, just before leaving off
work, they climbed up a tree, but happening to look down, whom should
they see but the Squire, wearing his three-cornered hat, and dressed in
the clothes he used to wear when alive, and he was leaning against the
trunk of the tree on which they were perched. In great fright they
dropped to the ground and took to their heels. They ran without stopping
to Bryn Coch, but there, to their horror, stood the Squire in the middle
of the road quietly leaning on his staff. They again avoided him and ran
home every step, without looking behind them. The orchard robbers never
again saw their late master, nor did they ever again attempt to rob the
orchard.

_David Salisbury's Ghost_.

I will quote from _Bye-Gones_, vol. iii., p. 211, an account of this
Spirit.

"There was an old Welsh tradition in vogue some fifty years ago, that
one David Salisbury, son of _Harri Goch_ of Llanrhaiadr, near
Denbigh, and grandson to Thomas Salisbury hen of Lleweni, had given
considerable trouble to the living, long after his remains had been
laid in the grave. A good old soul, Mr. Griffiths of Llandegla,
averred that he had seen his ghost, mounted upon a white horse,
galloping over hedges and ditches in the dead of night, and had heard
his 'terrible groans,' which, he concluded, proceeded from the weight
of sin troubling the unhappy soul, which had to undergo these
untimely and unpleasant antics. An old Welsh ballad entitled 'Ysbryd
Dafydd Salbri,' professed to give the true account of the individual
in question, but the careful search of many years has failed me in
securing a copy of that horrible song.

GORONWY IFAN."

This Spirit fared better than most of his compeers, for they, poor
things, were, according to the popular voice, often doomed to ride
headless horses, which madly galloped, the livelong night, hither and
thither, where they would, to the great terror of the midnight traveller
who might meet this mad unmanageable creature, and also, as it would
seem, to the additional discomfort of the unfortunate rider.

It is, or was believed in Gyffylliog parish, which is in the recesses of
the Denbighshire mountains, four or five miles to the west of Ruthin,
that the horses ridden by Spirits and goblins were real horses, and it
was there said when horses were found in their stables at dawn in a state
of perspiration that they had been taken out in