Ysbrydnos: the Welsh spirit night

Long before plastic pumpkins, Wales had its own night of the dead. It fell on the last evening of October and it had a name: Nos Galan Gaeaf (nohs GAL-an GAY-av), the eve of Calan Gaeaf (KAL-an GAY-av), the first day of winter.

In the old Welsh year, Calan Gaeaf was a hinge. Summer’s work was done, the animals were brought down from the hills, and the long dark began. The night before it was one of three Ysbrydnos (uss-BRID-nos, “spirit nights”) in the calendar, alongside the eve of May Day and Midsummer’s Eve. On a spirit night the boundary between this world and the next was thought to thin. Ghosts walked the lanes, the future could be glimpsed, and the sensible stayed close to the fire.

If that sounds like the Irish and Scottish Samhain, it should. Calan Gaeaf belongs to the same ancient Celtic reckoning of the year. What makes the Welsh night its own is the cast of characters who came out in it.

The bonfire and the stones

Across Wales, communities lit a coelcerth (KOIL-kerth, bonfire) on a hilltop on Nos Galan Gaeaf. Families gathered, roasted potatoes and apples in the embers, and told stories while the flames held.

Then came the part that gave the night its edge. Each person marked a stone with their name and set it in the ring of the fire. In the morning they went back to look. If your stone was still there, all was well. If it was gone, you would not see the next Calan Gaeaf. Nobody, it was understood, wanted to be the one to go back and check.

As the coelcerth burned down, somebody would shout the rhyme and everyone would run:

Adref, adref, am y cynta’,
Hwch Ddu Gwta a gipio’r ola’.

Home, home, the first to get there — the tailless black sow takes the last.

The Hwch Ddu Gwta (hookh thee GOO-ta) was a monstrous black sow with no tail, said to rise from the ashes of the dying fire and chase the stragglers home through the dark. Sometimes she ran with a headless woman, the Ladi Wen. Whoever was last on the hill was hers.

It is a brilliant piece of folk engineering. The rhyme emptied the hillside in seconds, got every child home before the fire was fully out, and gave them a story they would tell for the rest of their lives. In the game, she is the one creature you never touch. Every Welsh child of the old days would have told you the same.

The Ladi Wen (LAD-ee wen) is Wales’s most widespread ghost. She haunts crossroads, stiles, old halls and churchyards, usually in white, sometimes without her head (the rhyme-books call her Ladi Wen heb ddim pen, “the white lady without a head”). In some places she guarded treasure; in others she simply watched. On Nos Galan Gaeaf, children were warned she waited at the stile for anyone out too late.

The Bwci Bo (BOOK-ee boh) is the everyday fright of Welsh childhood, the thing in the dark cupboard or behind the hedge. Not malicious exactly, but not to be trusted either. Every village had its own, and every grandmother knew exactly where it lived.

A canwyll corff (KAN-wilh korf) is a small light seen moving at night along the road a funeral would soon take, from a house to the churchyard. To see one was to know a death was coming. A small pale flame meant a child; a large one, an adult; two together, two deaths.

Tradition held that St David himself had prayed that the Welsh, of all people, should have warning of their deaths so they could prepare, and the corpse candle was the answer. It is a sombre thing, which is why in the game it is worth more than the common spirits: you have to be brave enough to reach for it.

Annwn (AN-oon) is the Welsh otherworld, a place of plenty under the hills, ruled in the oldest tales by Arawn and later by Gwyn ap Nudd. Its hounds, the Cŵn Annwn (koon AN-oon), are white with red ears in the Mabinogion, where the prince Pwyll meets them hunting a stag in the forest of Glyn Cuch. In later folklore they became the Welsh version of the Wild Hunt: a pack heard baying across the night sky on spirit nights, gathering the souls of the dead. Their cry was said to grow quieter the closer they came.

They are the fastest thing in the game, and the hardest to catch.

Before pumpkins arrived from America, the lantern of the Welsh autumn was a rwden (ROO-den, a swede) or a turnip, hollowed with a knife and a spoon, a face cut into it, a candle stub inside. It was hard, miserable work, and the result was uglier and far more frightening than any pumpkin. Children carried them on Nos Galan Gaeaf to light the way home and to scare each other on the way. In the game the rwden is the friend in the dark: catch it and you gain a few more seconds of the night.

Fortunes and apples

Nos Galan Gaeaf was also a night for seeing the future, and most of the methods had an apple in them. Twco afalau (TOO-koh av-AL-eye, apple bobbing) is the one that survived. In others, an apple peel pared in one piece and thrown over the shoulder would fall in the shape of a future husband’s initial; an apple eaten in front of a mirror by candlelight would show a face over your shoulder. A great mash of nine ingredients, stwmp naw rhyw, had a wedding ring hidden in it, and whoever found it would marry within the year. Young women walked three times round the church at midnight to hear a name whispered. None of these are in the game. All of them are the kind of thing worth knowing.

Not on this night: the Mari Lwyd

People often ask about the Mari Lwyd (MAR-ee LOO-id), the horse’s skull on a pole, draped in a sheet and ribbons, that goes from door to door demanding entry in rhyme. She is Welsh, she is magnificent, and she is not a Halloween custom: she belongs to midwinter, between Christmas and Twelfth Night. She may get a game of her own.

Calan Gaeaf today

The coelcerth and the sow faded through the twentieth century as imported Halloween took over, but Calan Gaeaf never quite went away. Welsh-medium schools teach it; St Fagans National Museum of History marks it; and a new generation is rediscovering a night that was always ours. This game is a small part of that. If you’ve read this far, you now know more about the Welsh Halloween than almost anyone. Nos da — and mind the sow.

Sources and further reading

• Trefor M. Owen, Welsh Folk Customs
• Marie Trevelyan, Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales
• Wirt Sikes, British Goblins
• The Mabinogion — Pwyll Pendefig Dyfed
• Amgueddfa Cymru, St Fagans National Museum of History collections