Welcome to the Nightwalks…

---

The Gwyllion is a mountain-dwelling spirit or faery in Welsh folklore, uncanny feminine entities that lead travellers away from the path into the mist and darkness…

---

Gwyllion (or Gwyllon) is the plural form of Gwyll or Yr Wyll, meaning “twilight,” “gloaming,” or “the wild.” The word is often  applied to a type of ghost or spirit, or sometimes to night-wanderers (human or supernatural). These beings are seen as outlaws of the wild and up to no good, and they often resemble mysterious women or strange, elderly hags in ash-coloured clothing and oblong, four-cornered hats, an apron over one shoulder and a wooden milk-can in one hand. Travellers never see their faces, because when they do appear in the distance they are always facing away from the person seeing them, and never turns around.

One of the Gwyllion is the Old Woman of the Mist, who appears on the slopes wrapped in ragged clothing, her face half-hidden by a hood or veils of drifting clouds. Sometimes, she merely stands there watching you. Sometimes, she gestures for you to follow her. Or, she wails – a sound described in nineteenth-century stories as being “like a child crying itself hoarse on a cold stone floor.”

The word gwyllion was coined in the 17th century by the Welsh lexicographer, Dr John Davies of Mallwyd. The word was eventually associated with the mountain faeries / spirits beginning with Edmund Jones, a minister who was born in Aberystruth in 1702 and was obsessed with these beings. People nicknamed him the Old Prophet, and he spent tens of years collecting and writing down stories of apparitions told to him by people around Pontypool. He published these accounts in 1780 as the book A Relation of Apparitions of Spirits in the County of Monmouth and the Principality of Wales. 100 years after that, the American consul of Cardiff (Wirt Sikes) retold the material from Edmund Jones in a book named British Goblins. He filed the mountain apparitions under the heading “The Gwyllion,” and the name stuck. Wirt described them as belonging “to the twilight between ghost and fairy.”

Gwyllion are female faeries of terrifying aspect who haunt lonely roads in the Welsh mountains of Monmouthshire and Breconshire, and they lead travellers astray. They are gloomy spirits akin to hags or witches, distinct from the Ellyllon (Welsh elves) who are usually more benevolent. While they aren’t good entities, they aren’t inherently evil, either. They are more like lost souls, wandering endlessly.

The Gwyllion are often encountered at night or during misty days, and even if you’re perfectly familiar with the road you’re on, they can and will make you get lost.

Gwyllion often entered the houses of people in the parish of Aberystruth, especially in stormy weather. The elderly faery women were always made welcome out of fear of what they might do if offended. They would be given clean water and great care was taken to not have any knives or cutting tools in the corner beside the fire (where faeries would usually like to sit). It was good to be hospitable to them while indoors, but outside, it was a different story.

One such gwyll is known as The Old Woman and was haunting the Black Mountain in Breconshire. A man – Robert Williams of Llangattock, near Crickhowell – happened to meet her there at the same time that he became lost. Thinking she was human, he called after her to wait, but she never replied. He assumed she was deaf and tried to overtake her, but she led him further and further astray, always out of his reach, until he stumbled upon a marsh. She cackled, and, suspecting she was a gwyll, he drew his knife – and she disappeared.

It is interesting to note that many Welsh ghosts and faeries are afraid of knives, and can be banished by them. Perhaps this is because faeries are vulnerable to cold iron, or maybe the knife exorcism is an echo of Excalibur and the role it played in pre-medieval times. Other ways to make the Gwyllion vanish or protect yourself from their tricks is to offer them some food, such as a bit of cheese or a crust of bread, or to nod politely to them and wish them “nos da,” (good evening).

There was an Old Woman of the Mountain haunting Llanhyddel Mountain in Monmouthshire as well. She was seen as the ghost of a woman who was viewed as a witch when she was living. Her name was Juan White. A Monmouthshire man writing to Sikes in 1870 said he remembered her as the tenant of a ruined cottage on Lasgarn Hill near Pontypool when he was a boy, and that at midnight she appeared carrying her own head under her arm. As a gwyll, she uttered strange cries and shouts throughout her mountain to frighten travellers. (Gwyllion are believed to cry a sound like “wow-up,” based on the Welsh cry of distress: wwb, or ww-bwb. People of Aberystruth could hear that sound from many different directions in a short amount of time.)

There were also gwyllion on Bedwellty Mountain at night. A traveller – Evan Thomas – was crossing the mountain towards home in the valley of Ebwy Fawr and saw several spirits dancing around him and heard the sounds of a bugle overhead while invisible hunters rode past. Evan drew his knife, and they all vanished.

John ap John from Cwm Celyn, was chased across Milfre Mountain by disembodied shouts moving from Bryn Mawr to Bwlch y Llwyn to the Gilfach fields, and the cries always resounded in the direction he was heading in (towards Caerleon fair, and it was before dawn). He was struck by the trundling of a coach on a path that no coach would be able to use, and the same shouts sounded as if they were sitting on top of it. John dived off the road and waited face-down in heather until the sounds had abated. He stood and the birds had started singing, there were sheep on the hill, and the terror deserted him.

The Gwyllion have been associated with goats, too. There is a tale of a man named Cadwaladr who cared greatly for his goat, Jenny. However, he lost his temper with her for running off into the hills and caused her to tumble off a steep incline by throwing a rock at her. He clambered down to where she lay dying, and she licked his hand while he cried and sat with her head on his arm until the moon rose. At that point, she became a young woman with brown eyes. She hung her black slipper on the end of a moonbeam and held out her hand, which was beautiful but still felt like a hoof when he grasped it, and she led him up the slopes. Up on the summit, a vapoured crowd of goats with shadowy horns circled around him, bleating, and the king of the goats drove its head into Cadwaladr’s stomach, pushing him over a crag. The man then woke to find himself utterly alone and goatless in the sunshine, with the birds singing like nothing had happened.

Edmund Jones noted that the Old Women / Gwyllion had moved out of the open hills of Wales since about 1800, and into the coal-pits and holes of the Earth instead.

The Welsh faeries are known as the Tylwyth Teg, meaning “Fair Family,” and the Irish equivalent are the Aos Si. In Welsh folklore, the Ellyllon are found in valleys and groves and are loosely equivalent to elves, the Coblynau are found in mines and are similar to dwarves, brownies or household faeries are the Bwbachod, and nymphs (or at least, faeries of lakes and streams) are known as the Gwragedd Annwn. The Gwyllion are found in mountains and could be seen as hags, witches, the Irish folkloric idea of “stray sod” or even will-o-the-wisps (which I wrote a few posts about a while ago).

---

Sources:

https://sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/wfl/wfl04.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwyllion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tylwyth_Teg

Gwyllion

The Welsh Gwyllion

---

In 2003, a haunted wine cabinet was put up for auction on eBay by Kevin Mannis, along with a description of horrific events caused by the cabinet’s presence, and whatever entity lay inside it. But what exactly is a dybbuk, and how much of the story was real?

---

---

Way back in the mists of time (erm, 2001), a writer and furniture refinishing businessman named Kevin Mannis bought an old wine cabinet from a garden sale. The garden sale was that of an attorney in Portland, Oregon.

Kevin Mannis placed the (sadly wineless) cabinet for auction on eBay, although the item description he penned for it was rather unusual and disturbing. He said the cabinet was once the possession of a Holocaust survivor in Poland, a woman who died aged 103, and that this survivor claimed the cabinet contained an evil spirit known as a dybbuk. The elderly woman had acquired the cabinet in Spain after escaping there from a concentration camp, then brought it with her when she emigrated to America – along with a steamer trunk and a sewing box.

Kevin also wrote that after he bought the cabinet, he was approached by the woman’s granddaughter, who said her grandmother had always kept the cabinet closed, in her sewing room, in a place well out of reach, and that she always called it the “dibbuk box.” When the granddaughter asked her what was in it, the woman would spit through her fingers three times and say “a dibbuk” and “keselim” and that it must never, ever be opened.

The grandmother had expressed a wish for the cabinet to be buried with her. On hearing this, Kevin said he could let the young woman keep the cabinet without refunding him, but she became distraught and insisted that he take it away.

Kevin Mannis then wrote that the box had weird powers and was responsible for a series of nightmares and bad luck affecting his life. He took the cabinet back to his furniture refinishing shop and left it in the basement, intending to dress it up and gift it to his mother. He then went on an errand, leaving a young female sales assistant in charge.

After half an hour (Kevin wrote) he got a panicked call from the sales assistant, saying an intruder had gotten into the shop basement and was breaking glass, swearing, and had locked all the exits so she couldn’t escape. Kevin raced back to the shop and found all the lights downstairs shattered on the floor – including four fluorescent tubes – and a strange stench like cat urine in the basement. The sales assistant left and refused to work there again.

Kevin then wrote that he got to work inspecting the dybbuk box. It had a mechanism inside that caused the opposite door and the drawer in its bottom to simultaneously open along with the door he pulled, and inside he found an inexplicable array of objects:

• A 1928 U.S. wheat penny
• A 1925 U.S. wheat penny
• A lock of blonde hair tied with string
• A lock of brown or black hair tied with string
• A small granite statue gilded and engraved with the Hebrew letters spelling “Shalom” (or “peace”)
• A dried rosebud
• A golden wine cup
• A black cast iron candlestick with octopus legs.

Kevin wrote that he then cleaned the cabinet and rubbed it with lemon oil, noticing something carved into the back of the box. Disaster struck when he tried to give the box to his mother as a gift, resulting in her having to go to hospital after suffering a stroke.

You can find out more about how things went from bad to worse for Kevin – according to his written account – at https://www.dibbukbox.com/story.html

Subsequent owners of the dybbuk box retold Mannis’s tale when selling the cabinet, and added their own accounts of terrifying phenomena in connection with it. You’d think that would put people off buying it, but then again, humans are strange.

Another of the cabinet’s owners, a Jason Haxton (Director of an osteopathy museum in Kirksville, Missouri) created the website about the haunted box at dibbukbox.com. It apparently received hundreds of thousands of visitors and the story became something of an online legend. In 2004, Jason Haxton sold the rights to the tale to a Hollywood production company.

The film that resulted from all of this was The Possession, released in 2012 and produced by Sam Raimi.

Jason then gave the dybbuk box to Zak Bagans, the star of Ghost Adventures, to put on display in his museum of haunted objects in Los Angeles.

In 2018, fans of the singer Post Malone suggested that his spate of misfortune was down to him having some contact with the haunted cabinet. Post Malone went to visit Zak Bagans’s museum and touched Zak on the shoulder after Zak had touched the box, which was apparently enough to get him “cursed.” In September 2018, the singer had some mishaps including two tyres on his private jet blowing out on the runway, his old house getting broken into by people with guns a few days later, and his Rolls Royce crashing into another car a week afterwards.

But what on Earth is a dybbuk, or a dibbuk? And what really happened?

---

The Dybbuk

According to the Encyclopedia Mythica, a dybbuk is a disembodied spirit possessing a living body that belongs to another soul. The spirit usually talks using that person’s mouth, and the idea of the dybbuk comes from Hebrew mythology.

A 1914 Yiddish play, The Dybbuk, was about the ghost of a dead man possessing the living body of a woman he had loved, and he had to be exorcised.

The word dybbuk comes from the Hebrew dibuq, meaning “a case of attachment.” This is derived from the verb dabaq (to adhere or to cling). The dybbuk is mentioned in old 16th century texts, but was more or less forgotten until the Yiddish play.

Traditionally, dybbuks were believed to be male spirits, as the Jewish religion held that women didn’t reincarnate. The dybbuks were said to possess women on the night before their weddings, typically in an inappropriate way, through their privates. However, dybbuks could also possess men and boys.

A Jewish boy in the Galilean village of Safed in 1540 was reportedly possessed by a soul that had previously been inside a dog. The soul within the dog possessed the boy to gain revenge after the boy’s father killed it.

In April 1999, a 38-year-old widow in Dimona, Israel was convinced she had been possessed by the soul of her dead husband. A rabbi diagnosed her with dybbuk possession and conducted an exorcism for it which was later shown on Israeli TV.

A dybbuk was believed to possess someone because it needed some kind of help, either to confess guilt about something, finish an incomplete task, or undergo expiation of a sin before it could move on to Gehenna or heaven. Exorcism was a healing for the possessed person but also a correction for the possessing spirit.

The idea of the dybbuk may have allowed people to express socially unacceptable urges in the past.

According to the author Brian Dunning, there is no precedent for a dybbuk possessing a box or other inanimate object in written folklore.

---

The Hoax

In January 2019, Kenny Biddle of the Skeptical Inquirer investigated the dybbuk box when it was on view in Zak Bagans’s haunted museum in LA. He concluded that the cabinet was not actually an old Jewish wine cabinet from Spain but instead a minibar from New York.

Kevin Mannis, being a creative writer, invented the story while posting the box for sale online. One of his Facebook posts to the Haunt ME page read:

“I am the original creator of the story of The Dibbuk Box which appeared as one of my Ebay [sic] posts back in 2003. … How about this – if you or anyone else can find any reference to a Dibbut [sic] Box anywhere in history prior to my Ebay post, I’ll pay you $100,000.00 and tattoo your name on my forehead.”

Mannis wanted the dybbuk box to become “an interactive horror story in real time.” The carving in the back of the box was his own handiwork, and the stone inside the box was also a design he created.

---

Sources

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-45559534

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dybbuk_box

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dybbuk

https://www.dibbukbox.com/story.html

---

Many years ago, I read a book in Michelle Paver’s The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness which had a being known as a Tokoroth in it. On seeing it mentioned again as a “tokolosh” during a TV documentary, I thought it was time to do a little investigation…

---

---

In Zulu and Xhosa mythology, the Tokoloshe is a dwarf-type water spirit. It can be mischievous and often evil, and it gains the power of invisibility by drinking water or from swallowing a stone – however it is usually visible to children, animals, and people with the “sight.”

Other names for the Tokoloshe include tikoloshe, tikolosh, tonkolosh, tonkolosi, tokolotshe, thokolosi, or the hili.

At its least evil, the tokoloshe is used as a cautionary being to scare children into behaving, but at its worst, it can cause illness or even death to its victims.

People protect themselves from these beings by sleeping in beds raised off the ground. Pastors and traditional healers called sangomas are believed to have the power to get rid of them.

Practitioners of harmful magic summon the tokoloshe to do damage to others. They are usually a witch doctor or shaman performing magic to deliver revenge on behalf of a client. In return for the birth of the tokoloshe, the client has to promise the soul of a loved one in exchange, but they cannot choose who that person will be. The tokoloshe is the one who decides what soul to take away.

The shaman finds a dead body for the tokoloshe to inhabit, then penetrates its eye sockets and brain with a hot, iron rod or poker, or even a nail. The rod is believed to prevent the body from thinking for itself.

Then, the shaman sprinkles the corpse with a certain powder that causes it to shrink. After the tokoloshe takes possession of the shrunken body, it is released to cause terror and trouble for its intended victim, claiming the soul of the client’s loved one for weeks, months, or even years.

The phantom Tokoloshe began with folklore tales told by the Bantu people of South Africa. Back then, people kept dying in their rondavels (cone-roofed huts) during the night, and no explanation could be found as to why, so they blamed the deaths on the Tokoloshe, imagined as a short, primate-like man with brown or black hair, whose head reached hip-height, or 3 feet tall. Traditionally, the Bantu people slept on the floor on grass mats surrounding a wood fire, which helped keep them warm in the sub-freezing winter nights on the African inland plateau.

The nocturnal deaths were in fact caused by the fire drawing too much oxygen out of the air, leaving carbon monoxide instead. Carbon monoxide is heavier than air, so it sank to the ground and asphyxiated people in their sleep.

Eventually, the Bantu people realised that those who slept off the ground escaped the tokoloshe. According to legend, you must slot a few bricks under each leg of your bed to keep the tokoloshe away at night.

This being is also believed to bite off the toes of sleeping people (frostbite, perhaps?), move objects, make weird sounds and cold spots, and can leave long scratches on sleepers’ bodies with its long, bony fingers.

The Tokoloshe could be seen as a type of zombie, gremlin, or even a poltergeist. It can wander about, causing harm to schoolchildren. According to the Zulu shaman Credo Mutwa, a tokoloshe can take on many different shapes. It can sometimes appear as a bearish humanoid, or a small, withered, grey being with gouged-out eyes and a hole in its forehead. It can change itself into a cat or a dog or some other innocuous animal so it can sneak into houses.

The tokoloshe has also been described as a goblin-like entity the size of a small child, that can shrink itself to avoid detection. It has a large head disproportionate to its body, long, skinny arms, and short, stumpy legs. It can have a sharp face and pointed ears, sharp teeth or fangs, and bulging, red, or glowing eyes.

The Tokoloshe is fast and ghostly, and has a taste for curdled milk, blood, or ashes. It is still regarded with fear and superstition by South African peoples today, and is believed to sexually assault men and women, beat or choke people while they sleep, and steal things like clothes or livestock. Some folk believe the 3 foot tall being has a 6 foot long penis (!) with which it impregnates young women. Shamans keep the tokoloshe docile by cutting the hair around its eyes.

The only method of destroying a tokoloshe is to find and eliminate the muthi or muti, or remnants of the magic that was done by the shaman – this can be different oils, herbal balms, the body parts of animals, ashes, and blood. This concoction is often buried close to the home of the tokoloshe’s intended target, and is used by the witch or umthakathi to awaken the spiritual forces needed to summon the Tokoloshe.

However, some tales have it that the Tokoloshe is summoned from rivers and ponds, or a calabash full of enchanted water, with incantations spoken over it and charms mixed in. Other stories describe the Tokoloshe as a type of witch’s familiar conjured from thin air or an animal like a cat, baboon, or snake.

Prevention or appeasement of the tokoloshe (aside from raising beds with bricks) involves scattering blessed salts around doorframes and windowsills. Tokoloshe salts are often dyed in various colours. Traditional Zulu healers or izinyanga give herbal medicines and charms, or perform cleansing ceremonies to repel Tokoloshe attacks.

In 2009, there were some cases of female, human-sized tokoloshe who claimed to have the name Livashni. This hasn’t been logically explained yet.

---

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokoloshe

https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Tokoloshe

Reddit (r/mythology)

https://astonishinglegends.com/astonishing-legends/2019/2/16/the-tokoloshe

https://oriire.com/article/tokoloshe—fear-witchcraft-and-the-unseen-forces-of-zulu-society