INDEPENDENT FIELD ARCHIVECorpse candle
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South-west Wales · Welsh
Corpse candle
Canwyll corff (Welsh) · dead men's candles
Death omens
AI illustration · imagined scene, not an evidence photograph A small light, like a candle flame, seen travelling the road a corpse will later take to its burial, sometimes before the person it foretells has even fallen ill. Its size was said to tell the age of the one who will die: a great light for a grown person, a little one for a child. Baxter's Welsh correspondents wrote that hardly anyone of age in their parts had not seen them; John Davis added that he could never hear of them in England.
Earliest written source: Letters from Welsh correspondents printed in Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the World of Spirits (London, 1691)
Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691)
Tradition · not evidence