Devil's Quoit (Sampson)

Pembrokeshire - in common with several other districts in Great Britain and Ireland - possesses a good phantom coach legend, localised in the southern part of the county, at a place where four roads meet, called Sampson Cross.

In old days, the belated farmer, driving home in his gig from market, was apt to cast a nervous glance over his shoulder as his pony slowly climbed the last steep pitch leading up to the Cross. For he remembered the story connected with that dark bit of road, that told how every night a certain Lady Z. (who lived in the seventeenth century, and whose monument is in the church close by) drives over from Tenby, ten miles distant, in a coach drawn by headless horses, guided by a headless coachman. She also has no head; and arriving by midnight at Sampson Cross, the whole equipage is said to disappear in a flame of fire, with a loud noise of explosion.

A clergyman living in the immediate neighbourhood, who told me the story, said that some people believed the ghostly traveller had been safely "laid" many years ago, in the waters of a lake not far distant. He added, however that might be, it was an odd fact that his sedate and elderly cob, when driven past the Cross after nightfall, would invariably start as if frightened there, a thing which never happened by daylight.