The ghosts of Wales present many well-defined features. It is even possible to classify them, after a fashion. Of course, as with all descriptions of phantoms, the vagueness inevitable in creatures of the imagination is here; but the ghosts of Welsh tradition are often so old, and have been handed down so cleanly through successive generations, that in our day they have almost acquired definite outlines, as in the case of images arising from the perceptions. Always bearing in mind the risk of being lost in the labyrinthine eccentricities of popular fancy, compared to which the Arsinoë of Herodotus was unperplexing, I venture to classify the inhabitants of the Welsh spirit-world thus: 1. Departed Mortals; 2. Goblin Animals; 3. Spectres of Natural Objects; 4. Grotesque Ghosts; 5. Familiar Spirits; 6. Death Omens.
The ghosts of departed mortals are usually the late personal acquaintances of the people who see them. But sometimes they are strangers whom nobody knows, and concerning whom everybody is curious. Two such ghosts haunted the streets of Ebbw Vale, in Glamorganshire, in January, 1877. One was in the shape of an old woman, the other in that of a girl child. Timid people kept indoors after nightfall, and there were many who believed thoroughly in the ghostly character of the mysterious visitors. Efforts were made to catch them, but they eluded capture. It was hinted by materialists that they were thieves; by unbelievers in spiritualism that they had perhaps escaped from a seance in some adjoining town. These ghosts, however, are not very interesting. A cultivated moderner can have no satisfaction in forming the acquaintance of a seance ghost; it is quite otherwise in the case of a respectable old family goblin which has haunted a friend's house in the most orthodox manner for centuries. Such ghosts are numerous in Wales, and quite faithfully believed in by selected individuals. Indeed one of the highest claims to a dignified antiquity that can be put in by a Welsh family mansion, is the possession of a good old-fashioned blood-curdling spectre--like that, for example, which has haunted Duffryn House, a handsome stone manse near Cardiff, for the past two hundred years and more. This is the ghost of the doughty admiral Sir Thomas Button, famed in his day as an Arctic navigator. Since his death he has faithfully haunted (so the local farm folk say) the cellar and the garden of Duffryn House, where he lived, when he did live, which was in the 17th century. He has never been known to appear in hall or chamber of the mansion, within the memory of man, but has been seen hovering over the beer butt or tun in the cellar, commemorated in his name, and walking in the flower-garden of a fine windy night.