ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the evolution from late eighteenth-to twenty-first-century literature of ghosts associated with the ancient monuments of Wales, its castles, and its prehistoric menhirs and ancient burial sites. It explores the literary representation of other more varied spectral presences who also owe their origin to the rites and beliefs of the Druids. In modern Wales, however, from the mid-eighteenth century, a successive wave of religious revivals led to the attempted suppression of such folk superstitions. Yet some atypical Welsh divines encouraged a belief in ghosts on the grounds that it could bolster a Christian faith. In like manner the role of many of the ghosts which haunt Welsh literature is, as have seen, to serve as reminders of their culture’s long history; their still as yet unfinished business is to aid in the survival of Welsh ethnicity per se.
