South Wales, a particular village, be confined to one very small area. But to any of the English-speaking world, it's a ghost that. comes from Wales and that's it. Yeah, there's this kind of inbuilt snobbishness, isn't there? There's this flattening of the sources of just, oh, well, here's some Welsh person and they said this.

And it's like, well, it could be days worth of travel apart. This could be one really unique and interesting story. This reminds me a lot of just sort of like any sources that we use from the medieval period as well, you know, like as a social historian. It's like, well, yeah, who writes things down? Members of the church, right? Because these are the people who are literate. these are the people who have time and who have the interest.

So no matter what, you're always kind of squinting, you know, kind of trying to look through these biases. But I think that you have so much more on top of that when you're working with a culture like Wales, which people have a tendency to, I don't know, I kind of try to think of the word like, talk about it in a twee way. You know, like, oh, Wales, isn't that adorable?

And not like, oh, well, this is a really interesting and complex culture. But people talk about folklore generally in a twee way, because people have a misunderstanding across the board as to what folklore is. Some people think that folklore as a term is essentially those weird, superstitious beliefs of the uneducated rural people that has no relevance in society and is just curious. And of course, we all know that it's not. Folklore emerges every day. We all interact with it every day.

we all create new folklore every day. It's the 21st century. It's still hugely relevant. And people don't always see it that way. They see it as that curious old belief that if you rub a snail on a water and then hang it from a tree, then you'll get better. There's far more than that. Okay, so we're talking about this really rich history of stories that get traded. But when we talk about ghosts, what do we mean here?

because one of the first things I was really surprised with in the book is that for Welsh people, ghosts are not just dead people. You can have ghosts that are, you know, apparitions of the living. So how are we defining this even in this context? I think to define it is probably a very slippery slope. In terms of Welsh ghost law, in particular, we've got several motifs that are extremely prominent. one of them is the Ghost of the Living, but that's not just a Welsh thing. If you look at England during the Victorian period,

and the Ghost of the Living is one of the most popular types of ghosts that is recorded during that time as well. So it's not like that's hugely different for us. It's just that it was very much spoken about as a matter of fact. Or we saw old Mrs. Jones down the road the other day. She was definitely in bed during that time sort of thing. So it is presented as a matter of fact. thing in a lot of Welsh accounts.

But I've got multiple other motifs that do set us apart. Actually, a lot of these motifs are probably going to be quite familiar to you as a medieval historian. So things like ghosts being reported as these abstract shapes, lots of sort of ghosts in animal form. They do park back to that sort of medieval time. It's very interesting. Those motifs have persisted in Wales and actually are still here today.

So those weird phenomena still being reported today, wheels and balls of fire, that sort of things and lots of animal ghosts. But in the same way as a lot of the sources are quite difficult to interpret. We do have that Trump card in Wales in the Reverend Edmund Jones. So he was a non-conformist minister who was recording during the late 18th century. So he's essentially collected these motifs that actually have then, carried on throughout our history of ghost law in Wales. So he's really the first person who presents these sort of wheels and balls of fire. And a quarter of his accounts are all ghosts that appear in animal form.

And yes, there's that bias because he was a member of the clergy. But actually, it's the first time we've got ghost law presented on a regional level. But again, with him, it's really interesting because the people that he looked up to are people like Richard Baxter and Joseph Glanville and those people who were recording those ghost stories, like a whole century before he started. So you've got that sort of gap there then, where you think, why is he reporting these in this way now so late on compared to his predecessors? So yeah, it's very fascinating.

Do you know, as folklorists, there are two main groups of people to which we have to be hugely thankful for the majority of our historical documentation. Edwardian and Victorian antiquarian clergyman, who obviously had nothing to do six days of the week, apart from the Sunday service, and middle to upper class ladies of the middle of the 20th century, who collected a lot of this material. And those are the two key sets of people

without whom folklore as a discipline would be so much poorer. Yeah, I think when last year I made for History Hit a show about medieval ghosts, and the number of recordings that we have from kind of, as you're saying, ladies from the early 20th century, you know, who are like, oh, I've married into this castle and now I'm recording the 50 ghosts that live here. You know, things like that are such amazing sources. And then they have these roots that go back and back and back. And the stories have been being told by everyone who lives there since the 14th century.

but it just takes, you know, someone with time and interest to finally get it down on paper. But isn't it wonderful that happened? Because when you look back to the earlier period, women were painted out of most of that side of things. The number of female antiquarian scholars can be counted on the fingers of not very many hands, pre-late 19th century probably. There are notable exceptions, but on the whole, it's the well-to-do upper-class white male collector. This brings me to one of my questions for you. I'm quite interested in sort of the way that ghosts kind of show up in these gendered motifs. Can you tell us a little bit about the white lady?

It's a universally recognised motif, isn't it? It's hugely popular in Wales. Wales, by no means, is any different to any of the other countries in the United Kingdom or outside. So there's been some move to try and sub-classify her. So I know Mark and I spoke about Jane C. Beck's paper in the book about trying to talk about her as either a lady wen, a white lady, which was meant to come back to haunt an area where a particularly violent event had happened, or the Donest Melguin, the lady in white, which was more of your sort of revenant figure. But actually, when you look at the accounts that have been collected from folk, that classification doesn't. really exist so much in the same ways there's been a lot of talk about her in some respects representing a facet of fairy law if you read books about the white lady there's lots of talk

about her in association with fairfolk which again doesn't really hold water and when you look back at the Welsh accounts that they've used to bolster that argument it's actually just a misunderstanding of that story it's a mistranslation of that original Welsh story or it's the particular example that's used in Wales to associate her with the fairfolk is that there's a story called Fanon Grassy, the well of Grassy. And Grassy was a young woman who was meant to look after this well to stop it from flooding, who was meant to put a lid on it at a particular time every day to stop the water from spilling out. And one day she doesn't turn up and, of course, everywhere floods and it's her fault.

But there was a particular version of this story that was recorded by W. Jenkin Thomas. in his collection of children's fairy stories. And he uses this story, elaborates it and talks about how these fairies lead her away. And that's why everywhere floods. And she's transformed into this white swan. And her ghost is then seen as a white lady. But that's the story that's used in a lot of the accounts to associate her with fairfair. Actually, that's not the actual story of Funograssi.

That's not the folklore that we heard growing up. just a children's version of it. It's written for children. There's a lot of that sort of misunderstanding and mistranslation that goes on in Welsh folklore as a whole that sort of contributes to maybe those stories evolving, which that's what folklore does. But it's interesting to go back to then to those original sources

and we're like, well, maybe that classification isn't right because actually that story you've used isn't the way that it was actually meant to be presented. One of the other interesting points about the Laddy Wen is the whole motif of being clad in white is something that's really stereotypical when it comes to ghosts broadly. Ghosts appear in white, faded colour, the white sheeted ghosts as a cartoon-type stereotype. Really common. But in Wales, you don't find any of that really outside of the Laddie Wend.

The first example of a ghost appearing in anything that would resemble what we think of as a white sheet comes from 1904, with the fighting ghost of Tondou, which is a really famous example of a ghost that actually, I think we're 99.9% certain, is just a hoax anyway, an example of ghost hoaxing for reasons that we could go into. Because we don't get the same ideas surrounding the grave, do we in Wales, as we do in other places. The whole idea of ghosts rising from a grave, or being drawn from a grave, being taken from a grave. That's where the motif of the white sheep comes from because of being buried in a shroud and obviously coming from the grave, still being clad in a shroud. But they come the other direction in Wales. They don't come from the ground so much as from elsewhere.

Yeah, I look through thousands of different sources to try and see if there's anything that might indicate why we don't have that stereotypical white sheep motif. And I think I found one example of a ghost coming from the grave and otherwise there was nothing. They all appear from the ether or come down from the heavens. So yeah, that's really fascinating. But we do still get the image of the ghost in a white sheet in terms of pranking. So there are several stories of pranking people in white sheets. So that image had obviously made it across the border. So people were aware of it. It's just that it wasn't part of our folklore because our folklore is developed separately from the rest of Britain.

And it's not until the late 20th century accounts where that white sheeted ghost tends to crop in. And even our white ladies, when the actual clothing is described, they're described as the types of dresses that the previous generation or a few generations ago would have worn, they just happened to be white. And it's only when you get to the likes of Peter Underwood and that sort of thing, where they start to be described as flowing white robes. So, yeah, I mean, it just shows how much of our folklore has, developed and then survived separately to the rest of Britain, even with the influence of popular

culture. Yeah, and that influence of popular culture is what shapes it in more modern times, because the white-sheeted ghost is really two things at the end of the day. It's a stereotypical pop culture image of a ghost, or it's a really cheap and simple Halloween costume. Absolutely. What are the uses of ghost stories, right? Because, you know, here we've got pranks. Like some kids got hold of a sheet, or I loved the one in the... the book where there was kind of a rock formation that sort of looks like a chair. And one guy's like, well, I went and put a candle on it one night, you know, and then

everyone was like, oh, the chair is haunted. You know, so we know that there are pranks that have gone awry. But you're also very good at kind of sussing out. People will say, oh, our pub is so haunted from this ghost that's been there since, you know, the 16th century. It's like, but the pub is on a new side across the street, you know, but it's a good way of getting people in, right? But people tell ghost stories for all sorts of reasons, right?

Yeah, there are multiple reasons really, and certainly Del can talk about the haunted pub example as being a really good one. She's visited a few. Two big ones, perhaps, and I tend to speak more broadly as contextualising these things outside of Wales. But the two broad reasons, really, for a lot of these stories are either cautionary tales or their moralistic stories. And you find this across folklore, of course. So cautionary tales really keep people out of danger on one aspect. that lake is haunted with a particular thing or that pool is bottomless. At the end of the day, don't fall in there because it's going to be hard to get out and you're going to die.

Or moralistic stories, and they often emerge out of the Christianisation of a lot of older tales. This will happen to you if you play cards on a Sunday. This will happen to you if you're not a good god-fearing person, any of these sorts of things. They're broad areas of folklore. These stories are there for those sorts of reasons. But on a local level, I think there are lots of other examples. too. Yeah, I think the most common we found throughout the book was that sort of warning to the curious, wasn't it? We've also got a huge number of localities that have got ghosts within the

title somehow, there's Bogie Lane or that sort of thing. And I think that a lot of these stories are perhaps made to fit with those locations. So obviously some of them have arisen because of the folklore associated with that area. But I think others are written or are told in retrospect. as well. So we get folklore coming up because of various points within the landscape that people think, actually, that would be a great place to put a giant or this particular ghost or this witch. And then they'll build that story up from there and it starts to evolve within a community and then peters out amongst everybody. You have to really careful, of course, with place names in folklore as well and ascribing meaning to them because it's not always obvious,

particularly with pub names where you think they link to one thing. There's a great example near me, thinking about spectral ghosts and black dogs. There's a village near me called Black Dog, which has a pub called the Black Dog in, and has a legend of a black dog that haunts a nearby earthworks. So, of course, everybody says the pub is called the Black Dog in because of this folklore, whereas in fact the pub is called the Black Dog in because a previous landlord, when he bought it, called the Blue Boy, had a particularly favourite hunting dog. which was black. And he renamed the pub, the black dog in after his dog. It has nothing to do with any of the folklore at all. But that becomes ascribed later because of the strength of the stories. So you have to be really careful sometimes with these things too. And we've got an example in the book as well, don't we? Because we've got Bear the Key Deer in Roth, the grave of the black dog in Roth in Cardiff, which you could easily say it's because there was a black dog that used to haunt that particular locality. But it's actually named after the people who owned the land. Oh, yeah. This is a good way to start talking about just all of the dog ghosts, because I loved this.

As you were saying earlier, Delic, this is such a medieval motif. This is one of the big ways that I expect ghosts to show up in medieval stories. So they show up as cockerels. They show up as giant dogs. They show up as haystacks. They show up as burning wheels. You know, all of these things that are not necessarily. human in form or they might eventually take on a human form, but the first thing that they do is show up as a dog or a

cockerel or a red mare or something like this. And they kind of pursue you until you speak to them or tell them in the name of God to speak to you. And then they turn into a person and start having a conversation, right? So I loved the tailless black sow and just the endless, endless dogs that were kind of showing up sometimes to just kind of, I don't know, chase off a bad guy. things like this. In terms of our sort of ghost law, as I said earlier, it's one of our most popular motifs, anecdotally about a quarter of the database I have on ghosts in Wales here, are still animals in spirit form. And they haven't really evolved that much. They're still similar to the ones that we were reporting back

in the 17th and 18th centuries. They're still the giant cat of Anglesey, instance, or Penmine Mauro. They're still very medieval in terms of their themes. It's quite bizarre. Even there's a whole host of animal apparitions that were reported during the 1970s, and there's still horses with hoofs on fire and that sort of thing. It's just very old-fashioned sounding, but still very pertinent to Welsh ghost law today. But in terms of Mark will be able to talk to you more about dogs, because that is his area of expertise, but in terms of ghost dogs in Wales, it's quite a difficult category to pin down because we've obviously got black dogs,

we've got white dogs, but we've also got like red dogs, dogs with red spots and all sorts, because there is that association with the corn, Anon, the dogs of Anon in simple terms, hellhounds, if you want to call them that, and Gwychkun and the dogs of the fairies, called Benditha Mamma. So they all link in together. And the problem with a lot of the accounts that we have is that these terms are completely interchangeable. So whereas you will have dogs that you might otherwise describe as being black dogs across the border in England being presented as corn anon, which are stereotypically meant to be white with red ears because that's how they were first described in the Mabinoggi.

And also then you'll have sort of corn deer black dogs being ascribed to the wild hunt in Wales. So it's very difficult to pinpoint where. where these different names come from. A lot of it depends on the locality. So if you cross the border from one county to another, then that terminology will change, or evens village to village or farm to farm even. So that's been quite problematic

when trying to put these into their retrospective chapters in the book as well. It is very difficult to unpick. Black Dog Folklore was the subject of my first book a long time ago now. And my main archival collection is in spectral. dog stories and eyewitness accounts and things. And looking at it in the broader sense, it's just as difficult to unpick. Because of course, all those examples that Del's just given, they're all in a way, or a lot of them are sky dogs, and they have this link to the wild hunt, whether they're

the white with red ear example, whether they're the black example. But then at the same time, a lot of those ideas also come out of fairy folklore. And fairy dogs are very different to the wild hunt dogs. But it happens more generally. If you look at the UK as a whole, people, when they talk about black dogs, will automatically talk about the Shook or Hellhounds, that motif. Because at the end of the day, whenever it's talked about in the press for whatever reason, there was an example where a giant dog skeleton was dug up at Leaston Abbey a few years ago. And the news reports started on a local level. A big dog skeleton has been dug up by archaeologists. And then suddenly they became bones of the Shuck discovered when it becomes onto a kind of national platform. Why? Because that's how

you sell papers. That's how you get likes and subscribes. That's how you draw people into a story. So therefore, that then becomes the default position. So you look at black dogs and you go, yeah, they're all hounds of hell. If you look at the archive actually and look at the reasons behind apparitions of black dogs, less than 50% of them are portentious or evil or demonic in any way. In fact, a lot of them are protective or just neutral. Yeah. I think my favorite of your dog ghosts was the one that there are three men walking. Only one can see it.

And he's chatting the whole time. His friends make fun of him. And then eventually the dog shows himself very fiercely to the two friends who didn't believe in him. I was like, what a good dog. I suppose this is a natural place to talk about the wild hunt. Here's a really interesting motif. Can you expand on that a little bit? broadly the wild hunt is really the first example that we have recorded of black dog sightings

because it comes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in Peterborough in the late 12th century and this is the first example of what we might term a black dog a great number saw black dogs and hunters riding through the sky and we find this motif across Europe a teutonic mythology that then spreads in wales we find it as well don't we find it as well don't we, but not perhaps as much as we do in other areas of the UK? No, I think that's fair to say. So the first time it crops up is in the Mabinogi, in the first branch where the Brennan Aron, King Aron, is out hunting with his pack of Korn Anon, the dogs of Anon.

But then the first time we see it portrayed as a sort of proper, paranormal, supernatural encounter, I think is with the Reverend Edmund Jones in the late. 18th century. And with those accounts that he records, you never actually see the dog. So you hear them howling in the sky, but you don't actually see them. He doesn't specifically talk about spectral dogs that people report seeing as part of the wild hunt. So the interesting thing about the wild hunt in Wales is that the closer the dogs are meant to get to you, the quieter they got and the further away the louder the hunt was. That was something that Edmund Jones sort of first introduced. But then that has snowballed then and it's more or less become canon within

Welsh folklore that it's repeated everywhere and all the sort of coffee table books. And it's quite likely that the idea that you hear them and don't see them comes from the fact that to see the wild hunt would be a bad thing because they are essentially hunting for souls. So therefore or if you hear the wild hunt coming, then you cover yourself, you bury your head, you don't witness it, so you wouldn't have those records. And I suppose then it makes sense that you'd want it to be louder when it was further away because it gives you more chance to hide, didn't that? Maybe the spookiest of the chapters.

Your final chapter in here, your death omens chapter, I was like, yes, fantastic. This is the good stuff. I love it when you have these kind of potential spirits that show. up to be very creepy, you know, because you want a little bit of a threat level in order for something to be really creepy, right? And the best thing about this chapter really is that it summarises a lot of Welsh folklore that we simply don't find in the same way anywhere else. There are motifs within Wales that are really unique to that. I was going to say to that country, but actually, even more regionally than that, of course, is that there are different

examples. But we don't find a lot of them, do we, outside of the borders of Wales? No, it's one of my favourite bits of ghost lore, I have to say. It's where I get my kicks. It's when I'm talking about death omens. We're just obsessed. If you look through our folklore, and it's not just the sort of fantastical, fantastical, fantastical, death omens.

It's just things like, you see a Robin. Okay, that means that grandma's going to die today. The most innocuous things possible suddenly become these portents of, of doom. But it's hardly surprising you had during a time where sudden death was really commonplace and especially in those areas where the work that you did was quite high risk. So in the mining communities, for instance, death omens were abundant. So that's where we start to see things like spectral dogs appearing, white ladies making appearance there as well. But also that's where fairy folklore comes in, even things like phantom smells or the sounds

of phantom screams and seeing different birds on a particular day. If you saw, say, a Robin close to the entrance of a mine, then there was a high chance you probably wouldn't go to work that day because there was a risk that something might happen. So there's lots of stories about the whole sort of workforce refusing to go into work because somebody said that they heard knocking in the pits the day before or somebody said they saw a white lady. So it was just everywhere in Wales.

And of course, there are different levels of threat here as well, aren't it? Because if you hear knocking in a pit, then the chances are that you're not going to want to go into a pit, because at the very least, it could symbolise that there's a problem with where an adet is shored up, for example, or the incursion of water. That's perfectly sensible. You see a robbing on the way into work. It's a good excuse for duvet day, isn't it? If nothing else. Absolutely.

You know, one of the things I really like was the whole chapter on religious ghosts. I especially liked the kind of combination of religious ghosts and death omens about sneaking outside the church on New Year's Eve to see whose name would get red off because they were going to die. I thought that was a quite nice touch. I love the image of all the wise and brave old men from the village hanging out on the church porch. Yeah, there's a lot of that in Wales. It's usually Halloween or sometimes New Year's Eve, depending on where you lived. But it's seen peppered throughout Wales. It's not just a regional custom.

that is something that's quite universal. In the same way as it was if you wanted to practice divinity on Halloween, then a lot of that takes place at churchyard. So sewing seeds and that sort of thing would happen in a churchyard. You know, a lot of these Welsh ghosts are kind of showing up because there's something that needs to be done. And they know about a buried treasure, or they have kind of squirled something away

that needs to be thrown into running water in order to make it better. And, you know, this is very familiar from a kind of medieval understanding of what dead people are doing. So, you know, you kind of have all of these constant warnings not to do necromancy, which is just kind of chatting with dead people in the Middle Ages. And there's this understanding that dead people know where things are. You know, you could ask a dead person, hey, is there buried treasure? Hey, are there lost spoons around here? And like literally any dead person will be like, oh yeah, man, there's some spoons out the back, you can go get them. But the Welsh ghosts kind of have the same thing of an understanding

of they've put something somewhere and it needs to be dealt with. Or they like iron and show up around iron and things like this. So I was like, this is a very interesting kind of medieval motif, but it seems to be specific to Wales. Again, it's one of the most popular motifs that we have is the idea of a ghost with unfinished business. There's a fantastic example from a strike which I think is probably my favourite, where you have the ghost of a woman appearing to the son of an innkeeper. And I think she appears three times to him because it's obviously, I'm the third time you've got to ask the ghost actually, what do you want? And she then says that she needs to take him to Philadelphia to pick up some treasure that she's hidden there at some

point. And then she flies him off to Philadelphia. And I think flies him off on the Saturday and brings him home in time for tea on the Monday evening, at which point, again, you've got that sort of medieval theme of she brings him back and he then spends the next few weeks sick in bed, which I think is another very strong medieval motif. Yeah, medieval people are certain you're going to get sick if you come into contact with a ghost. And again, then he can't look anybody in the eyes after that. That's another motif that crops up time and time again is you interact with a ghost and after that, you just can't make eye contact with other people.

That's a brilliant story, but there are much less exciting versions of that pop up throughout Wales of a ghost turning up and saying, I've hidden something. Sometimes it can just be a bundle of socks, or it can be a crock of gold. It varies depending on the spirit. And then it's your job to get rid of that item.

And most of the time you need to dispose of it. But there's the odd occasion where there's, allowed to keep it. But for the most part, you've got to get rid of it. And of course, you would go right back pre-medieval for the origins of this as well, because one of the various sort of earliest recorded hauntings comes from the story of Athenodorus, whose house is haunted by a spirit who acts a bit like lassie, really, or Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. So I think he wants us to follow him. And they go out with the garden, and Athenodorus fortunately has a good sense to mark the place where the spirit disappears.

The next morning, when he's a little less sleepy, he goes out with his servants and digs a big hole in the ground and finds the skeleton with iron shackles attached, which they then give a proper burial, and then ghost never appears again. They have a very early origin point, these sorts of stories. I think that this is the wonderful thing about this book

and why I really recommend that people check it out is that it does have all of these great ancient to medieval motifs, and it shows how we really are all still connected with these ideas. And these are the stories that we tell and the things that make our communities work. And it shows how we are still kind of connected to this imaginary wellspring from the past. So I absolutely adored the book. I recommend that you all check it out and then tell me what your favorite story is.

I think we're going to have to leave it there. Dalleth and Mark, thank you so, so much for joining me. Everyone out there listening, thank you so much for being here. This has been Gone Medieval by History Hit, and if you liked what you've heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast, and tell your friends about it. And if you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com.

Otherwise, I'll be back again next Tuesday for another episode, and my co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Friday. Until next time.