I will now proceed in Mr. Davies' words, heading each incident with the title given it in the collec
- Date of account
- Published 1911
- Source
- Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore
- Reference
- Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore · selected passage 109
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
stories of the Toili, a word of explanation regarding them may not be out of place, in case it happens that these lines travel to a region where there is no Toili, or fall into the hands of those not privileged to see it
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlystories of the Toili, a word of explanation regarding them may not be out of place, in case it happens that these lines travel to a region where there is no Toili, or fall into the hands of those not privileged to see it. The Toili was a spirit burial or funeral. It was also an apparition or "double"; and very often in days gone by one heard that So-and-so had seen his own apparition. In some parts the Cyheuraeth[13] was seen. The people of Glamorganshire always saw the Cyheuraeth; and the folks of Teify-side used to see, and still do see, the Toili. All the movement and action of a real funeral were to be perceived in the Toili. In this way the whole business of the real funeral could be known beforehand by the person who happened to witness the spectral one, and a few of his friends to whom he would speak about it. There was the crowd collected round a certain house, then came the corpse carried out to the bier or hearse, the reading, the prayers, the singing, and if any particularly penetrating voice were heard at the funeral in the crying of the deceased's relatives, that was sure to have been noticed beforehand in the Toili. In this way it came to be known very often which of a family was to go.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.