In another case the same gentleman relates a number of these candles were
seen together. "About thirty-four or thirty-five years since," he says,
"one Jane Wyat, my wife's sister, being nurse to Baronet Reid's three
eldest children, and (the lady being deceased) the lady controller of that
house, going late into a chamber where the maidservants lay, saw there no
less than five of these lights together. It happened a while after, the
chamber being newly plastered and a great grate of coal-fire thereon
kindled to hasten the drying up of the plastering, that five of the
maidservants went there to bed, as they were wont, but in the morning they
were all dead, being suffocated in their sleep with the steam of the newly
tempered lime and coal. This was at Llangathen in Carmarthenshire."
Occasionally a figure is seen with the lights, but nearly always that of a
woman. À propos of this the same writer says: "William John of the County
of Carmarthen, a smith, on going home one night, saw one of the corpse
candles; he went out of his way to meet with it, and when he came near it,
he saw it was a burying; and the corpse upon the bier, the perfect
resemblance of a woman in the neighbourhood whom he knew, holding the
candle between her forefingers, who dreadfully grinned at him, and
presently he was struck down from his horse, where he remained a while,
and was ill a long time after before he recovered. This was before the
real burying of the woman. His fault, and therefore his danger, was his
coming presumptuously against the candle."
Lastly, an account of these death candles appeared some years ago in
_Fraser's Magazine_. It ran as follows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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