This article was first published in The Caernarvon and Denbigh Herald, May 1984.
In that year the B.P.O.S. were investigating local stories of a phantom black monk seen near the old farmstead of Pen-y-Bryn in Llanddeiniolen. This remote location in the Snowdonian Valley of North Wales is only two miles distant from Deiniolen where a similar figure had been sighted.
There is an old graveyard adjoining an isolated church in the area; but ironically there were (then at least) no useable roads leading to it. When people passed away in the vicinity and needed to be conveyed to the site for committal and burial there was no ready access except via an overgrown path adjacent to the farmhouse. In past centuries this had become known as “the funeral path”. It was upon this corpse path (as such routes are commonly known), that the Black Monk had been alleged to manifest …
