There is something particularly unsettling about meeting a funeral when nobody has died.
Not hearing a mysterious knock in an empty house, or glimpsing something from the corner of your eye, but seeing an entire procession. Mourners walking together. Figures moving solemnly towards a churchyard. Sometimes a coffin. Sometimes lights. Everything apparently happening exactly as a funeral should, except that there is no funeral taking place.
In parts of Wales these apparitions had a name: the toili. They were not generally regarded as ghosts of people already dead. They were something stranger. They were funerals seen before the death occurred.
And according to some accounts, when the real funeral eventually came, it followed the same road.
Turn over The Funeral
Death once travelled very visibly through a community.
Before hearses carried coffins swiftly from funeral home to crematorium, the dead were taken from home to burial ground along roads, lanes and footpaths familiar to everyone. A funeral procession could pass farms, cottages and neighbours who had known the person all their life.
It is perhaps unsurprising that those routes acquired folklore of their own.
Welsh tradition contains particularly rich accounts of the toili, a spectral or supernatural funeral procession believed to foretell a death. The stories were still being passed down orally well into the twentieth century. Museum Wales preserves an account recorded from Cassie Davies, born in 1898, who remembered her father telling of a local man named Dafydd Morgan who encountered one near Tregaron. Davies specifically recalled her father using the word toili, and said he believed in them. Museum Wales
There were rules to the phenomenon.
According to the tradition Davies remembered, even the time at which the procession appeared could matter. A toili seen early in the night indicated the death of a young person. One appearing later foretold the death of somebody older. Museum Wales
Other accounts are considerably more dramatic.
At Coed-y-Brenin near Neuadd Lwyd, tradition tells of John Jones encountering a phantom funeral while returning home one evening. At a crossroads he apparently found himself caught among the spectral procession, pressed so closely by its participants that he almost fainted. He escaped into a field and watched it continue towards Neuadd Lwyd.
A few weeks later, according to the story, he saw a real funeral travel the same way. landoflegends.wales
That repetition is crucial.
The phantom funeral did not merely announce death. It could apparently rehearse it.
The same idea appears in the work of folklorist Jonathan Ceredig Davies, whose Folk-lore of West and Mid-Wales, published in 1911, records both the toili and its close relative, the canwyll corph, or corpse candle. Davies gathered material from people who claimed to have seen these phenomena themselves. Reading Rooms
The corpse candle was usually described as a small light moving close to the ground. Like the phantom funeral, it could travel from the house of the person destined to die towards the churchyard, following the route their funeral would subsequently take.
Some traditions became extraordinarily specific. The colour or size of the light might indicate whether the coming death was that of a man, woman or child. Two lights could mean two deaths. The hour at which the light appeared might indicate how soon the death would occur. Reading Rooms
The National Library of Wales has traced versions of the corpse-candle tradition through nineteenth-century Welsh archival material and notes its connection with the darker seasonal folklore surrounding Calan Gaeaf, when boundaries between the living and the spirit world were traditionally thought particularly vulnerable. Library Wales
One Museum Wales recording, made in 1979, preserves the memories of Mary and William Thomas of the Ysbyty Ystwyth area. Mary recalled stories of a grandfather who supposedly saw corpse candles repeatedly. In one family story, both a dying woman and her husband saw a small light leave the house shortly before her death.
But the conversation preserved something even stranger.
William Thomas described a belief that if someone encountered a corpse candle and watched it cross water, the identity of the person destined to die might be revealed. Mary added that a person looking into the water as the spectral funeral passed could see the individual who would eventually occupy the coffin. Museum Wales
Imagine standing beside a dark Welsh lane and seeing that.
Then imagine recognising the face.
There are, of course, perfectly earthly possibilities behind at least some of these stories. Funeral processions were familiar sights, particularly in small communities. Mist, darkness, lanterns and distant groups of travellers could transform ordinary scenes. Memory is notoriously willing to connect an ambiguous earlier event with something significant that happens later.
There is also a problem familiar to anyone studying supernatural folklore. Once a community knows the rules of a phenomenon, later experiences are interpreted through those rules. A strange light becomes a corpse candle because corpse candles are what strange lights mean. A distant group becomes a funeral because phantom funerals are already part of the cultural vocabulary.
Yet simply explaining how such traditions might develop misses something important.
These weren’t merely scary stories.
They provided a way of thinking about death.
A death that arrives without warning is chaotic. The toili reverses that. Somewhere, somehow, the funeral has already happened. The road has already been walked. The mourners have already gathered. The landscape itself appears to know what is coming even though the living do not.
Perhaps that is why the phantom funeral is so much more disturbing than an ordinary ghost.
A ghost belongs to the past.
The toili belongs to the future.
And if you meet one coming along the lane, the question isn’t who has died?
It is who is going to?
IX – The Funeral
The Funeral is the card of endings already in motion.
It does not necessarily signify literal death. Instead it represents something whose ending may have begun before you consciously recognised it. A relationship, belief, habit, ambition or period of life may already be passing away.
The Funeral asks you not to cling simply because the final moment has not yet arrived.
There is also an element of foreknowledge here. Something within you may already understand what your conscious mind is resisting. Pay attention to repetition, instinct and those peculiar moments when the future seems to cast a shadow backwards.
But this is not simply a card of loss.
Funerals mark transition. They acknowledge what existed, allow grief its proper place and create the point from which those remaining must continue.
When The Funeral appears, ask yourself: What am I already saying goodbye to?
Sometimes the procession begins long before we realise we are walking in it.
Sources
Museum Wales, Folk Tales: Dafydd Morgan, Pant-y-craf, is Pressed Against the Hedge by a Funeral. Oral account from Cassie Davies concerning the Welsh toili and beliefs surrounding phantom funerals. Museum Wales
Museum Wales, Folk Tales: A Man from Ysbyty Ystwyth sees a Corpse Candle. Recording made in 1979 preserving traditions surrounding corpse candles, funeral routes and foreknowledge of death. Museum Wales
Jonathan Ceredig Davies: Folk-lore of West and Mid-Wales (1911). Includes contemporary collected accounts of the Canwyll Corph and its relationship with the toili. Reading Rooms
Marie Trevelyan: Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales (1909), Chapter XIV, “Corpse-Candles and Phantom Funerals”. A substantial early collection of Welsh death-omen traditions. Wikimedia Commons
National Library of Wales: One Dark Night: Tales of the Cannwyll Corff. Archival discussion of Welsh corpse-candle traditions and nineteenth-century accounts. Library Wales
Land of Legends Wales: Coed-y-Brenin, Neuadd Lwyd. Records the local tradition concerning John Jones and the phantom funeral procession.
