The Bwystfel

Posted by: (Original poster still under investigation)
Reposted by: Humboldt squid

I was maybe seven when my great grandmother died at the age of 96; she was Welsh, and a smiling, stooped-back woman with keen blue eyes and a maze of wrinkles. Apart from several stories -– which I recall my grandmother being annoyed that I was told -– I know little about my greatgran. Scared I would forget her altogether, a few years after she died, I sat down and tried to remember what she'd told me, making notes for myself. The below is taken from the notes I and my own memory.

You can read these two stories in a number of ways – a very old tale of a shadow person/ghost/demon/faerie beast, or a child's imaginings, or maybe just an attempt to frighten me. I'm repeating them as I was told them.

Spellings of (probably) Welsh words are all approximate; where there's a *, I've quoted directly from the notes, but am not sure what she/I meant.

The Bwystfel and the Bone Den

"When I was a child, I lived in Radnorshire, one of seven children and the youngest of six girls. As my parents had six other girls and an infant boy to take care of, they left me to myself, and I ran about like a wild thing. Not that they didn't love me, but they had other things to do.

I was about five when I began to see the Bwystfel. It roamed about the farm, slipping in the shadows, and the only way to see it was to look for the shapes that were darker than the spaces between stars. Its mad eyes were like coal sparks, it laughed like a goat in pain, and it was always angry. I watched it from a distance: one spring, I saw it kill a nest of sparrows – closing its hands about the nest until the little naked birds smothered on its flesh* -- one summer, it poisoned the sheep, biting the ewes' legs until rot and infection ate into their flesh that no about of doctoring could fix. Later, it skulked into the shed and sliced the handyman's chest open, then danced his blood up the walls and over the rafters. My parents said it was an accident, but knew better. "The Bwystfel did it," I told my father, and he boxed my ears for being a liar. No one believed me at all. . . except the Bwystfel itself.

It grew angrier. At night, it crept into my room, giggling and ripping the blankets away and pinching me. I shared a bed with two of my sisters – we didn't all have separate rooms like you do – and when the Bwystfel came, we shivered together, too afraid to move until morning. We were very little girls, and nobody trusted us with a candle, so we had no way to drive the thing away. It tormented us in whispers, calling us names and telling us we were bad children, because our prayers that it would leave us be weren't answered. My sisters refused to speak a word of it, and they wore the Bwystfel-inflicted bruises like jewellery – saying they'd fallen over or been bitten by the cat.

I decided I would have to find the Bwystfel myself and scare it away. I took the statuette of Florence Nightingale that my mother gave us to hold when we were sick and a stone with a hole in it, both for luck. As it turned out, I would need the luck.

I walked for ages, got lost, and eventually stumbled into a small wooded copse where I had never been before. Under the trees it was cold air, and pine needles and dried leaves lay thick upon the patchy grass. I clutch Florence. . . and then I saw the bones.

Bleached and ancient, they lay scattered in so-wide* circle: small bones, large bones, bones half buried in the loam, bones with scraps of dried flesh still clinging to them. A sheep skeleton hung suspended in the tangle of a blackberry bush, and canes had grown through the eye sockets of birds. I started to cry – I knew I'd found the den of the Bwystfel.

The Bwystfel appeared from nowhere, crouched down on the tawny grass like a cat about to pounce. The ivory of the bones jutted up around it like little fingers, clawing, trying to drag it down. "You'd better run, small girl," the Bwystfel hissed. "Better run, or your brother-boy will break his bones, snap-snap." It vanished, only to appear again, behind me. Terrified, I flung my lucky stone at it; the stone passed right through its head, and the ghoul screamed.

I'd seen enough. I bolted, dropping Florence, rushing headlong towards where I thought the nearest road should be. Once there, I kept going, my skirt ripped to ribbons by thorns and my legs stung with nettles, until, turning a corner, I ran smack into my grandfather. He was a big man, my grandfather, and he swung me off my feet and held me as I sobbed.

"What's wrong, darling?" he asked, when I calmed some. I told him of the Bwystfel and what it had said, and instead of being angry, as my father had been, he listened. His brow furrowed. "Are you feeling brave, darling? Do you think you could be brave for me?" When I nodded, he had me show him were I'd gone – then he sat me on a bank and gave me his best silver snuff box to hold. "I'm going after the Bwystfel," he told her. "You stay here in the sunshine and I'll be back soon. If any bad bwcy* comes, you hit it with that."

So I waited, shaking, afraid for my granddaddy and afraid of the Bwystfel and afraid of what Mother would do if I lost Florence. Finally, back Grandad came; flushed, and bleeding from a hundred cuts on his hands. He looked angry, more angry then I'd ever seen him, for he was the mildest of men. "The Bwystfel-beast is dead again," he told me, "and under the soil where it belongs." He spat upon the earth and ground the moisture in with his boot heel.

"What do you mean, dead again?" I asked.

Grandad was quiet for a time, then he said. "The Bwystfel was an unchristian/damned* who hurt small things because he loved pain. When I was a boy, Old Thomas* killed him, but Young Thomas found where he lay and let him out. I'll sort him out for good soon and he won't bother you any more." When he arrived at my father's house, he made excuses for my torn dress and tear-stained face, saying I'd been attacked by a dog, and Florence had been broken as I'd tried to escape.

And then, without another word, he went to the shed and fetched the dead handyman's bottle of whiskey and gun powder and a box of matches.

I never went back, but I heard of a fire that burned bone den trees to the ground."

If nothing else is true, the Florence Nightingale statuette still exists, and has indeed been broken and glued back together.


The Bwystfel and the Handyman
I loved the Bwystfel story -- wouldn't you be pleased to know your great granny tried to kick some paranormal butt? -- and after many pleas and the repetition of the original story dozens of times, I convinced my Greatgran to elaborate. While I have mismatched, incomplete notes on some of the other stories, this was the one she told most often.

"The handyman was a widower and a drunk, yet good natured and pious all the same. He never swore in front of ladies, and he always tipped his cap to Mother. . . . Somehow, tho, he angered the Bwystfel. Everywhere he went, the thing would follow, cursing low and solid in his ears. It pushed him into ditches and stuck bramble canes in his bed, so would awake in covered in needle-point scratches. The handyman and Father were good friends, and the handyman often ate with my family. As the weeks past, the man grew paler and paler and became jumpy, starting at every sound. I watched the Bwystfel slithering around his ankles and snickering. He couldn't see it, but he could hear it, and he thought he was going mad.

At dinner one night, the handyman told us that he was having nightmares – horrible nightmares of rotting things – and that he could smell the carrion when he woke. By this point, my father was worried for his friends, and together they pried the floorboards up, looking for dead mice. . . and found them. . . along with the handyman's missing cat, curled up under the floor just below the foot of the bed, where it used to sleep. Everyone agreed that the cat must have been hunting mice and become trapped and starved.

That didn't explain the broken necks.
Or the dried corpses of a hundred bees, lying in rows under the bed.

Eventually, the handyman, too, began to see what I knew was the Bwystfel. He said, that he could feel its stare, and when he slept the shadows seemed to move: growing larger, then smaller, then larger again. Things tapped on the walls at night, and knocked on the windows and breathed cold breath on his face. The milk turned sour and the butter rancid and cracks appeared in every plate the handyman owned. And then things got even worse.

I was playing nearby when the scream came. The Bwystfel shrieked with its goat laughter and the sound of crashing and scraping metal echoed out of the shed. Chickens ran willy-nilly, and the dog, lying beside me, barked and barked, the hair on its back bristling like a brush. Mother burst from our house and ordered me away.

Every rusted farm tool in that little shed had come off its hooks. The handyman died a few days later from a blow to the head and an infection from a pitchfork cut. He had never having woken up."

Naturally, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of these stories, nor do I know what a Bwystfel is. All I can add was that the smiling Greatgran I knew didn't exist when she recounted these stories. At least once afterwards, she stayed up all night with the light on. Also, out of my grandmother's hearing, and after a good bit of sherry, she made me promise that if I ever met anything like the Bwystfel, I was to go straight to the nearest church and stay there.