* 9 best ghost story in Wales

The Thing in Calico

One story which genuinely gave me the creeps was recorded in a book of True Ghost Stories, published in 1936.

One fine summer's night, the Rev H Elwyn Thomas was walking along a lonely stretch of road beside a canal at Llangynidr, near Abergavenny, when he noticed an odd-looking figure standing nearby.

Taking him for a tramp, Mr Thomas decided to walk over and speak to him.
Which was a mistake.

What he saw was, "an old man over whose face the leaden-coloured skin was tightly stretched; the lips were thin and bloodless, and the half-open mouth toothless.

Two piercing and semi-luminous eyes, set far back, stared at Mr Thomas..." The figure was also bizarrely dressed - hardly dressed, in fact. Two filthy strips of calico were wound round and round its emaciated body, and that was all.

A nameless dread gripped Mr Thomas and, to his own amazement, he ran blindly away. Minutes later, he stopped, ashamed of himself, and turned round. But the Thing had followed him, floating down the road and was almost on top of him.

Only then did the appalled Mr Thomas realise it was a ghost. There followed a nightmare chase down the road - ending in Mr Thomas's collapse from nerves and exhaustion. The ghost turned out to be that of a mad old miser who had died years before and who used to dress himself in filthy strips of calico, just as Mr Thomas had seen.