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Folk Horror Urban Legends

The Corpse Candles: “Follow Not the Flame”

FLASH FICTION

The Corpse Candles

A bluish flame, no wick, no lantern—a mere solo light, trembled in the dark. (image by Poe)

Follow Not the Flame

The candle appeared on the third night.

Elin first saw it through her cottage window, floating just above the dry stone wall that marked the edge of her father’s pasture. A bluish flame, no wick, no lantern—only light, trembling slightly in the windless dark.

At first, she thought it a trick of the eye. But then the dogs howled in an eerie, ear-piercing lamentation.

By the time she opened the door, the flame had drifted halfway up the footpath toward the chapel ruins.

She watched it for a long time, unmoving. Then she closed the door and bolted it.

Her grandmother had warned her about Canwyll Corff. Corpse candles. Lights of the dead.

It’s Just a Tale

By morning, the candle had vanished.

Elin went about her chores with a weight behind her eyes. Her father sat in his usual chair by the hearth, wrapped in the same old blanket, tea cooling in his gnarled hands. He hadn’t spoken since the stroke, but he watched her now, eyes too wide, too knowing.

“Don’t fret, Da,” she whispered. “It’s just a tale.”

That night, the candle returned.

This time there were two. (Image by Poe.)

This time, there were two.

They floated together—one high, one low—moving steadily from the pasture toward the chapel again. Elin stepped out onto the porch, her breath a ghost in the cold spring air.

The smaller light flickered like a heartbeat. A child’s candle.

She thought of her brother’s daughter, Bronwyn, barely six, sleeping upstairs with her mother while her father worked the night shift in Aberystwyth.

Elin took one step off the porch.

The candles paused.

She took another.

And they resumed their path, winding through the sheep gate, over the narrow stone bridge, toward the bramble-choked ruins where the dead of Llanwenog were buried before the plague wiped out half the village.

Just a Tale…

She followed

The grass was wet and cold beneath her bare feet. Thorns reached like fingers from the underbrush, catching at her nightdress. The candles led without hesitation, never flickering in the rising wind.

They stopped at the chapel’s hollow threshold.

There, between broken pews and shattered stone, Elin saw a figure kneeling.

A girl—no more than six, long hair tangled, face turned away.

“Bronwyn?” she called.

The child didn’t move.

Elin stepped forward.

The candles flared.

Then vanished.

The chapel was empty.

No girl. No light.

Only a stone slab carved with her family’s name, slick with moss and something darker. There Elin found her father’s name. Her brother’s. And her own.

Freshly etched.

Into the Fog

Into the fog, the child went.

At dawn, the villagers found Elin’s body at the chapel gate. Face pale, eyes wide, lips still parted in a half-whispered name.

Bronwyn, they said, would not stop crying.

They buried Elin before the week’s end.

But on the seventh night, a single bluish flame floated from the pasture once more—small and low to the earth.

And Bronwyn, sleepwalking, followed it into the fog.


For more Folk Horror and Urban Legends check out the following.

Icelandic Changelings

The Ghost Doctor Urban Legend

Sleep deep, dream strange, and I’ll be here when the mist returns.
Clara Bush
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