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The Ghost World

by T. F. Thiselton-Dyer · English · Gutenberg #45362 · 529,856 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Ghost World

Author: T. F. Thiselton-Dyer


        
Release date: April 11, 2014 [eBook #45362]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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THE GHOST WORLD

by

T. F. THISELTON DYER

Author of 'Church Lore Gleanings' etc.







London
Ward & Downey
12 York Street Covent Garden
1893

All rights reserved




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                      PAGE
       I. THE SOUL'S EXIT                         1
      II. TEMPORARY EXIT OF SOUL                 17
     III. THE NATURE OF THE SOUL                 24
      IV. THE UNBURIED DEAD                      43
       V. WHY GHOSTS WANDER                      50
      VI. GHOSTS OF THE MURDERED                 64
     VII. PHANTOM BIRDS                          85
    VIII. ANIMAL GHOSTS                         102
      IX. PHANTOM LIGHTS                        127
       X. THE HEADLESS GHOST                    144
      XI. PHANTOM BUTTERFLIES                   159
     XII. RAISING GHOSTS                        163
    XIII. GHOST LAYING                          179
     XIV. GHOSTS OF THE DROWNED                 206
      XV. GHOST SEERS                           214
     XVI. GHOSTLY DEATH-WARNINGS                219
    XVII. 'SECOND SIGHT'                        233
   XVIII. COMPACTS BETWEEN THE LIVING AND DEAD  245
     XIX. MINDERS' GHOSTS                       257
      XX. THE BANSHEE                           278
     XXI. SEE PHANTOMS                          284
    XXII. PHANTOM DRESS                         303
   XXIII. HAUNTED HOUSES                        310
    XXIV. HAUNTED LOCALITIES                    335
     XXV. CHECKS AND SPELLS AGAINST GHOSTS      354
    XXVI. WRAITH-SEEING                         363
   XXVII. GHOSTLY TIMES AND SEASONS             382
  XXVIII. SPIRIT-HAUNTED TREES                  391
    XXIX. GHOSTS AND HIDDEN TREASURES           397
     XXX. PHANTOM MUSIC                         411
    XXXI. PHANTOM SOUNDS                        426
          INDEX                                 439




THE GHOST WORLD




CHAPTER I

THE SOUL'S EXIT


In the Iliad,[1] after the spirit of Patroclus has visited Achilles
in his dream, it is described as taking its departure, and entering
the ground like smoke. In long after years, and among widely scattered
communities, we meet with the same imagery; and it is recorded how
the soul of Beowulf the Goth 'curled to the clouds,' imaging the
smoke which was curling up from his pyre. A similar description of
the soul's exit is mentioned in one of the works of the celebrated
mystic, Jacob Boehme,[2] who observes: 'Seeing that man is so very
earthly, therefore he hath none but earthly knowledge; except he be
regenerated in the gate of the deep. He always supposeth that the
soul--at the deceasing of the body--goeth only out at the mouth, and he
understandeth nothing concerning its deep essences above the elements.
When he seeth a blue vapour go forth out of the mouth of a dying man,
then he supposeth that is the soul.' The same conception is still
extensively believed throughout Europe, and the Russian peasant often
sees ghostly smoke hovering above graves. The Kaffirs hold that at
death man leaves after him a sort of smoke, 'very like the shadow which
his living body will always cast before it,'[3] reminding us of the
hero in the Arabian romance of Yokdnan, who seeks the source of life
and thought, and discovers in one of the cavities of the heart a bluish
vapour--the living soul. Among rude races the original idea of the
human soul seems to have been that of vaporous materiality, which, as
Dr. Tylor observes,[4] has held so large a place in modern philosophy,
and in one shape or another crops up in ghost stories. The Basutos,
speaking of a dead man, say that his heart has gone out, and the Malays
affirm that the soul of a dying man escapes through the nostrils.

Hogarth has represented the figure of Time breathing forth his last--a
puff of breath proceeding from his mouth; and a correspondent of
'Notes and Queries'[5] relates that, according to a popular belief, a
considerable interval invariably elapses between the first semblance
of death and what is considered to be the departure of the soul, about
five minutes after the time when death, to all outward appearances,
has taken place, 'the last breath' may be seen to issue with a vapour
'or steam' out of the mouth of the departed. According to some foreign
tribes, the soul was said to dwell mainly in the left eye; and in New
Zealand men always ate the left eye of a conquered enemy. At Tahiti,
in the human sacrifices, the left eye of the victim was always offered
to the chief presiding over the ceremony. It was further believed in
New Zealand that 'in eating the left eye they doubled their own soul by
incorporating with it that of the conquered man. It was also thought
by some people in the same archipelago that a spirit used to dwell in
both eyes.'[6]

The supposed escape of the soul from the mouth at death gave rise to
the idea that the vital principle might be transferred from one person
to another; and, among the Seminoles of Florida, when a woman died in
childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive her parting
spirit. Algonquin women, desirous of becoming mothers, flocked to the
bed of those about to die, in the hope that they might receive the
last breath as it passed from the body; and to this day the Tyrolese
peasant still fancies a good man's soul to issue from his mouth at
death like a little white cloud.[7] We may trace the same fancy in our
own country, and it is related[8] that while a well-known Lancashire
witch lay dying, 'she must needs, before she could "shuffle off this
mortal coil," transfer her familiar spirit to some trusty successor.
An intimate acquaintance from a neighbouring township was sent for in
all haste, and on her arrival was immediately closeted with her dying
friend. What passed between them has never fully transpired; but it is
asserted that at the close of the interview the associate received the
witch's last breath into her mouth, and with it her familiar spirit.
The powers for good or evil were thus transferred to her companion.'

In order that the soul, as it quits the body, may not be checked in its
onward course, it has long been customary to unfasten locks or bolts,
and to open doors, so that the struggle between life and death may not
be prolonged--a superstition common in France, Germany, Spain, and
England. A correspondent of 'Notes and Queries' tells how for a long
time he had visited a poor man who was dying, and was daily expecting
death. Upon calling one morning to see his poor friend, his wife
informed him that she thought he would have died during the night, and
hence she and her friends unfastened every lock in the house; for, as
she added, any bolt or lock fastened was supposed to cause uneasiness
to, and hinder, the departure of the soul.[9] We find the same belief
among the Chinese, who make a hole in the roof to let out the departing
soul; and the North American Indian, fancying the soul of a dying man
to go out at the wigwam roof, would beat the sides with a stick to
drive it forth. Sir Walter Scott, in 'Guy Mannering,' describes this
belief as deep rooted among 'the superstitious eld of Scotland;' and at
the smuggler's death in the Kaim of Derncleugh, Meg Merrilies unbars
the door and lifts the latch, saying--

    Open lock, end strife,
    Come death, and pass life.

A similar practice exists among the Esquimos, and one may often hear
a German peasant express his dislike to slam a door, lest he should
pinch a soul in it. It has been suggested that the unfastening of doors
and locks at death may be explained by analogy and association. Thus,
according to a primitive belief, the soul, or the life, was thought to
be tied up,[10] so that the unloosing of any knot might help to get
rid of it at death. The same superstition 'prevailed in Scotland as
to marriage. Witches cast knots on a cord; and in a Perthshire parish
both parties, just before marriage, had every knot or tie about them
loosened, though they immediately proceeded in private to tie them each
up again.'[11] Another explanation suggests that the custom is founded
on the idea that, when a person died, the ministers of purgatorial
pains took the soul as it escaped from the body, and flattening it
against some closed door--which alone would serve the purpose--crammed
it into the hinges and hinge openings; thus the soul in torment was
likely to be miserably squeezed. By opening the doors, the friends
of the departed were at least assured that they were not made the
unconscious instruments of torturing the departed.[12]

There is a widespread notion among the poor that the spirit will linger
in the body of a child a long time when the parent refuses to part with
it, an old belief which, under a variety of forms, has existed from a
primitive period. In Denmark one must not weep over the dying, still
less allow tears to fall on them, for it will hinder their resting in
the grave. In some parts of Holland, when a child is at the point of
death, it is customary to shade it by the curtains from the parents'
gaze, the soul, it is said, being detained in the body so long as
a compassionate eye is fixed upon it. A German piece of folk-lore
informs us that he who sheds tears when leaning over an expiring friend
increases the difficulty of death's last struggle. A correspondent
of 'Notes and Queries' alluding to this superstition in the North of
England writes: 'I said to Mrs. B----, "Poor little H---- lingered a
long time; I thought when I saw him that he must have died the same
day, but he lingered on!" "Yes," said Mrs. B----, "it was a great shame
of his mother. He wanted to die, and she would not let him die; she
couldn't part with him. There she stood fretting over him, and couldn't
give him up; and so we said to her, 'He'll never die till you give him
up,' and then she gave him up, and he died quite peacefully."'[13]

Similarly, it is not good to weep for the dead, as it disturbs the
peace and rest of the soul. In an old Danish ballad of Aage and Else, a
lover's ghost says to his mistress:

    Every time thou weepest, for each tear in that flood,
    The coffin I am laid in is filled with much blood.

Or, as another version has it:

    Every time thou'rt joyful,
      And in thy mind art glad,
    Then is my grave within
      Hung round with roses' leaves.

    Every time thou grievest,
      And in thy mind are sad,
    Then is within my coffin
      As if full of clotted blood.

A German song tells us how a sister wept incessantly over her brother's
grave, but at last her tears became intolerable to the deceased,
because he was detained on earth by her excessive weeping, and suffered
thereby great torment. In a fit of desperation he cursed her, and in
consequence of his malediction, she was changed into a cuckoo, so that
she might always lament for herself.[14] Mannhardt relates a pretty
tale of a young mother who wept incessantly over the loss of her
only child, and would not be comforted. Every night she went to the
little grave and sobbed over it, till, on the evening preceding the
Epiphany, she saw Bertha pass not far from her, followed by her troop
of children. The last of these was one whose little shroud was all
wet, and who seemed exhausted by the weight of a pitcher of water she
carried. It tried in vain to cross a fence over which Bertha and the
rest had passed; but the fond mother, at once recognising her child,
ran and lifted it over. 'Oh, how warm are mother's arms!' said the
little one; 'but don't cry so much, mother, for I must gather up every
tear in my pitcher. You have made it too full and heavy already. See
how it has run over and wet all my shift.' The mother cried again, but
soon dried her tears.

We may compare a similar superstition among the natives of Alaska,
when, if too many tears were shed by the relatives during the burial
ceremonies, it was thought that the road of the dead would be muddy,
but a few tears were supposed just to lay the dust.[15] The same idea
is found in a Hindu dirge: 'The souls of the dead do not like to
taste the tears let fall by their kindred; weep not, therefore;' and,
according to the Edda, every tear falls as blood upon the ice-cold
bosom of the dead. We may trace the belief in Ireland, and Sir Walter
Scott says[16] it was generally supposed throughout Scotland that 'the
excessive lamentation over the loss of friends disturbed the repose of
the dead, and broke even the rest of the grave.'

The presence of pigeon or game feathers is said to be another hindrance
to the exit of the soul; and, occasionally, in order to facilitate its
departure, the peasantry in many parts of England will lay a dying man
on the floor. A Sussex nurse once told the wife of a clergyman that
'never did she see anyone die so hard as Master Short; and at last she
thought--though his daughter said there were none--that there must be
game feathers in the bed. So she tried to pull it from under him, but
he was a heavy man, and she could not manage it alone, and there was
none with him but herself, and so she got a rope and tied it round him,
and pulled him right off the bed, and he went off in a minute quite
comfortable, just like a lamb.'[17] In Lancashire, this belief is so
deep-rooted that some persons will not allow sick persons to lie on a
feather-bed; while in Yorkshire the same is said of cocks' feathers.
Shakespeare alludes to the practice where Timon says[18]--

    Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads.

And Grose remarks: 'It is impossible for a person to die whilst resting
on a pillow stuffed with the feathers of a dove, for he will struggle
with death in the most exquisite torture.' This is also a Hindu and
Mohammedan belief, and in India 'the dying are always taken from
their beds and laid on the ground, it being held that no one can die
peaceably except when laid on mother earth.'[19] In Russia, too, there
is a strong feeling against the use of pigeon feathers in beds.

The summons for the soul to quit its earthly tenement has been thought
to be announced, from early times, by certain strange sounds, a belief
which Flatman has embodied in some pretty lines:

    My soul, just now about to take her flight
    Into the regions of eternal night,
    Methinks I hear some gentle spirit say,
    'Be not fearful, come away!'

Pope speaks in the same strain:

    Hark! they whisper, angels say,
    'Sister spirit, come away!'

And in 'Troilus and Cressida' (iv. 4), the former says:

    Hark! you are called; some say, the Genius so
    Cries 'Come!' to him that instantly must die.

As in days gone by so also at the present time, there is, perhaps,
no superstition more generally received than the belief in what are
popularly known as 'death-warnings,'[20] reference to which we shall
have occasion to make in a later chapter.

It has been urged again, that at the hour of death the soul is, as it
were, on the confines of two worlds, and hence may possess a power
which is both prospective and retrospective. In 'Richard II.' (ii. 1),
the dying Gaunt exclaims, alluding to his nephew, the young and
self-willed king:

    Methinks I am a prophet, new inspired,
    And thus expiring do foretell of him.

Nerissa says of Portia's father in 'Merchant of Venice' (i. 2): 'Your
father was ever virtuous; and holy men at their death have good
inspirations.' This idea may be traced up to the time of Homer,[21]
and Aristotle tells us that the soul, when on the point of death,
foretells things about to happen; the belief still lingering on in
Lancashire and other parts of England. According to another notion, it
was generally supposed that when a man was on his death-bed, the devil
or his agents tried to seize his soul, if it should happen that he died
without receiving the 'Eucharist,' or without confessing his sins. In
the old office books of the Church, these 'busy meddling fiends' are
often represented with great anxiety besieging the dying man; but on
the approach of the priest and his attendants they are represented as
being dismayed. Douce[22] quotes from a manuscript book of devotion, of
the time of Henry VI., the following prayer to St. George: 'Judge for
me when the most hedyous and damnable dragons of helle shall be redy
to take my poore soule and engloute it into theyr infernall belyes.'
One object, it has been urged, of the 'passing bell' was to drive away
the evil spirit that might be hovering about to seize the soul of the
deceased, such as the king speaks of in 2 Henry VI. (iii. 3):

    O, beat away the busy meddling fiend,
    That lays strong siege unto this wretch's soul,
    And from his bosom purge this black despair.

We may find the same idea among the Northern Californians, who affirmed
that when the soul first escaped from the body an evil spirit hovered
near, ready to pounce upon it and carry it off.[23]

It is still a common belief with our seafaring community on the
east coast of England, that the soul takes its departure during the
falling of the tide. Everyone remembers the famous scene in 'David
Copperfield,' where Barkis's life 'goes out with the tide.' As Mr.
Peggotty explained to David Copperfield by poor Barkis's bedside,
'People can't die along the coast except when the tide's pretty nigh
out. He's a-going out with the tide--he's a-going out with the tide.
It's ebb at half arter three, slack water half an hour. If he lives
till it turns he'll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with
the next tide.' In the parish register of Heslidon, near Hartlepool,
the subjoined extract of old date alludes to the state of the tide
at the time of death: 'The xith daye of Maye, A.D. 1595, at vi of
ye clocke in the morninge, being full water, Mr. Henrye Mitford, of
Hoolam, died at Newcastel, and was buried the xvi daie, being Sondaie.
At evening prayer, the hired preacher made ye sermon.' Mrs. Quickly
in 'Henry V.' (ii. 3) speaking of Falstaff's death says: ''A made a
finer end and went away an it had been any christom child; 'a parted
even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o' the tide.' In
Brittany, death claims its victim at ebb of the tide, and along the
New England coast it is said a sick man cannot die until the ebb-tide
begins to run. It has been suggested that there may be some slight
foundation for this belief in the change of temperature which takes
place on the change of tide, and which may act on the flickering spark
of life, extinguishing it as the ebbing sea recedes.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] xxiii. 100; Keary's _Outlines of Primitive Belief_, p. 284.

[2] _The Three Principles_, chap. xix. 'Of the Going Forth of the Soul.'

[3] Letourneau's _Sociology_, p. 252.

[4] _Primitive Culture_, 1873, i. p. 457.

[5] 1st S. ii. p. 51.

[6] Letourneau's _Sociology_, p. 257.

[7] Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 433; Brinton's _Myths of the New
World_, p. 253.

[8] Harland and Wilkinson's _Lancashire Folk-lore_, 1867, p. 210.

[9] 1st S. i. p. 315.

[10] Cf. 'Nexosque resolveret artus,' Virgil on the death of Dido.
Æneid iv. 695.

[11] See Dalyell's _Darker Superstitions of Scotland_, p. 302, and
_Notes and Queries_, 1st S. iv. p. 350.

[12] _Ibid._ i. p. 467.

[13] 1st S. iii. p. 84.

[14] Kelly's _Indo-European Folk-lore_, pp. 127-128.

[15] Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 43.

[16] In a note to _Redgauntlet_, Letter xi.

[17] _Folk-lore Record_, i. pp. 59-60.

[18] _Timon of Athens_, iv. 3.

[19] Henderson's _Folk-lore of Northern Counties_, pp. 60-61.

[20] See Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 145.

[21] _Iliad_, ii. 852.

[22] _Illustrations of Shakspeare_, 1839, pp. 324-326.

[23] Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 40.




CHAPTER II

TEMPORARY EXIT OF SOUL


Many of the conceptions of the human soul formed by savage races arose
from the phenomena of everyday life. According to one of the most
popular dream theories prevalent among the lower races, the sleeper's
soul takes its exit during the hours of slumber, entering into a
thousand pursuits. Now, as it is well known by experience 'that men's
bodies do not go on these excursions, the explanation is that every
man's living self, a soul, is his phantom or image, which can go out of
his body and see, and be seen itself, in dreams.'[24] In the opinion
of the savage, therefore, dreams have always afforded a convincing
proof of the soul's separate existence, and Dr. Tylor considers that
'nothing but dreams and visions could ever have put into men's minds
such an idea as that of souls being ethereal images of bodies.'

Thus the Dayaks of Borneo believe that in the hours of sleep the soul
travels far away, and the Fijians think that the spirit of a living
man during sleep can leave the body and trouble some one else. But Mr.
E. im Thurn, in his 'Indians of Guiana' (344-346), gives some very
striking instances of this strange phase of superstitious belief:
'One morning, when it was important to me to get away from a camp
on the Essequibo River, at which I had been detained for some days
by the illness of some of my Indian companions, I found that one of
the invalids, a young Macusi Indian, though better in health, was so
enraged against me that he refused to stir, for he declared that,
with great want of consideration for his weak health, I had taken him
out during the night, and had made him haul the canoe up a series of
difficult cataracts. Nothing could persuade him that this was but a
dream, and it was some time before he was so far pacified as to throw
himself sulkily into the bottom of the canoe. At that time we were all
suffering from a great scarcity of food, and, hunger having its usual
effect in producing vivid dreams, similar events frequently occurred.
More than once the men declared in the morning that some absent men
whom they named had come during the night, and had beaten, or otherwise
maltreated them; and they insisted on much rubbing of the bruised parts
of their bodies.'[25]

Another evidence in savage culture of the soul's having its own
individuality, independently of the body, is the fact that a person
through some accident may suddenly fall into a swoon, remaining to
all outward appearance dead. When such a one, however, revives and is
restored to consciousness, the savage is wont to exclaim that he died
for a time until his soul was induced to return.

Hence Mr. Williams informs us[26] how the Fijians believe, when anyone
dies or faints, that the soul may sometimes be brought back by calling
after it; and in China, when a child is at the point of death, the
mother will go into the garden and call its name, thinking thereby to
bring back the wandering spirit. On this account divination and sorcery
are extensively employed, and certain 'wise men' profess to have a
knowledge of the mystic art of invoking souls that for some reason or
other may have deserted their earthly tenement.[27]

The Rev. W. W. Gill, in his 'Myths and Songs from the South Pacific'
(171-172), gives a curious instance of the wandering of the soul during
life. 'At Uea, one of the Loyalty Islands, it was the custom formerly,
when a person was very ill, to send for a man whose employment it was
to restore souls to forsaken bodies. The soul doctor would at once
collect his friends and assistants, to the number of twenty men, and
as many women, and start off to the place where the family of the sick
man was accustomed to bury their dead. Upon arriving there, the soul
doctor and his male companions commenced playing the nasal flutes with
which they had come provided, in order to entice back the spirit to
its old tenement. The women assisted by a low whistling, supposed to
be irresistibly attractive to exile spirits. After a time the entire
procession proceeded towards the dwelling of a sick person, flutes
playing and the women whistling all the time, leading back the truant
spirit. To prevent its possible escape, with their palms open, they
seemingly drove it along with gentle violence and coaxing. On entering
the dwelling of the patient, the vagrant spirit was ordered in loud
tones at once to enter the body of the sick man.'

In the same way, too, according to a popular superstition among rude
tribes, some favoured persons are supposed to have the faculty of
sending forth their own souls on distant journeys, and of acquiring, by
this means, information for their fellow creatures. Thus the Australian
doctor undergoes his initiation by such a journey, and those who are
not equally gifted by nature subject themselves to various ordeals,
so as to possess the supposed faculty of releasing their souls for a
time from the body. From this curious phase of superstition have arisen
a host of legendary stories, survivals of which are not confined to
uncivilised communities, but are found among the folk-tales of most
countries. Mr. Baring Gould,[28] for instance, quotes a Scandinavian
story in which the Norse Chief Ingimund shut up three Finns in a hut
for three nights so that their souls might make an expedition to
Iceland, and bring back information of the nature of the country where
he was eventually to settle. Accordingly their bodies soon became
rigid, they dismissed their souls on the errand, and on awakening after
three days, they gave Ingimund an elaborate description of the country
in question. We may compare this phase of belief with that which is
commonly known in this country as second sight.[29]

Among the Hervey Islanders, Mr. Gill says: 'The philosophy of sneezing
is that the spirit having gone travelling about--perchance on a visit
to the homes or burying-places of its ancestors--its return to the body
is naturally attended with some difficulty and excitement, occasionally
a tingling and enlivening sensation all over the body. Hence the
various customary remarks addressed to the returned spirit in different
islands. At Rarotonga, when a person sneezes, the bystanders exclaim,
as though addressing a spirit, "Ha! you have come back."'

Then there is the widespread Animistic belief, in accordance with which
each man has several souls;--some lower races treating the breath,
the dream ghost, and other appearances as being separate souls. This
notion seems to have originated in the pulsation of the heart and
arteries, which rude tribes regard as indications of independent life.
Thus this fancy is met with in various parts of America and exists
also in Madagascar. It prevails in Greenland, and the Fijians affirm
that each man has two souls. This belief, too, is very old, evidences
of its existence being clearly traceable among the ancient Greeks and
Romans.[30] Indeed, classic literature affords ample proof of how
the beliefs of modern savages are in many cases survivals of similar
notions held in olden times by nations that had made considerable
progress in civilisation.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Tylor's _Anthropology_, 1881, p. 343.

[25] See further instances in Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. pp. 440,
441.

[26] _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. p. 242.

[27] See Sir John Lubbock's _Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive
Condition of Man_, 1870, p. 141.

[28] _Werewolves_, p. 29.

[29] See Chapter on Second Sight.

[30] See Tylor's _Anthropology_, p. 345; and Sir John Lubbock's _Origin
of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man_, p. 141; and H.
Spencer's _Principles of Sociology_, 1885, i. p. 777.




CHAPTER III

THE NATURE OF THE SOUL


It has from time immemorial been a widely recognised belief among
mankind that the soul after death bears the likeness of its fleshly
body, although opinions have differed largely as to its precise nature.
But it would seem to be generally admitted that the soul set free from
its earthly tenement is at once recognised by anyone to whom it may
appear, reminding us of Lord Tennyson's dictum in 'In Memoriam':

    Eternal form shall still divide
    The eternal soul from all beside;
      And I shall know him when we meet.

Despite the fact that the disembodied spirit has been supposed to
retain its familiar likeness, we find all kinds of strange ideas
existing in most parts of the world as to what sort of a thing it
really is when its condition of existence is so completely changed.
Thus, according to a conception which has received in most ages very
extensive credence, the soul has substantiality. This was the Greek
idea of ghosts, and 'it is only,' writes Bishop Thirwall, 'after their
strength has been repaired by the blood of a slaughtered victim, that
they recover reason and memory for a time, can recognise their living
friends, and feel anxiety for those they have left on earth.' A similar
notion of substantiality prevailed among the Hebrews, and, as Herbert
Spencer points out, 'the stories about ghosts accepted among ourselves
in past times involved the same thought. The ability to open doors,
to clank chains, and make other noises implies considerable coherence
of the ghost's substance.'[31] That this conception of the soul was
not only received but taught, may be gathered from Tertullian, who
says: 'The soul is material, composed of a substance different to the
body, and particular. It has all the qualities of matter, but it is
immortal. It has a figure like the body. It is born at the same time as
the flesh, and receives an individuality of character which it never
loses.' He further describes[32] a vision or revelation of a certain
Montanist prophetess, of the soul seen by her corporeally, thin and
lucid, aerial in colour, and human in form. It is recorded, too, as
an opinion of Epicurus, that 'they who say the soul is incorporeal
talk folly, for it could neither do nor suffer anything were it such.'
It was the idea of materiality that caused the superstitious folk in
years gone by to attribute to ghosts all kinds of weird and eccentric
acts which could not otherwise be explained. And yet it has always
been a puzzle in Animistic philosophy, how a ghost could be possessed
at one moment of a corporeal body, and immediately afterwards vanish
into immateriality, escaping sight and touch. But this strange ghost
phenomenon is clearly depicted in sacred history, where we find
substantiality, now insubstantiality, and now something between the
two, described. Thus, as Herbert Spencer remarks,[33] 'the resuscitated
Christ was described as having wounds that admitted of tactual
examination, and yet as passing unimpeded through a closed door or
through walls.' And, as he adds, the supernatural beings of the Hebrews
generally, 'whether revived dead or not, were similarly conceived:
here, angels dining with Abraham, or pulling Lot into the house,
apparently possess complete corporeity; there, both angels and demons
are spoken of as swarming invisibly in the surrounding air, thus being
incorporeal; while elsewhere they are said to have wings, implying
motion by mechanical action, and are represented as rubbing against,
and wearing out, the dresses of Rabbis in the Synagogue.' All kinds
of strange theories have been suggested by perplexed metaphysicians
to account for this duplex nature of the disembodied soul; Calmet
having maintained that 'immaterial souls have their own vaporous
bodies, or occasionally have such vaporous bodies provided for them by
supernatural means to enable them to appear as spectres, or that they
possess the power of condensing the circumambient air into phantom-like
bodies to invest themselves in.'[34]

In Fiji the soul is regarded quite as a material object, subject
to the same laws as the living body, and having to struggle hard to
gain the paradisaical Bolotu. Some idea, too, of the hardships it has
to undergo in its material state may be gathered from the following
passage in Dr. Letourneau's 'Sociology' (p. 251): 'After death the soul
of the Fijian goes first of all to the eastern extremity of _Vanna
Levou_, and during this voyage it is most important that it should hold
in its hand the soul of the tooth of a spermaceti whale, for this tooth
ought to grow into a tree, and the soul of the poor human creature
climbs up to the top of this tree. When it is perched up there it is
obliged to await the arrival of the souls of his wives, who have been
religiously strangled to serve as escort to their master. Unless all
these and many other precautions are taken, the soul of the deceased
Fijian remains mournfully seated upon the fatal bough until the arrival
of the good Ravuyalo, who kills him once and for all, and leaves him
without means of escape.'

According to another popular and widely accepted doctrine, the soul
was supposed to be composed of a peculiar subtle substance, a kind
of vaporous materiality. The Choctaws have their ghosts or wandering
spirits which can speak and are visible, but not tangible.[35] The
Tongans conceived it as the aeriform part of the body, related to it as
the perfume and essence of a flower; and the Greenlanders speak of it
as pale and soft, without flesh and bone, so that he who tries to grasp
it feels nothing he can take hold of. The Siamese describe the soul as
consisting of some strange matter, invisible and untouchable. While Dr.
Tylor quotes a curious passage from Hampole,[36] in which the soul,
owing to the thinness of its substance, suffers all the more intense
suffering in purgatory:

    The soul is more tendre and nesche (soft)
    Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;
    Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,
    Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde,
    Than eni bodi that evere on live was.

Then there is the idea of the soul as a shadow, a form of superstition
which has given rise to many quaint beliefs among uncultured tribes.
The Basutos, when walking by a river, take care not to let their
shadow fall on the water, lest a crocodile seize it, and draw the
owner in. The Zulu affirms that at death the shadow of a man in some
mysterious way leaves the body, and hence, it is said, a corpse cannot
cast a shadow. Certain African tribes consider that 'as he dies, man
leaves a shadow behind him, but only for a short time. The shade, or
the mind, of the deceased remains, they think, close to the grave where
the corpse has been buried. This shadow is generally evil-minded, and
they often fly away from it in changing their place of abode.'[37] The
Ojibways tell how one of their chiefs died,[38] but while they were
watching the body on the third night, his shadow came back into it. He
sat up, and told them how he had travelled to the River of Death, but
was stopped there, and sent back to his people.

Speaking of the human shadow in relation to foundation sacrifices, we
are reminded[39] how, according to many ancient Roumenian legends,
'every new church or otherwise important building became a human
grave, as it was thought indispensable to its stability to wall in a
living man or woman, whose spirit henceforward haunts the place. In
later times this custom underwent some modifications, and it became
usual, in place of a living man, to wall in his shadow. This is done
by measuring the shadow of a person with a long piece of cord, or a
ribbon made of strips of reed, and interring this measure instead of
the person himself, who, unconscious victim of the spell thrown upon
him, will pine away and die within forty days. It is an indispensable
condition to the success of this proceeding that the chosen victim be
ignorant of the part he is playing, therefore careless passers by near
a building may often hear the cry, warning, "Beware, lest they take
thy shadow!" So deeply engrained is this superstition, that not long
ago there were professional shadow-traders, who made it their business
to provide architects with the necessary victims for securing their
walls.' 'Of course, the man whose shadow is thus interred must die,'
argues the Roumenian, 'but as he is unaware of his doom, he does not
feel any pain or anxiety, and so it is less cruel than walling in a
living man.'

At the present day in Russia, as elsewhere, a shadow is a common
metaphor for the soul,[40] whence it arises that there are persons
there who object to having their silhouettes taken, fearing that if
they do, they will die before the year is out. In the same way, a man's
reflected image is supposed to be in communion with his inner self,
and, therefore, children are often forbidden to look at themselves in a
glass, lest their sleep should be disturbed at night. It may be added,
too, as Mr. Clodd points out, that in the barbaric belief of the loss
of the shadow being baleful, 'we have the germ of the mediæval legends
of shadowless men, and of tales of which Chamisso's "Story of Peter
Schlemihl" is a type.'[41] Hence the dead in purgatory recognised that
Dante was alive when they saw that, unlike theirs, his figure cast a
shadow on the ground. But, as Mr. Fiske observes,[42] 'the theory which
identifies the soul with the shadow, and supposes the shadow to depart
with the sickness and death of the body, would seem liable to be
attended with some difficulties in the way of verification, even to the
dim intelligence of the savage.'

Again, another doctrine promulgated under various forms in Animistic
philosophy is, that the existence and condition of the soul depend upon
the manner of death. The Australian, for instance, not content with
slaying his enemy, cuts off the right thumb of the corpse, so that the
departed soul may be incapacitated from throwing a spear; and even the
half-civilised Chinese prefer the punishment of crucifixion to that of
decapitation, that their souls may not wander headless about the spirit
world. Similarly the Indians of Brazil 'believe that the dead arrive
in the other world wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact, just as they
left this.' European folk-lore has preserved, more or less, the same
idea, and the ghost of the murdered person often appears displaying
the wounds which were the cause of the death of the body. Many a
weird and ghastly ghost tale still current in different parts of the
country gives the most blood-curdling details of such apparitions; and
although, in certain cases, a century or so is said to have elapsed
since they first made their appearance, they still bear the marks of
violence and cruelty which were done to them by a murderous hand when
in the flesh. An old story tells how, when the Earl of Cornwall met the
fetch of William Rufus carried on a very large black goat, all black
and naked, across the Bodmin moors, he saw that it was wounded through
the breast. Robert adjured the goat, in the name of the Holy Trinity,
to tell what it was he carried so strangely. He answered, 'I am
carrying your king to judgment; yea, that tyrant, William Rufus, for I
am an evil spirit, and the revenger of his malice which he bore to the
Church of God. It was I that did cause this slaughter.' Having spoken,
the spectre vanished. Soon afterwards Robert heard that at that very
hour the king had been slain in the New Forest by the arrow of William
Tirell.[43] This idea corresponds with what was believed in early
times, for Ovid[44] tells us how

    Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto.

Again, some modes of death are supposed to kill not only the body but
also the soul. 'Among all primitive peoples,' writes Mr. Dorman,[45]
'where a belief in the renewal of life, or the resurrection, exists,
the peace and happiness of the spirit, which remains in or about the
body, depend upon success in preventing the body, or any part of it,
from being devoured or destroyed in any manner.' The New Zealanders
believed that the man who was eaten was annihilated, both body and
soul; and one day a bushman, who was a magician, having put to death
a woman, dashed the head of the corpse to pieces with large stones,
buried her, and made a large fire over the grave, for fear, as he
explained, lest she should rise again and trouble him. The same idea,
remarks Sir John Lubbock,[46] evidently influenced the Californian, who
did not dispute the immortality of the whites, who buried their dead,
but could not believe the same of his own people, because they were in
the habit of burning them, maintaining that when they were burnt they
became annihilated.

It may be added, too, that the belief underlying the burial customs
of most American tribes was to preserve the bones of the dead, the
opinion being that the soul, or a part of it, dwelt in the bones.
These, indeed, were the seeds which, planted in the earth, or preserved
unbroken in safe places, would in time put on once again a garb of
flesh, and germinate into living human beings.[47] This Animistic
belief has been amply illustrated by mythology and superstition. In
an Aztec legend, after one of the destructions of the world, Zoloti
descended to the realm of the dead, and brought thence a bone of
the perished race. This, sprinkled with blood, grew on the fourth
day into a youth, the father of the present race. The practice of
pulverising the bones of the dead, practised by some tribes, and of
mixing them with the food, was defended by asserting that the souls
of the dead remained in the bones, and lived again in the living.[48]
The Peruvians were so careful lest any of the body should be lost,
that they preserved even the parings of the nails and clippings of
the hair--expecting the mummified body to be inhabited by its soul;
while the Choctaws maintain that the spirits of the dead will return
to the bones in the bone mounds, and flesh will knit together their
loose joints. Even the lower animals were supposed to follow the same
law. 'Hardly any of the American hunting-tribes,' writes Mr. Brinton,
'before their original manners were vitiated by foreign influence,
permitted the bones of game slain in the chase to be broken, or left
carelessly about the encampment; they were collected in heaps, or
thrown into the water.' The Yuricares of Bolivia carried this belief
to such an inconvenient extent that they carefully put by even small
fish bones, saying that unless this was done the fish and game would
disappear from the country. The traveller on the western prairies
often notices the buffalo skulls, countless numbers of which bleach on
those vast plains, arranged in circles and symmetrical piles by the
careful hands of the native hunters. The explanation for this practice
is that these osseous relics of the dead 'contain the spirits of the
slain animals, and that some time in the future they will rise from the
earth, re-clothe themselves with flesh, and stock the prairies anew.'

As a curious illustration of how every spiritual conception was
materialised in olden times, may be quoted the fanciful conception
of the weight of the soul. Thus in mediæval literature the angel in
the Last Judgment 'was constantly represented weighing the souls in
a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavoured
to disturb the equilibrium.'[49] But how seriously such tests of the
weight of the soul have been received, may be gathered from the cases
now and then forthcoming of this materialistic notion of its nature.
These, writes Dr. Tylor,[50] range from the 'conception of a Basuto
diviner that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and
he never felt such a weight in his wife, to Glanvil's story of David
Hunter, the neatherd, who lifted up the old woman's ghost, and she felt
just like a bag of feathers in his arms; or the pathetic superstition
that the dead mother's coming back in the night to suckle the baby she
has left on earth, may be known by the hollow pressed down in the bed
where she lay, and at last down to the alleged modern spiritualistic
reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from three to four ounces.'
But the heavy tread which occasionally makes the stairs creak and
boards resound has been instanced as showing that, whatever may be
the real nature of the soul, it is capable of materialising itself at
certain times, and of displaying an amount of force and energy in no
way dissimilar to that which is possessed when living in the flesh.

Just, too, as souls are possessed of visible forms, so they are
generally supposed to have voices. According to Dr. Tylor,[51] 'men
who perceive evidently that souls do talk when they present themselves
in dream or vision, naturally take for granted at once the objective
reality of the ghostly voice, and of the ghostly form from which it
proceeds;' and this principle, he adds, 'is involved in the series of
narratives of spiritual communications with living men, from savagery
onward to civilisation.' European folk-lore represents ghostly voices
as resembling their material form during life, although less audible.
With savage races the spirit voice is described 'as a low murmur,
chirp, or whistle.' Thus, when the ghosts of the New Zealanders
address the living, they speak in whistling tones. The sorcerer among
the Zulus 'hears the spirits who speak by whistlings speaking to
him.' Whistling is the language of the Caledonians, and the Algonquin
Indians of North America 'could hear the shadow souls of the dead
chirp like crickets.' As far back as the time of Homer, the ghosts
make a similar sound, 'and even as bats flit gibbering in the secret
place of a wonderful cavern, even so the souls gibbered as they fared
together.'[52]

Ghosts, when they make their appearance, are generally supposed, as
already noticed, to have a perfect resemblance, in every respect, to
the deceased person. Their faces appear the same--except that they are
usually paler than when alive--and the ordinary expression is described
by writers on the subject as 'more in sorrow than in anger.' Thus, when
the ghost of Banquo rises and takes a seat at the table, Macbeth says
to the apparition--

            Never shake
    Thy gory locks at me.

And Horatio tells Marcellus how the ghost of Hamlet's father was not
only fully armed, but--

    So frown'd he once, when in angry parle,
    He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.

The folk-lore stories from most parts of the world coincide in this
idea. It was recorded of the Indians of Brazil by one of the early
European visitors that 'they believe that the dead arrive in the
other world, wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact, just as they left
this;'[53] a statement which reminds us of a ghost described by Mrs.
Crowe,[54] who, on appearing after death, was seen to have the very
small-pox marks which had disfigured its countenance when in the flesh.

As in life, so in death, it would seem that there are different classes
of ghosts--the princely, the aristocratic, the genteel, and the
common. The vulgar class, it is said, delight to haunt 'in graveyards,
dreary lanes, ruins, and all sorts of dirty dark holes and corners.'
An amusing anecdote illustrative of this belief was related by the
daughter of 'the celebrated Mrs. S.' [Siddons?] who told Mrs. Crowe
that when her parents were travelling in Wales they stayed some days
at Oswestry, and lodged in a house which was in a very dirty and
neglected state, yet all night long the noise of scrubbing and moving
furniture made it impossible to sleep. The servants did little or no
work, for they had to sit up with their mistress to allay her fears.
The neighbours said that this person had killed an old servant, hence
the disturbance and her terror. Mr. and Mrs. S---- coming in suddenly
one day, heard her cry out, 'Are you there again? Fiend! go away!' But
numerous tales similar to the above are still current in different
parts of the country; and from time to time are duly chronicled in the
local press.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] _Principles of Sociology_, 1885, i. p. 174.

[32] _De Anima_, p. 9; see Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 456.

[33] _Principles of Sociology_, 1885, i. p. 174.

[34] See Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 457.

[35] Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 20.

[36] Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 456.

[37] Letourneau's _Sociology_, p. 253.

[38] See Tylor's _Anthropology_, 1881, p. 344.

[39] _Nineteenth Century_, July 1885, pp. 143-144, 'Transylvanian
Superstitions,' by Madame Emily de Laszowska Gerard.

[40] Ralston's _Songs of the Russian People_, p. 117.

[41] _Myths and Dreams_, 1885, p. 184.

[42] _Myths and Myth-makers_, 1873, p. 225.

[43] See Hunt's _Popular Romances of the West of England_, p. 373.

[44] _Fasti_, v. 457.

[45] _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 195.

[46] _The Origin of Civilisation, and the Primitive Condition of Man_,
1870, p. 140; see Letourneau's _Sociology_, p. 263.

[47] Brinton's _Myths of the New World_, 1868, p. 257.

[48] Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, 1881, p. 193.

[49] See Lecky's _Rationalism in Europe_, 1870, i. p. 340; cf. Maury's
_Légendes Pieuses_, p. 124.

[50] _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 455.

[51] See Andrew Lang's _Myth, Ritual, Religion_, i. p. 108.

[52] _Odyssey_, xxiv.

[53] Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 451.

[54] _Night Side of Nature._




CHAPTER IV

THE UNBURIED DEAD


The Greeks believed that such as had not received funeral rites would
be excluded from Elysium. The younger Pliny tells the tale of a haunted
house at Athens, in which a ghost played all kinds of pranks owing to
the funeral rites having been neglected. It is still a deep-rooted
belief that when the mortal remains of the soul have not been honoured
with proper burial, it will walk. The ghosts of unburied persons not
possessing the _obolus_ or fee due to Charon, the ferryman of Styx, and
Acheron, were unable to obtain a lodging or place of rest. Hence they
were compelled to wander about the banks of the river for a hundred
years, when the portitor, or 'ferryman of hell,' passed them over _in
formâ pauperis_. The famous tragedy of 'Antigone' by Sophocles owes
much of its interest to this popular belief on the subject. In most
countries all kinds of strange tales are told of ghosts ceaselessly
wandering about the earth, owing to their bodies, for some reason or
another, having been left unburied.

There is a well known German ghost, the Bleeding Nun. This was a nun
who, after committing many crimes and debaucheries, was assassinated
by one of her paramours and denied the rites of burial. After this,
she used to haunt the castle where she was murdered, with her bleeding
wounds. On one occasion, a young lady of the castle, willing to elope
with her lover, in order to make her flight easier, personated the
bleeding nun. Unfortunately the lover, whilst expecting his lady under
this disguise, eloped with the spectre herself, who presented herself
to him and haunted him afterwards.[55]

Comparative folk-lore, too, shows how very widely diffused is this
notion. It is believed by the Iroquois of North America, that unless
the rites of burial are performed, the spirits of the dead hover for a
time upon the earth in great unhappiness. On this account every care
is taken to procure the bodies of those slain in battle. Certain
Brazilian tribes suppose that the spirits of the dead have no rest
till burial, and among the Ottawas, a great famine was thought to have
been produced on account of the failure of some of their tribesmen to
perform the proper burial rites. After having repaired their fault they
were blessed with abundance of provisions. The Australians went so far
as to say that the spirits of the unburied dead became dangerous and
malignant demons. Similarly, the Siamese dread, as likely to do them
some harm, the ghosts of those who have not been buried with proper
rites, and the Karens have much the same notion. According to the
Polynesians, the spirit of a dead man could not reach the sojourn of
his ancestors, and of the gods, unless the sacred funereal rites were
performed over his body. If he was buried with no ceremony, or simply
thrown into the sea, the spirit always remained in the body.[56]

Under one form or another, the same belief may be traced in most parts
of the world, and, as Dr. Tylor points out,[57] 'in mediæval Europe
the classic stories of ghosts that haunt the living till laid by
rites of burial pass here and there into new legends where, under a
changed dispensation, the doleful wanderer now asks Christian burial in
consecrated earth.' Shakespeare alludes to this old idea, and in 'Titus
Andronicus' (i. 2) Lucius, speaking of the unburied sons of Titus, says:

    Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths,
    That we may hew his limbs, and on a pile
    _Ad manes fratrum_ sacrifice his flesh,
    Before this earthly prison of their bones;
    That so the shadows be not unappeas'd,
    Nor we disturb'd with prodigies on earth.

Hence the appearance of a spirit, in times past, was often regarded
as an indication that some foul deed had been done, on which account
Horatio in 'Hamlet' (i. 1) says to the ghost:

    If there be any good thing to be done
    That may to thee do ease, and grace to me,
    Speak to me.

In the narrative of the sufferings of Byron and the crew of H.M. ship
'Wager,' on the coast of South America, we find a good illustration
of the superstitious dread attaching to an unburied corpse. 'The
reader will remember the shameful rioting, mutiny, and recklessness
which disgraced the crew of the "Wager," nor will he forget the
approach to cannibalism and murder on one occasion. These men had
just returned from a tempestuous navigation, in which their hopes
of escape had been crushed, and now what thoughts disturbed their
rest--what serious consultations were they which engaged the attention
of these sea-beaten men? Long before Cheap's Bay had been left, the
body of a man had been found on a hill named "Mount Misery." He was
supposed to have been murdered by some of the first gang who left the
island. The body had never been buried, and to such neglect did the
men now ascribe the storms which had lately afflicted them; nor would
they rest until the remains of their comrade were placed beneath the
earth, when each evidently felt as if some dreadful spell had been
removed from his spirit.' Stories of this kind are common everywhere,
and are interesting as showing how widely scattered is this piece of
superstition.

In Sweden the ravens, which scream by midnight in forest swamps and
wild moors, are held to be the ghosts of murdered men, whose bodies
have been hidden in those spots by their undetected murderers, and
not had Christian burial.[58] In many a Danish legend the spirit of
a strand varsler, or coast-guard, appears, walking his beat as when
alive. Such ghosts were not always friendly, and it was formerly
considered dangerous to pass along 'such unconsecrated beaches,
believed to be haunted by the spectres of unburied corpses of drowned
people.'[59]

The reason, it is asserted, why many of our old castles and country
seats have their traditional ghost, is owing to some unfortunate
person having been secretly murdered in days past, and to his or her
body having been allowed to remain without the rites of burial. So
long as such a crime is unavenged, and the bones continue unburied,
it is impossible, we are told, for the outraged spirit to keep quiet.
Numerous ghost stories are still circulated throughout the country of
spirits wandering on this account, some of which, however, are based
purely on legendary romance.

But when the unburied body could not be found, and the ghost wandered,
the missing man was buried in effigy, for, as it has been observed,
'according to all the laws of primitive logic, an effigy is every
bit as good as its original. Therefore, when a dead man is buried in
effigy, with all due formality, that man is dead and buried beyond a
doubt, and his ghost is as harmless as it is in the nature of ghosts to
be.' But sometimes such burial by proxy was premature, for the man was
not really dead; and if he declined to consider himself as such, the
question arose, was he alive, or was he dead? The solution adopted was
that he might be born again and take a new lease of life. 'And so it
was, he was put out to nurse, he was dressed in long clothes--in short,
he went through all the stages of a second childhood. But before this
pleasing experience could take place, he had to overcome the initial
difficulty of entering his own house, for the door was ghost-proof.
There was no other way but by the chimney, and down the chimney he
came.' We may laugh at such credulity, but many of the ghost-beliefs of
the present day are not less absurd.

FOOTNOTES:

[55] Yardley's _Supernatural in Fiction_, p. 93.

[56] Letourneau's _Sociology_, p. 257.

[57] _Primitive Culture_, ii. p. 29; Douce's _Illustrations of
Shakespeare_, pp. 450, 451.

[58] Henderson's _Folk-lore of Northern Counties_, p. 126, note.

[59] Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_, ii. p. 166.




CHAPTER V

WHY GHOSTS WANDER


A variety of causes have been supposed to prevent the dead resting in
the grave, for persons 'dying with something on their mind,' to use
the popular phrase, cannot enjoy the peace of the grave; oftentimes
some trivial anxiety, or some frustrated communication, preventing the
uneasy spirit flinging off the bonds that bind it to earth. Wickedness
in their lifetime has been commonly thought to cause the souls of the
impenitent to revisit the scenes where their evil deeds were done. It
has long been a widespread idea that as such ghosts are too bad for
a place in either world, they are, therefore, compelled to wander on
the face of the earth homeless and forlorn. We have shown in another
chapter how, according to a well-known superstition, the _ignes fatui_,
which appear by night in swampy places, are the souls of the dead--men
who during life were guilty of fraudulent and other wicked acts. Thus a
popular belief reminds us[60] how, when an unjust relative has secreted
the title-deeds in order to get possession of the estate himself,
he finds no rest in the other world till the title-deeds are given
back, and the estate is restored to the rightful heir. Come must the
spirit of such an unrighteous man to the room where he concealed the
title-deeds surreptitiously removed from the custody of the person to
whose charge they were entrusted. 'A dishonest milkwoman at Shrewsbury
is condemned,' writes Miss Jackson in her 'Shropshire Folk-lore'[61]
(p. 120), 'to wander up and down "Lady Studley's Diche" in the Raven
Meadow--now the Smithfield--constantly repeating:

   "Weight and measure sold I never,
    Milk and water sold I ever."'

The same rhyme is current at Burslem, in the Staffordshire Potteries.
The story goes that 'Old Molly Lee,' who used to sell milk there, and
had the reputation of being a witch, was supposed to be seen after her
death going about the streets with her milk-pail on her head repeating
it. Miss Jackson further relates how a mid-Shropshire squire of long
ago was compelled to wander about in a homeless state on account of
his wickedness. Murderers cannot rest, and even although they may
escape justice in this life, it is supposed that their souls find no
peace in the grave, but under a curse are compelled to walk to and
fro until they have, in some degree, done expiation for their crimes.
Occasionally, it is said, their plaintive moans may be heard as they
bewail the harm done by them to the innocent, weary of being allowed no
cessation from their ceaseless wandering--a belief which reminds us of
the legend of the Wandering Jew, and the many similar stories that have
clustered round it.

In 'Blackwood's Magazine' for August 1818 this passage occurs: 'If any
author were so mad as to think of framing a tragedy upon the subject
of that worthy vicar of Warblington, Hants, who was reported about a
century ago to have strangled his own children, and to have walked
after his death, he would assuredly be laughed to scorn by a London
audience.' But a late rector of Warblington informed a correspondent
of 'Notes and Queries' (4th S. xi. 188), 'it was quite true that
his house was said to be haunted by the ghost of a former rector,
supposed to be the Rev. Sebastian Pitfield, who held the living in
1677.' A strong prejudice against hanging prevails in Wales, owing
to troublesome spirits being let loose, and wandering about, to the
annoyance of the living.

The spirits of suicides wander, and hence cross-roads in various parts
of the country are oftentimes avoided after dark, on account of being
haunted by headless and other uncanny apparitions. The same belief
exists abroad. The Sioux are of opinion that suicide is punished in the
land of spirits by the ghosts being doomed for ever to drag the tree
on which they hang themselves; and for this reason they always suspend
themselves to as small a tree as can possibly sustain their weight.

With the Chinese the souls of suicides are specially obnoxious, and
they consider that the very worst penalty that can befall a soul is the
sight of its former surroundings. Thus, it is supposed that, in the
case of the wicked man, 'they only see their homes as if they were near
them; they see their last wishes disregarded, everything upside down,
their substance squandered, strangers possess the old estate; in their
misery the dead man's family curse him, his children become corrupt,
land is gone, the wife sees her husband tortured, the husband sees his
wife stricken down with mortal disease; even friends forget, but some,
perhaps, for the sake of bygone times, may stroke the coffin and let
fall a tear, departing with a cold smile.'[62] But, as already noticed,
the same idea, in a measure, extends to the West, for in this country
it has long been a popular belief that the ghosts of the wicked are
forced to periodically rehearse their sinful acts. Thus, the murderer's
ghost is seen in vain trying to wash out the indelible blood-stains,
and the thief is supposed to be continually counting and recounting
the money which came into his possession through dishonest means. The
ghost is dogged and confronted with the hideousness of his iniquities,
and the young woman who slew her lover in a fit of jealous passion is
seen, in an agonised expression, holding the fatal weapon. But such
unhappy spirits have, in most cases, been put to silence by being laid,
instances of which are given elsewhere; and in other cases they have
finally disappeared with the demolition of certain houses which for
years they may have tenanted.

On the other hand, the spirits of the good are said sometimes to return
to earth for the purpose of either succouring the innocent, or avenging
the guilty.

'Those who come again to punish their friends' wrongs,' writes
Miss Jackson, in her 'Shropshire Folk-lore' (p. 119), 'generally
appear exactly as in life, unchanged in form or character. A certain
well-to-do man who lived in the west of Shropshire within living
memory, left his landed property to his nephew, and a considerable
fortune to his two illegitimate daughters, the children of his
housekeeper. Their mother, well provided for, was at his death turned
adrift by the nephew. Her daughters, however, continued to live in
their old home with their cousin. A maid-servant who entered the family
shortly after (and who is our informant) noticed an elderly man often
walking in the garden in broad daylight, dressed in old-fashioned
clothes, with breeches and white stockings. He never spoke, and never
entered the house, though he always went towards it. Asking who he was,
she was coolly told, "Oh, that is only our old father!" No annoyance
seems to have been caused by the poor old ghost, with one exception,
that the clothes were every night stripped off the bed of the two
unnatural daughters.'

German folk-lore tells how slain warriors rise again to help their
comrades to victory, and how a mother will visit her old home to look
after her injured and forsaken children, and elsewhere the same idea
is extensively believed. In China, the ghosts which are animated by
a sense of duty are frequently seen: at one time they seek to serve
virtue in distress, and at another they aim to restore wrongfully-held
treasure. Indeed, as it has been observed, 'one of the most powerful
as well as the most widely diffused of the people's ghost stories is
that which treats of the persecuted child whose mother comes out of the
grave to succour him.'[63] And there perhaps can be no more gracious
privilege allotted to immortal spirits than that of beholding those
beloved of them in mortal life:

                          I am still near,
    Watching the smiles I prized on earth,
    Your converse mild, your blameless mirth.[64]

As it has been observed, no oblivious draught has been given the
departed soul, but the remembrance of its earthly doings cleaves to it,
and this is why ghosts are always glad to see the places frequented by
them while on earth. In Galicia, directly after a man's burial, his
spirit takes to wandering by nights about the old home, and watching
that no evil befalls his heirs.[65]

Occasionally the spirit returns to fulfil a promise as in compacts,
to which reference is made in another chapter. The reappearance of a
lover, 'in whose absence his beloved has died, is a subject that has
been made use of by the folk-poets of every country, and nothing,' it
is added, 'can be more characteristic of the nationalities to which
they belong than the divergences which mark their treatment of it.'[66]
Another cause of ghosts wandering is founded upon a superstition as to
the interchange of love-tokens, an illustration of which we find in
the old ballad of 'William's Ghost':

    There came a ghost to Marjorie's door,
      Wi' many a grievous maen,
    And aye he tirl'd at the pin,
      But answer made she nane.

    'Oh, sweet Marjorie! oh, dear Marjorie!
      For faith and charitie,
    Give me my faith and troth again,
      That I gied once to thee.'

    'Thy faith and troth I'll ne'er gie thee,
      Nor yet shall our true love twin,
    Till you tak' me to your ain ha' house,
      And wed me wi' a ring.'

    'My house is but yon lonesome grave,
      Afar out o'er yon lee,
    And it is but my spirit, Marjorie,
      That's speaking unto thee.'[67]

She followed the spirit to the grave, where it lay down and confessed
that William had betrayed three maidens whom he had promised to marry,
and in consequence of this misdemeanour he could not rest in his grave
until she released him of his vows to marry her. On learning this,
Marjorie at once released him.

    Then she'd taen up her white, white hand,
      And struck him on the breist,
    Saying, 'Have ye again your faith and troth,
      And I wish your soul good rest.'

In another ballad, 'Clerk Sanders,' there is a further illustration
of the same belief. The instances, says Mr. Napier, differ, but 'the
probability is that the ballad quoted above and "Clerk Sanders" are
both founded on the same story. Clerk Sanders was the son of an earl,
who courted the king's daughter, Lady Margaret. They loved each other
even in the modern sense of loving too well. Margaret had seven
brothers, who suspected an intrigue, and they came upon them together
in bed and killed Clerk Sanders, whose ghost soon after came to
Margaret's window. The ballad, which contains much curious folk-lore,
runs thus:[68]

    'Oh! are ye sleeping, Margaret?' he says,
      'Or are ye waking presentlie?
    Give me my faith and troth again,
      I wot, true love, I gied to thee.

    'I canna rest, Margaret,' he says,
      'Down in the grave where I must be,
    Till ye give me my faith and troth again,
      I wot, true love, I gied to thee.'

    'Thy faith and troth thou shalt na get,
      And our true love shall never twin,
    Until ye tell what comes o' women,
      I wot, who die in strong travailing.

    'Their beds are made in the heavens high,
      Down at the foot of our Lord's knee,
    Weel set about wi' gilliflowers,
      I trow sweet company for to see.

    'Oh, cocks are crowing a merry midnight,
      I wot the wild fowls are boding day;
    The psalms of heaven will soon be sung,
      And I, ere now, will be missed away.'

    Then she has ta'en a crystall wand,
      And she has stroken her throth thereon;
    She has given it him out of the shot-window,
      Wi' many a sigh and heavy goan.

    'I thank ye, Margaret; I thank ye, Margaret;
      And aye, I thank ye heartilie;
    Gin ever the dead come for the quick,
      Be sure, Margaret, I'll come for thee.'

    Then up and crew the milk-white cock,
      And up and crew the gray;
    Her lover vanished in the air,
      And she gaed weeping away.

Madness, again, during life, is said occasionally to produce
restlessness after death. 'Parson Digger, at Condover,' remarked an old
woman to Miss Jackson,[69] 'he came again. He wasn't right in his head,
and if you met him he couldn't speak to you sensibly. But when he was
up in the pulpit he'd preach, oh! beautiful!' In Hungary, there are
the spirits of brides who die on their wedding-day before consummation
of marriage. They are to be seen at moonlight, where cross-roads meet.
And it is a Danish tradition that a corpse cannot have peace in the
grave when it is otherwise than on its back. According to a Scotch
belief, excessive grief for a departed friend, 'combined with a want of
resignation to the will of Providence, had the effect of keeping the
spirit from rest in the other world. Rest could be obtained only by the
spirit coming back, and comforting the mourner by the assurance that it
was in a state of blessedness.'[70] The ghosts of those, again, who had
some grievance or other in life are supposed to wander. The Droitwich
Canal, in passing through Salwarpe, Worcestershire, is said to have
cut off a slice of a large old half-timbered house, in revenge for
which act of mutilation, the ghost of a former occupier revisited his
old haunts, and affrighted the domestics.

Once more, according to another Animistic conception which holds a
prominent place in the religion of uncultured tribes, the soul at death
passes through some transitionary stages, finally developing into
a demon. In China and India this theory is deeply rooted among the
people, and hence it is customary to offer sacrifices to the souls of
the departed by way of propitiation, as otherwise they are supposed to
wander to and fro on the earth, and to exert a malignant influence on
even their dearest friends and relatives. Diseases, too, are regarded
as often being caused by the wandering souls of discontented relatives,
who in some cases are said to re-appear as venomous snakes.[71] Owing
to this belief, a system of terror prevails amongst many tribes, which
is only allayed by constantly appeasing departed souls. Believing
in superstitions of this kind, it is easy to understand how the
uncivilised mind readily lays hold of the doctrine that the souls of
the departed, angry and enraged at having had death thrust on them,
take every opportunity of wandering about, and annoying the living,
and of wreaking their vengeance on even those most nearly related to
them. In this phase of savage belief may be traced the notion of Manes
worship found under so many forms in foreign countries. Indeed, once
granted that the departed soul has power to affect the living, then
this power attributed to it is only one of degree. With this belief,
too, may be compared the modern one of worship of the dead; and as Dr.
Tylor remarks: 'A crowd of saints, who were once men and women, now
form an inferior order of deities active in the affairs of men, and
receiving from them reverence and prayer, thus coming strictly under
the definition of Manes.'[72] A further illustration may be adduced in
the patron deities of particular trades and crafts, and in the imposing
array of saints supposed to be specially interested in the particular
requirements of mankind.

FOOTNOTES:

[60] See Gregor's _Folk-lore of North-East of Scotland_, p. 68.

[61] Edited by C. S. Burne.

[62] Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco, 1886, _Essays in the Study
of Folk-songs_, p. 8.

[63] _Study of Folk-songs_, p. 2.

[64] _Study of Folk-songs_, p. 8.

[65] Ralston's _Songs of the Russian People_, p. 121.

[66] _Study of Folk-songs_, p. 21.

[67] _Folk-lore Record_, 1879, iii. pp. 111, 112,

[68] _Folk-lore Record_, 1879, iii. pp. 111, 112.

[69] _Shropshire Folk-lore_, p. 119.

[70] Gregor's _Folk-lore of North-East of Scotland_, p. 69.

[71] Sir John Lubbock's _Origin of Civilisation_, p. 134.

[72] _Primitive Culture_, ii. p. 120.




CHAPTER VI

GHOSTS OF THE MURDERED


It is commonly supposed that the spirits of those who have suffered
a violent or untimely death are baneful and malicious beings; for,
as Meiners conjectures in his 'History of Religions,' they were
driven unwillingly from their bodies, and have carried into their new
existence an angry longing for revenge. Hence, in most countries,
there is a dread of such harmful spirits; and, among the Sioux Indians
the fear of the ghost's vengeance has been known to act as a check to
murder. The avenging ghost often comes back to convict the guilty, and
appears in all kinds of strange and uncanny ways. Thus the ghost of
Hamlet's father (i. 5) says:

    I am thy father's spirit,
    Doomed for a certain time to walk the night,
    And for the day confined to fast in fires,
    Till the foul crimes, done in my days of nature,
    Are burnt and purged away.

Till the crime has been duly expiated, not only is the spirit supposed
to be kept from its desired rest, but it flits about the haunts of the
living, that, by its unearthly molestation, it may compel them to make
every possible reparation for the cruel wrong done. Any attempt to
lay such a ghost is ineffectual, and no exorcist's art can induce it
to discontinue its unwelcome visits. Comparative folk-lore proves how
universal is this belief, for one of the most popular ghost stories
in folk-tales is that which treats of the murdered person whose ghost
hovers about the earth with no gratification but to terrify the living.

The Chinese have a dread of the wandering spirits of persons who
have come to an unfortunate end. At Canton, in 1817, the wife of an
officer of Government had occasioned the death of two female domestic
slaves, from some jealous suspicion it was supposed of her husband's
conduct towards the girls; and, in order to screen herself from the
consequences, she suspended the bodies by the neck, with a view to its
being construed into an act of suicide. But the conscience of the woman
tormented her to such a degree that she became insane, and at times
personated the victims of her cruelty; or, as the Chinese supposed, the
spirits of the murdered girls possessed her, and utilised her mouth to
declare her own guilt. In her ravings she tore her clothes, and beat
her own person with all the fury of madness; after which she would
recover her senses for a time, when it was supposed the demons quitted
her, but only to return with greater frenzy, which took place a short
time previous to her death.[73] According to Mr. Dennys,[74] the most
common form of Chinese ghost story is that wherein the ghost seeks to
bring to justice the murderer who shuffled off its mortal coil.

The following tale is told of a haunted hill in the country of the
Assiniboins. Many summers ago a party of Assiniboins pounced on a
small band of Crees in the neighbourhood of Wolverine Knoll. Among the
victors was the former wife of one of the vanquished, who had been
previously captured by her present husband. This woman directed every
effort in the fight to take the life of her first husband, but he
escaped, and concealed himself on this knoll. Wolverine--for this was
his name--fell asleep, and was discovered by this virago, who killed
him, and presented his scalp to her Assiniboin husband. The knoll was
afterwards called after him. The Indians assert that the ghosts of
the murderess and her victim are often to be seen from a considerable
distance struggling together on the very summit of the height.[75]

The Siamese 'fear as unkindly spirits the souls of such as died a
violent death, or were not buried with the proper rites, and who,
desiring expiation, invisibly terrify their descendants.'[76] In the
same way, the Karens say that the ghosts of those who wander on the
earth are the spirits of such as died by violence; and in Australia we
hear of the souls of departed natives walking about because their death
has not been expiated by the avenger of blood.

The Hurons of America, lest the spirits of the victims of their torture
should remain around the huts of their murderers from a thirst of
vengeance, strike every place with a staff in order to oblige them to
depart. An old traveller mentions the same custom among the Iroquois:
'At night we heard a great noise, as if the houses had all fallen; but
it was only the inhabitants driving away the ghosts of the murdered;'
with which we may compare the belief of the Ottawas: On one occasion,
when noises of the loudest and most inharmonious kind were heard in
a certain village, it was ascertained that a battle had been lately
fought between the Ottawas and Kickapoos, and that the object of all
this noise was to prevent the ghosts of the dead combatants from
entering the village.[77]

European folk-lore still clings to this old belief, and, according
to the current opinion in Norway,[78] the soul of a murdered person
willingly hovers around the spot where his body is buried, and makes
its appearance for the purpose of calling forth vengeance on the
murderer.

The idea that, in cases of hidden murder, the buried dead cannot rest
in their graves is often spoken in our old ballad folk-lore. Thus, in
the ballad of the 'Jew's Daughter,' in Motherwell's collection, a youth
was murdered, and his body thrown into a draw-well, and he speaks to
his mother from the well:

    She ran away to the deep draw-well,
      And she fell down on her knee,
    Saying, 'Bonnie Sir Hugh, oh, pretty Sir Hugh,
      I pray ye, speak to me!'
    'Oh! the lead it is wondrous heavy, mother,
      The well, it is wondrous deep,
    The little penknife sticks in my throat,
      And I downa to ye speak.
    But lift me out of this deep draw-well,
      And bury me in yon churchyard;
    Put a Bible at my head,' he says,
      'And a Testament at my feet,
    And pen and ink at every side,
      And I will lay still and sleep.
    And go to the back of Maitland town,
      Bring me my winding sheet;
    For it's at the back of Maitland town
      That you and I shall meet.'

The eye of superstition, we are told, sees such ghosts sometimes as
white spectres in the churchyard, where they stop horses, terrify
people, and make a disturbance; and occasionally as executed criminals,
who, in the moonlight, wander round the place of execution, with their
heads under their arms. At times they are said to pinch persons while
asleep both black and blue, such spots being designated ghost-spots, or
ghost-pinches. It is also supposed in some parts of Norway that certain
spirits cry like children, and entice people to them, such being
thought to derive their origin from murdered infants. A similar belief
exists in Sweden, where the spirits of little children that have been
murdered are said to wander about wailing, within an assigned time, so
long as their lives would have lasted on earth, had they been allowed
to live. As a terror for unnatural mothers who destroy their offspring,
their sad cry is said to be 'Mama! Mama!' If travellers at night pass
by them, they will hang on the vehicle, when the most spirited horses
will sweat as if they were dragging too heavy a load, and at length
come to a dead stop. The peasant then knows that a ghost or pysling has
attached itself to his vehicle.[79]

The nautical ghost is often a malevolent spirit, as in Shelley's
'Revolt of Islam'; and Captain Marryat tells a sailor story of a
murdered man's ghost appearing every night, and calling hands to
witness a piratical scene of murder, formerly committed on board
the ship in which he appeared. A celebrated ghost is that of the
'Shrieking Woman,' long supposed to haunt the shores of Oakum Bay,
near Marblehead. She was a Spanish lady murdered by pirates in the
eighteenth century, and the apparition is thus described by Whittier in
his 'Legends of New England':

    'Tis said that often when the moon,
      Is struggling with the gloomy even,
    And over moon and star is drawn
      The curtain of a clouded heaven,
    Strange sounds swell up the narrow glen,
      As if that robber crew was there;
    The hellish laugh, the shouts of men
      And woman's dying prayer.

Many West Indian quays were thought to be the haunts of ghosts
of murdered men; and Sir Walter Scott tells how the Buccaneers
occasionally killed a Spaniard or a slave, and buried him with their
spirits, under the impression that his ghost would haunt the spot, and
keep away treasure hunters. He quotes another incident of a captain
who killed a man in a fit of anger, and, on his threatening to haunt
him, he cooked his body in the stove kettle. The crew believed that
the murdered man took his place at the wheel, and on the yards. The
captain, troubled by his conscience and the man's ghost, finally jumped
overboard, when, as he sank, he threw up his arms and exclaimed, 'Bill
is with me now!'

In most parts of the world similar tales are recorded, and are as
readily believed as when they were first told centuries ago. A certain
island on the Japanese coast is traditionally haunted by the ghosts
of Japanese slain in a naval battle. Even 'to-day the Chousen peasant
fancies he sees the ghostly armies baling out the sea with bottomless
dippers, condemned thus to cleanse the ocean of the slain of centuries
ago.'[80] According to an old Chinese legend the ghost of a captain of
a man-of-war junk, who had been murdered, reappeared and directed how
the ship was to be steered to avoid a nest of pirates.[81]

In this country, many an old mansion has its haunted room, in which
the unhappy spirit of the murdered person is supposed, on certain
occasions, to appear. Generation after generation do such troubled
spirits return to the scene of their life, and persistently wait
till some one is bold enough to stay in the haunted room, and to
question them as to the cause of their making such periodical visits.
Accordingly, when a murder has been committed and not discovered,
often, it is said, has the spirit of the murdered one continued to
come back and torment the neighbourhood till a confession of the crime
has been made, and justice satisfied. Mr. Walter Gregor,[82] detailing
instances in Scotland of haunted houses, tells how 'in one room a lady
had been murdered, and her body buried in a vault below it. Her spirit
could find no rest till she had told who the murderer was, and pointed
out where the body lay. In another, a baby heir had its little life
stifled by the hand of an assassin hired by the next heir. The estate
was obtained, but the deed followed the villain beyond the grave, and
his spirit could find no peace. Night by night the ghost had to return
at the hour of midnight to the room in which the murder was committed,
and in agony spend in it the hours till cock-crowing, when everything
of the supernatural had to disappear.'

The ghost of Lady Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, who always appears in
white, carrying her child in her arms, has long been, as Mr. Ingram
says,[83] 'an enduring monument of the bloodthirsty spirit of the age
in which she lived.' Whilst her husband was away from home, a favourite
of the Regent, Murray seized his house, turned his wife, on a cold
night, naked, into the open fields, where, before morning, she was
found raving mad; her infant perishing either by cold or murder. The
ruins of the mansion of Woodhouslee, 'whence Lady Bothwell was expelled
in the brutal manner which occasioned her insanity and death,' have
long been tenanted with the unfortunate lady's ghost; 'and so tenacious
is this spectre of its rights, that a part of the stones belonging to
the ancient edifice having been employed in building or repairing the
new Woodhouslee, the apparition has deemed it one of her privileges to
haunt that house also.'

Samlesbury Hall, Lancashire, has its ghosts; and it is said that 'on
certain clear still evenings a lady in white can be seen passing along
the gallery and the corridors, and then from the hall into the grounds;
then she meets a handsome knight who receives her on bended knees, and
he then accompanies her along the walks. On arriving at a certain spot,
most probably the lover's grave, both the phantoms stand still, and, as
they seem to utter lost wailings of despair, they embrace each other,
and then melt away into the clear blue of the surrounding sky.' The
story goes that one of the daughters of Sir John Southworth, a former
owner, formed an attachment with the heir of a neighbouring house; but
when Sir John said 'no daughter of his should ever be united to the son
of a family which had deserted its ancestral faith,' an elopement was
arranged. The day and place were overheard by the lady's brother, and,
on the evening agreed upon, he rushed from his hiding-place and slew
her lover. But soon afterwards her mind gave way, and she died a raving
maniac.[84]

Mrs. Murray, a lady born and brought up in the borders, writes Mr.
Henderson,[85] tells me of 'a cauld lad,' of whom she heard in her
childhood during a visit to Gilsland, in Cumberland. He perished from
cold, at the behest of some cruel uncle or stepdame, and ever after his
ghost haunted the family, coming shivering to their bedsides before
anyone was stricken by illness, his teeth audibly chattering; and if it
were to be fatal, he laid his icy hand upon the part which would be the
seat of the disease, saying:

    Cauld, cauld, aye cauld!
    An' ye see he cauld for evermair.

St. Donart's Castle, on the southern coast of Glamorganshire, has its
favourite ghost, that of Lady Stradling, who is said to have been
murdered by one of her family. 'It appears,' writes the late Mr. Wirt
Sikes,[86] 'when any mishap is about to befall a member of the house
of Stradling, the direct line, however, of which is extinct. She wears
high-heeled shoes, and a long trailing gown of the finest silk.' While
she wanders, the castle hounds refuse to rest, but with their howling
raise all the dogs in the neighbourhood. The Little Shelsey people long
preserved a tradition that the court-house in that parish was haunted
by the spirit of a Lady Lightfoot, who was said to have been imprisoned
and murdered;[87] and Cumnor Hall has acquired a romantic interest from
the poetic glamour flung over it by Mickle in his ballad of Cumnor
Hall, and by Sir Walter Scott in his 'Kenilworth.' Both refer to it
as the scene of Amy Robsart's murder, and although the jury agreed to
accept her death as accidental, the country folk would not forego their
idea that it was the result of foul play. Ever since the fatal event
it was asserted that 'Madam Dudley's ghost did use to walk in Cumnor
Park, and that it walked so obstinately, that it took no less than nine
parsons from Oxford to lay her.' According to Mickle--

    The village maids, with fearful glance,
      Avoid the ancient moss-grown wall;
    Nor ever lead the merry dance
      Among the groves of Cumnor Hall.

About half a mile to the east of Maxton, a small rivulet runs across
the old turnpike road, at a spot called Bow-brig-syke. Near this bridge
is a triangular field, in which for nearly a century it was averred
that the forms of two ladies, dressed in white, might be seen pacing up
and down, walking over precisely the same spot of ground till morning
light. But one day, while some workmen were repairing the road, they
took up the large flagstones upon which foot-passengers crossed the
burn, and found beneath them the skeletons of two women lying side by
side. After this discovery the Bow-brig ladies, as they were called,
were never again seen to walk in the three-corner field. The story goes
that these two ladies were sisters to a former laird of Littledean,
who is said to have killed them in a fit of passion, because they
interfered to protect from ill-usage a young lady whom he had met at
Bow-brig-syke. Some years later he met with his own death near the same
fatal spot.[88]

Mr. Sullivan, in his 'Cumberland and Westmoreland,' relates how, some
years ago, a spectre appeared to a man who lived at Henhow Cottage,
Martindale. Starting for his work at an early hour one morning, he
had not gone two hundred yards from his house when his dog gave signs
of alarm, and, on looking round, he saw a woman carrying a child in
her arms. On being questioned as to what was troubling her, the ghost
replied that she had been seduced, and that her seducer, to conceal
his guilt and her frailty, had given her medicine, the effect of
which was to kill both mother and child. Her doom was to wander for a
hundred years, forty of which had expired. The occurrence is believed
to have made a lasting impression on the old man, who, says Sullivan,
'was until lately a shepherd on the fells. There can be no moral doubt
that he both saw and spoke with the apparition; but what share his
imagination had therein, or how it had been excited, are mysteries,
and so they are likely to remain.' But as Grose remarks, ghosts do not
go about their business like living beings. In cases of murder, 'a
ghost, instead of going to the next justice of the peace and laying
its information, or to the nearest relation of the person murdered,
it appears to some poor labourer who knows none of the parties, draws
the curtains of some decrepit nurse or alms-woman, or hovers about the
place where his body is deposited.' The same circuitous mode, he adds,
'is pursued with respect to redressing injured orphans or widows,
when it seems as if the shorter and more certain would be to go to the
person guilty of the injustice, and haunt him continually till he be
terrified into a restitution.'

From early days the phantoms of the murdered have occasionally
appeared to the living, and made known the guilty person or persons
who committed the deed. Thus Cicero relates how 'two Arcadians came
to Megara together; one lodged at a friend's house, the other at an
inn. During the night, the latter appeared to his fellow-traveller,
imploring his help, as the innkeeper was plotting his death; the
sleeper sprang up in alarm, but thinking the vision of no importance,
he went to sleep again. A second time his companion appeared to him, to
entreat that, though he had failed to help, he would at least avenge,
for the innkeeper had killed him, and hidden his body in a dung-cart,
wherefore he charged his fellow-traveller to be early next morning at
the city gate before the cart passed out. The traveller went as bidden,
and there found the cart; the body of the murdered man was in it, and
the innkeeper was brought to justice.'[89]

Of the many curious cases recorded of a murder being discovered through
the ghost of the murdered person, may be quoted one told in Aubrey's
'Miscellanies.' It appears that on Monday, April 14, 1690, William
Barwick was walking with his wife close to Cawood Castle, when, from
motives not divulged at the trial, he determined to murder her, and
finding a pond conveniently at hand, threw her in. But on the following
Tuesday, as his brother-in-law, Thomas Lofthouse, 'about half an hour
after twelve of the clock in the daytime, was watering quickwood, as
he was going for the second pail, there appeared walking before him an
apparition in the shape of a woman, "her visage being like his wife's
sister's." Soon after, she sat down over against the pond, on a green
hill. He walked by her as he went to the pond, and, on his return, he
observed that she was dangling "something like a white bag" on her
lap, evidently suggestive of her unborn baby that was slain with her.
The circumstance made such an impression on him, that he immediately
suspected Barwick, especially as he had made false statements as to
the whereabouts of his wife, and obtained a warrant for his arrest.
The culprit when arrested confessed his crime, and the body of the
murdered woman being recovered, was found dressed in clothing similar,
apparently, to that worn by the apparition. Ultimately Barwick was
hanged for his crime.'[90]

A similar case, which occurred in the county of Durham in 1631, and is
the subject of a critical historical inquiry in Surtees's 'History of
Durham,' may be briefly summed up.[91] 'One Walker, a yeoman of good
estate, a widower, living at Chester-le-Street, had in his service a
young female relative named Anne Walker. The results of an amour which
took place between them caused Walker to send away the girl under
the care of one Mark Sharp, a collier, professedly that she might
be taken care of as befitted her condition, but in reality that she
might no more be troublesome to her lover. Nothing was heard of her
till, one night in the ensuing winter, one James Graham, coming down
from the upper to the lower floor of his mill, found a woman standing
there with her hair hanging about her head, in which were five bloody
wounds. According to the man's evidence, she gave an account of her
fate; having been killed by Sharp on the moor in their journey, and
thrown into a coal pit close by, while the instrument of her death,
a pick, had been hid under a bank along with his clothes, which were
stained with her blood. She demanded of Graham that he should expose
her murder, which he hesitated to do, until she had twice reappeared to
him, the last time with a threatening aspect.

'The body, the pick, and the clothes having been found as Graham
had described, Walter and Sharp were tried at Durham, before Judge
Davenport, in August 1631. The men were found guilty, condemned, and
executed.'

In 'Ackerman's Repository' for November 1820, there is an account of
a person being tried on the pretended evidence of a ghost. A farmer,
on his return from the market at Southam, co. Warwick, was murdered.
The next morning a man called upon the farmer's wife, and related how
on the previous night her husband's ghost had appeared to him, and,
after showing him several stabs on his body, had told him that he was
murdered by a certain person, and his corpse thrown into a marl-pit.
A search was instituted, the body found in the pit, and the wounds on
the body of the deceased were exactly in the parts described by the
pretended dreamer; the person who was mentioned was committed for trial
on the charge of murder, and the trial came on at Warwick before Lord
Chief Justice Raymond. The jury would have convicted the prisoner as
rashly as the magistrate had committed him, but for the interposition
of the judge, who told them he did not put any credence in the
pretended ghost story, since the prisoner was a man of unblemished
reputation, and no ill-feeling had ever existed between himself and
the deceased. He added that he knew of no law which admitted of the
evidence of a ghost, and, if any did, the ghost had not appeared. The
crier was then ordered to summon the ghost, which he did three times,
and the judge then acquitted the prisoner, and caused the accuser to
be detained and his house searched, when such strong proofs of guilt
were discovered, that the man confessed the crime, and was executed for
murder at the following assizes.

FOOTNOTES:

[73] _The Chinese_: J. F. Davis, 1836, ii. pp. 139, 140.

[74] _Folk-lore of China_, p. 73.

[75] See Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 304.

[76] _Primitive Culture_, ii. p. 28.

[77] See Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, 1880, pp. 19, 20.

[78] Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_, ii, p. 19.

[79] Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_, ii. pp. 94, 95.

[80] Griffis, _The Mikado's Kingdom_.

[81] Denny's _Folk-lore of China_; see Bassett's _Legends and
Superstitions of the Sea_, p. 296.

[82] _Folk-lore of North-East of Scotland_, 1881, p. 68.

[83] _Haunted Homes of England_, 1881, p. 286.

[84] _Haunted Homes of England_, 2nd S., pp. 222-225.

[85] _Folk-lore of Northern Counties_, p. 267.

[86] _British Goblins_, pp. 143, 144.

[87] _Gentleman's Magazine_, 1855, part ii. p. 58.

[88] See Henderson's _Folk-lore of Northern Counties_, pp. 324-325.

[89] Quoted in Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 444.

[90] See Ingram's _Haunted Homes_, 1884, pp. 33-36.

[91] See _Book of Days_, ii. p. 287.




CHAPTER VII

PHANTOM BIRDS


One of the forms which the soul is said occasionally to assume at
death is that of a bird--a pretty belief which, under one form or
another, exists all over the world. An early legend tells how, when
St. Polycarp was burnt alive, there arose from his ashes a white dove
which flew towards heaven; and a similar story is told of Joan of Arc.
The Russian peasantry affirm that the souls of the departed haunt their
old homes in the shape of birds for six weeks, and watch the grief
of the bereft, after which time they fly away to the other world. In
certain districts bread-crumbs are placed on a piece of white linen at
a window during those six weeks, when the soul is believed to come and
feed upon them in the form of a bird. It is generally into pigeons or
crows that the dead are transformed. Thus, when the Deacon Theodore
and his three schismatic brethren were burnt in the year 1682, writes
Mr. Ralston,[92] 'the souls of the martyrs appeared in the air as
pigeons.' In Volhynia dead children are believed to come back in the
spring to their native village under the semblance of swallows and
other small birds, endeavouring, by soft twittering or song, to console
their sorrowing parents. The Bulgarians say that after death the soul
assumes the form of a bird; and according to an old Bohemian fancy the
soul flies out of the dying in a similar shape. In the 'Chronicles of
the Beatified Anthony'[93] we find described fetid and black pools
'in regione Puteolorum in Apulia,' whence the souls arise in the form
of monstrous birds in the evening hours of the Sabbath, which neither
eat nor let themselves be caught, but wander till in the morning an
enormous lion compels them to submerge themselves in the water.

It is a German belief that the soul of one who has died on shipboard
passes into a bird, and when seen at any time it is supposed to
announce the death of another person. The ghost of the murdered mother
comes swimming in the form of a duck, or the soul sits in the likeness
of a bird on the grave. This piece of folk-lore has been introduced
into many of the popular folk-tales, as in the well-known story of the
juniper tree. A little boy is killed by his step-mother, who serves
him up as a dish of meat to his father. The father eats in ignorance,
and throws away the bones, which are gathered up by the half-sister,
who puts them into a silk handkerchief and buries them under a juniper
tree. But presently a bird of gay plumage perches on the tree, and
whistles as it flits from branch to branch:

    Min moder de mi slach't,
    Min fader de mi att,
    Min swester de Marleenken,
    Söcht alle mine Beeniken,
    Und bindt sie in een syden Dodk,
    Legst unner den Machandelboom;
    Ky witt! ky witt! Ach watt en schön vogel bin ich!

--a rhyme which Goethe puts into the mouth of Gretchen in prison.[94]
In Grimm's story of 'The White and the Black Bride,' the mother and
sister push the true bride into the stream. At the same moment a
snow-white swan is discovered swimming down the stream.

Swedish folk-lore tells us that the ravens which scream by night in
forest swamps and wild moors are the ghosts of murdered men whose
bodies have been hidden by their undetected murderers, and not had
Christian burial. In Denmark the night-raven is considered an exorcised
spirit, and there is said to be a hole in its left wing caused by the
stake driven into the earth. Where a spirit has been exorcised, it is
only through the most frightful swamps and morasses that it ascends,
first beginning under the earth with the cry of 'Rok! rok!' then 'Rok
op! rok op!' and when it has thus come forth, it flies away screaming
'Hei! hei! he!--i!' When it has flown up it describes a cross, but one
must take care, it is said, not to look up when the bird is flying
overhead, for he who sees through the hole in its wing will become
a night-raven himself, and the night-raven will be released. This
ominous bird is ever flying towards the east, in the hope of reaching
the Holy Sepulchre, for when it arrives there it will find rest.[95]
Then there is the romantic Breton ballad of 'Lord Nann and the
Korrigan,' wherein it is related how--

    It was a marvel to see, men say,
    The night that followed the day,
    The lady in earth by her lord lay,

    To see two oak trees themselves rear,
    From the new made grave into the air;

    And on their branches two doves white,
    Who there were hopping, gay and light,

    Which sang when rose the morning ray,
    And then towards heaven sped away.

In Mexico it is a popular belief that after death the souls of nobles
animate beautiful singing birds, and certain North American Indian
tribes maintain that the souls of their chiefs take the form of small
woodbirds.[96] Among the Abipones of Paraguay we are told of a peculiar
kind of little ducks which fly in flocks at night-time, uttering a
mournful tone, and which the popular imagination associates with the
souls of those who have died. Darwin mentions a South American Indian
who would not eat land-birds because they were dead men; and the
Californian tribes abstain from large game, believing that the souls of
past generations have passed into their bodies. The Içannas of Brazil
thought the souls of brave warriors passed into lovely birds that fed
on pleasant fruits; and the Tapuyas think the souls of the good and
the brave enter birds, while the cowardly become reptiles. Indeed, the
primitive psychology of such rude tribes reminds us how the spirit
freed at death--

    Fills with fresh energy another form,
    And towers an elephant, or glides a worm;
    Swims as an eagle in the eye of noon,
    Or wails a screech-owl to the deaf cold moon.

It was also a belief of the Aztecs that all good people, as a reward of
merit, were metamorphosed at the close of life into feathered songsters
of the grove, and in this form passed a certain term in the umbrageous
bowers of Paradise; while certain African tribes think that the souls
of wicked men become jackals. The Brazilians imagined that the souls
of the bad animated those birds that inhabited the cavern of Guacharo
and made a mournful cry, which birds were religiously feared.

Tracing similar beliefs in our own country, may be compared the
Lancashire dread of the so-called 'Seven Whistlers,' which are
occasionally heard at night, and are supposed to contain the souls of
those Jews who assisted at the Crucifixion, and in consequence of their
wickedness were doomed to float for ever in the air. Numerous stories
have been told, from time to time, of the appearance of these 'Seven
Whistlers,' and of their being heard before some terrible catastrophe,
such as a colliery explosion. A correspondent of 'Notes and Queries'
relates how during a thunderstorm which passed over Kettering, in
Yorkshire, on the evening of September 6, 1871, 'on which occasion the
lightning was very vivid, an unusual spectacle was witnessed. Immense
flocks of birds were flying about, uttering doleful affrighted cries as
they passed over the locality, and for hours they kept up a continual
whistling like that made by sea-birds. There must have been great
numbers of them, as they were also observed at the same time in the
counties of Northampton, Leicester, and Lincoln. The next day, as my
servant was driving me to a neighbouring village, this phenomenon of
the flight of birds became the subject of conversation, and on asking
him what birds he thought they were, he told me they were what were
called the "Seven Whistlers," and that whenever they were heard it was
considered a sign of some great calamity, and that the last time he
heard them was the night before the great Hartley Colliery explosion.
He had also been told by soldiers, that if they heard them they always
expected a great slaughter would take place soon. Curiously enough, on
taking up the newspaper the following morning, I saw headed in large
letters, "Terrible Colliery Explosion at Wigan," &c.' Wordsworth speaks
of the 'Seven Whistlers' in connection with the spectral hounds of the
wild huntsman:

    He the seven birds hath seen that never part--
      Seen the seven whistlers on their nightly rounds,
    And counted them. And oftentimes will start,
      For overhead are sweeping Gabriel's hounds,
    Doomed, with their impious lord, the flying hart
      To chase for ever on ærial grounds.

A similar tradition prevails on the Bosphorus with reference to
certain flocks of birds, about the size of a thrush, which fly up and
down the Channel, and are never seen to rest on the land or water.
These are supposed to be the souls of the damned, and condemned to
perpetual motion. Among further instances of the same belief may be
mentioned one current among the Manx herring fishermen, who, from time
immemorial, have been afraid of going to sea without a dead wren, for
fear of disasters and storms. The story goes that once upon a time 'a
sea spirit hunted the herring track, always attended by storms, but
at last assumed the form of a wren, and flew away.' Accordingly they
believe that so long as they have a dead wren with them all is snug and
safe. Similarly, in the English Channel a rustling, rushing sound is
occasionally heard on the dark still nights of winter, and is called
the herring spear, or herring piece, by the fishermen of Dover and
Folkestone. But this strange sound is really caused by the flight of
the little redwings as they cross the Channel on their way to warmer
regions.

Stories of disembodied souls appearing as birds are very numerous. An
old well-known Cornish legend tells how, in days of old, King Arthur
was transformed into a chough, 'its talons and beak all red with
blood,' denoting the violent end to which the celebrated chieftain
came. In the same way a curious legend in Poland affirms that every
member of the Herburt family assumes the form of an eagle after death,
and that the eldest daughters of the Pileck line take the shape of
doves if they die unmarried, of owls if they die married, and that
they give previous notice of their death to every member of their race
by pecking a finger of each. A wild song sung by the boatmen of the
Molo, Venice, declares that the spirit of Daniel Manin, the patriot, is
flying about the lagunes to this day in the shape of a beautiful white
dove.[97] There is the ancient Irish tradition that the first father
and mother of mankind exist as eagles in the island of Innis Bofin,
at the mouth of Killery Bay, in Galway; indeed, survivals of this old
belief occur under all manner of forms. There is the popular legend of
the owl and the baker's daughter which Shakespeare has immortalised
in 'Hamlet' (iv. 5), where Ophelia exclaims, 'They say the owl was
a baker's daughter; Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we
may be.'[98] Gervase of Tilbury tells how the stork was formerly
regarded as both bird and man, on account of which superstition it is
carefully protected in Prussia from any kind of injury. The stork,
too, is still held in superstitious dread by the Chinese, who, on the
twenty-first day of the period of mourning for the dead, place three
large paper birds resembling storks on high poles in front of the house
of mourning. The birds are supposed to carry the soul of the deceased
person to Elysium, and during the next three days the Buddhist prays
to the ten kings of the Buddhist Hades, calling on them to hasten the
flight of the departed soul to the Western Paradise.[99] The Virginian
Indians had great reverence for a small bird called Pawcorance, that
flies in the woods, and in its note continually sounds that name. This
bird flies alone, and is heard only in twilight. It is said to be the
son of one of their priests, and on this account they would not hurt
it; but there was once a profane Indian who was hired to shoot one of
them, but report says he paid dearly for his act of presumption, for a
few days afterwards he disappeared, and was never heard of again.[100]
The Indians dwelling about the Falls of St. Anthony supposed that the
spirits of their dead warriors animated the eagles which frequented the
place, and these eagles were objects of their worship. In the 'Sæmund
Edda' it is said that in the nether world souls as singed birds fly
about like swarms of flies--

    Of that is to be told
    What I just observed,
    When I had come into the land of torment:
    Singed birds,
    That had been souls,
    Flew as many as gnats.

The Finns and the Lithuanians speak of the 'Milky Way' as the Bird's
Way--the way of souls. According to Kuhn, the notion of the soul
assuming the form of a bird is closely allied with the primitive
tradition of birds as soul-bringers. Thus, as it has been suggested,
'the soul and the bird that brought it down to earth may have been
supposed to become one, and to enter and quit the body together.'
In the Egyptian hieroglyphics a bird signified the soul of man; and
the German name for stork, writes Grimm, is literally child, or
soul-bringer. Hence the belief that the advent of infants is presided
over by this bird, which obtains so wide a credence in Denmark and
Germany.[101]

The idea of the bird as a 'soul bringer' probably gave rise to the
popular belief that it is unlucky when a bird hovers near the window of
a sick-room, a superstition to which Mrs. Hemans has prettily alluded:

    Say not 'tis vain! I tell thee some
      Are warned by a meteor's light,
    Or a pale bird flitting calls them home,
      Or a voice on the winds by night.

There are various stories told of mysterious birds appearing at such a
time in different localities. In Devonshire the appearance of a white
breasted bird has long been considered a presage of death, a notion
which is said to have originated in a tragic occurrence that happened
to one of the Oxenham family. A local ballad tells how on the bridal
eve of Margaret, heiress of Sir James Oxenham, a silver-breasted bird
flew over the wedding guests just as Sir James stood up to thank them
for good wishes. The next day she was slain by a discarded lover, and
the ballad records how--

    Round her hovering flies,
    The phantom-bird, for her last breath,
    To bear it to the skies.

In Yorkshire, Berry Well was supposed to be haunted by a bogie in
the form of a white goose, and the Rev. S. Baring-Gould informs us
how Lew Trenchard House is haunted by a white lady who goes by the
name of Madame Gould, and is supposed to be the spirit of a lady who
died there, April 10, 1795. 'A stone is shown on the "ramps" of Lew
Slate Quarry, where seven parsons met to lay the old madame, and some
say that the white owl, which nightly flits to and fro in front of
Lew House, is the spirit of the lady conjured by the parsons into a
bird.'[102]

Similarly, whenever the white owls are seen perched on the family
mansion of the noble family of Arundel of Wardour, it is regarded as
a certain indication that one of its members will shortly be summoned
out of the world. In Count Montalembert's 'Vie de Ste. Elizabeth' it
is related how 'Duke Louis of Thuringia, the husband of Ste. Elizabeth
of Hungary, being on the point of expiring, said to those around him,
"Do you see those doves more white than snow?" His attendants supposed
him to be a prey to visions; but a little while afterwards he said to
them, "I must fly away with those brilliant doves." Having said this
he fell asleep in peace. Then his almoner, Berthold, perceived doves
flying away to the east, and followed them along with his eyes.' We
may compare a similar story told of the most beautiful woman of the
Knistenaux, named 'Foot of the Fawn,' who died in her childbirth, and
her babe with her. Soon afterwards two doves appeared, one full grown,
and the other a little one. They were the spirits of the mother and
child, and the Indians would gather about the tree on which they were
perched with reverential love, and worship them as the spirit of
the woman and child.[103] There is Lord Lyttelton's well-known ghost
story, and the belief of the Duchess of Kendal that George I. flew
into her window in the shape of a raven. Another well-known case was
that of the Duchess of St. Albans, who, on her death-bed, remarked
to her step-daughter, Lady Guilford, 'I am so happy to day because
your father's spirit is breathing upon me; he has taken the shape of
a little bird singing at my window.' Kelly relates an anecdote of
a credulous individual who believed that the departing soul of his
brother-in-law, in the form of a bird, tapped at his window at the
time of his death;[104] and in FitzPatrick's 'Life of Bishop Doyle' it
is related, in allusion to his death, that, 'considering the season
was midsummer, and not winter, the visit of two robin redbreasts to
the sick-room may be noticed as interesting. They remained fluttering
round, and sometimes perching on the uncurtained bed. The priests,
struck by the novelty of the circumstance, made no effort to expel
the little visitors, and the robins hung lovingly over the bishop's
head until death released him.' A singular instance of this belief
was the extraordinary whim of a Worcester lady, who, imagining her
daughter to exist in the shape of a singing-bird, literally furnished
her pew in the Cathedral with cages full of the kind; and we are told
in Lord Oxford's letters that, as she was rich, and a benefactress in
beautifying the church, no objection was made to her harmless folly.

FOOTNOTES:

[92] _Songs of the Russian People_, p. 118.

[93] Quoted by Gubernatis, _Zoological Mythology_, 1872, ii. pp. 254,
255.

[94] Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco, _Study of Folk-songs_ p. 10;
Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_, i. p. 289.

[95] Henderson's _Folk-lore of Northern Counties_, p. 126; Thorpe's
Northern Mythology, ii. p. 211.

[96] See Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, pp. 48, 49.

[97] Jones' _Credulities, Past and Present_, p. 376.

[98] See Dasent's _Tales of the Norse_, 1859, p. 230.

[99] Jones' _Credulities, Past and Present_, p. 373.

[100] Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, pp. 255, 256.

[101] Hardwick's _Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-lore_, 1872
p. 243; Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_, i. p. 289. See Kelly's
_Indo-European Folk-lore_, p. 103.

[102] See Henderson's _Folk-lore of Northern Counties_, pp. 331-335.

[103] Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 255.

[104] _Indo-European Folk-lore_, pp. 104, 105.




CHAPTER VIII

ANIMAL GHOSTS


It is the rule rather than the exception for ghosts to take the
form of animals. A striking feature of this form of animism is its
universality, an argument, it is said, in favour of its having
originally sprung from the old theory of metempsychosis which has
pertinaciously existed in successive stages of the world's culture.
'Possibly,' it has been suggested, 'the animal form of ghosts is a mark
of the once-supposed divinity of the dead. Ancestor worship is one
of the oldest of the creeds, and in all mythologies we find that the
gods could transform themselves into any shape at will, and frequently
took those of beasts and birds.'[105] At the same time, one would
scarcely expect to come across nowadays this fanciful belief in our
own and other civilised countries, and yet instances are of constant
occurrence, being deeply rooted in many a local tradition. Acts of
injustice done to a person cause the soul to return in animal form by
way of retribution. Thus, in Cornwall, it is a very popular fancy that
when a young woman who has loved not wisely but too well dies forsaken
and broken-hearted, she comes back to haunt her deceiver in the form
of a white hare.[106] This phantom pursues the false one everywhere,
being generally invisible to everyone but himself. It occasionally
rescues him from danger, but invariably causes his death in the end. A
Shropshire story tells[107] how 'two or three generations back there
was a lady buried in her jewels at Fitz, and afterwards the clerk
robbed her; and she used to walk Cuthery Hollow in the form of a colt.
They called it Obrick's Colt, and one night the clerk met it, and fell
on his knees, saying, "Abide, Satan! abide! I am a righteous man, and a
psalm singer."'[108] The ghost was known as Obrick's Colt from the name
of the thief, who, as the peasantry were wont to say, 'had niver no
pace atter; a was sadly troubled in his yed, and mithered.'[109]

Sometimes the spirit in animal form is that of a wicked person doomed
to wear that shape for some offence. A man who hanged himself at
Broomfield, near Shrewsbury, 'came again in the form of a large black
dog;' and an amusing Shropshire story is told of the laying of an
animal ghost at Bagbury, which took the form of a roaring bull, and
caused no small alarm. This bull, it appears, had been a very bad
man, but when his unexpected presence as a bull-ghost terrified the
neighbourhood, it was deemed desirable by the twelve parsons whose help
had been invoked to run him to earth in Hyssington Church, with candles
and all the paraphernalia employed on such occasions. But the bull,
becoming infuriated, 'made such a bust that he cracked the wall of
the church from the top to the bottom.' Their efforts were ultimately
successful, for they captured him, and as he was compressible, they
shut him up in a snuff-box, and laid him in the Red Sea for a thousand
years.

Lady Howard, a Devonshire notable of the time of James I., in spite
of her beauty and accomplishments, had many bad qualities, and amongst
others was not only guilty of unnatural cruelty to her only daughter,
but had a mysterious knack of getting rid of her husbands, having been
married no less than four times. Her misdemeanours, however, did not
escape with impunity, for, on her death, her spirit was transformed
into a hound, and compelled to run every night, between midnight and
cockcrow, from the gateway of Fitzford, her former residence, to
Oakhampton Park, and bring back to the place from whence she started a
blade of grass in her mouth, and this penance she is doomed to continue
till every blade of grass is removed from the park, which she will not
be able to effect till the end of the world.

Many spectral dogs, believed to be the souls of wicked persons, are
said to haunt the sides of rivers and pools, and the story goes that
there once lived in the hamlet of Dean Combe, Devon, a weaver of great
fame and skill. After a prosperous life he died, but the next day he
appeared sitting at the loom and working diligently as when he was
alive. His sons applied to the parson, who, hearing the noise of the
weaver's shuttle above, cried, 'Knowles! come down; this is no place
for thee.' 'I will,' said the weaver, 'as soon as I have worked out
my quill' (the quill is the shuttle-full of wool). 'Nay,' said the
vicar, 'thou hast been long enough at thy work, come down at once!' So
when the spirit came down, the vicar took a handful of earth from the
churchyard, and threw it on its face, and instantly it became a black
hound. Then the vicar took a nutshell with a hole in it, and led the
hound to the pool below the waterfall. 'Take this shell,' he said,
'and when thou shalt have dipped out the pool with it, thou mayest
rest, not before.'[110] On the west coast of Ireland, fishermen have a
strong prejudice against killing seals, owing to a popular tradition
that they enshrined 'the souls of them that were drowned at the flood.'
It was also said that such seals possessed the power of casting aside
their external skins, and disporting themselves in human form on the
sea-shore.

Within the parish of Tring, Hertford, a poor old woman was drowned
in 1751 for suspected witchcraft. A chimney-sweeper, who was the
principal perpetrator of this deed, was hanged and gibbeted near the
place where the murder was committed; and while the gibbet stood, and
long after it had disappeared, the spot was haunted by a black dog. A
correspondent of the 'Book of Days' (ii. 433) says that he was told by
the village schoolmaster, who had been 'abroad,' that he himself had
seen this diabolical dog. 'I was returning home,' said he, 'late at
night in a gig with the person who was driving. When we came near the
spot, where a portion of the gibbet had lately stood, he saw on the
bank of the roadside a flame of fire as large as a man's hat. "What's
that?" I exclaimed. "Hush!" said my companion, and suddenly pulling
in his horse, made a dead stop. I then saw an immense black dog just
in front of our horse, the strangest looking creature I ever beheld.
He was as big as a Newfoundland, but very gaunt, shaggy, with long
ears and tail, eyes like balls of fire, and large, long teeth, for he
opened his mouth and seemed to grin at us. In a few minutes the dog
disappeared, seeming to vanish like a shadow, or to sink into the
earth, and we drove on over the spot where he had lain.'

Occasionally, when loss of life has happened through an accident, a
spectre animal of some kind has been afterwards seen. Some years ago
an accident happened in a Cornish mine, whereby several men lost their
lives. As soon as help could be procured, a party descended, but the
remains of the poor fellows were discovered to be mutilated beyond
recognition. On being brought up to the surface, the clothes and a
mass of mangled flesh dropped from the bodies. A bystander, anxious
to spare the feelings of the relatives present, quickly cast the
unsightly mass into the blazing furnace of an engine close at hand. But
ever since that day the engineman positively asserted that troops of
little black dogs continually haunted the locality. Then there is the
pretty legend mentioned by Wordsworth in his poem entitled, 'The White
Doe of Rylstone,' in which is embodied a Yorkshire tradition to the
effect that the lady founder of Bolton Abbey revisited the ruins of the
venerable structure in the form of a spotless white doe:

    Which, though seemingly doomed in its breast to sustain
    A softened remembrance of sorrow and pain,
    Is spotless, and holy, and gentle, and bright,
    And glides o'er the earth like an angel of light.

So common in France are human ghosts in bestial form, 'that M.
D'Assier has invented a Darwinian way of accounting for the phenomena.
M. D'Assier, a positivist, is a believer in ghosts, but not in the
immortality of the soul. He suggests that the human _revenants_ in the
guise of sheep, cows, and shadowy creatures may be accounted for by a
kind of Atavism, or "throwing back," on the side of the spirit to the
lower animal forms out of which humanity was developed!'[111]

According to a German piece of folk-lore, the soul takes the form of a
snake, a notion we find shared by the Zulus, who revere a certain kind
of serpents as the ghosts of the dead; and the Northern Indians speak
of a serpent coming out of the mouth of a woman at death. It is further
related that out of the mouth of a sleeping person a snake creeps and
goes a long distance, and that whatever it sees, or suffers, on its
way, the sleeper dreams of. If it is prevented from returning, the
person dies.[112] Another belief tells us that the soul occasionally
escapes from the mouth in the shape of a weasel or a mouse, a
superstition to which Goethe alludes in 'Faust':

    Ah! in the midst of her song,
    A red mouseskin sprang out of her mouth.

Turning to similar beliefs current among distant nations, we are told
that the Andaman Islanders had a notion that at death the soul vanished
from the earth in the form of various animals and fishes; and in
Guinea, monkeys found in the locality of a graveyard are supposed to be
animated by the spirits of the dead. As Mr. Andrew Lang remarks:[113]
'Among savages who believe themselves to be descended from beasts,
nothing can be more natural than the hypothesis that the souls revert
to bestial shapes.' Certain of the North American Indian tribes believe
that the spirits of their dead enter into bears; and some of the
Papuans in New Guinea 'imagine they will reappear as certain of the
animals in their own island. The cassowary and the emu are the most
remarkable animals that they know of; they have lodged in them the
shades of their ancestors, and hence the people abstain from eating
them.'[114] Spiritualism, we are told, is very widely spread among
the Esquimos, who maintain that all animals have their spirits, and
that the spirits of men can enter into the bodies of animals.[115]
In the Ladrone Islands it was supposed that the spirits of the dead
animated the bodies of the fish, and 'therefore to make better use of
these precious spirits, they burnt the soft portions of the dead body,
and swallowed the cinders which they let float on the top of their
cocoa-nut wine.'[116]

In most parts of England there is a popular belief in a spectral dog,
which is generally described as 'large, shaggy, and black, with long
ears and tail. It does not belong to any species of living dogs, but is
severally said to represent a hound, a setter, a terrier, or a shepherd
dog, though often larger than a Newfoundland.'[117] It is commonly
supposed to be a bad spirit, haunting places where evil deeds have
been done, or where some calamity may be expected. In Lancashire, this
spectre-dog is known as 'Trash' and 'Striker,'[118] its former name
having been applied to it from the peculiar noise made by its feet,
which is supposed to resemble that of a person walking along a miry,
sloppy road, with heavy shoes; and its latter appellation from its
uttering a curious screech, which is thought to warn certain persons
of the approaching death of some relative or friend. If followed, it
retreats with its eyes fronting its pursuer, and either sinks into
the ground with a frightful shriek, or in some mysterious manner
disappears. When struck, the weapon passes through it as if it were a
mere shadow. In Norfolk and Cambridgeshire this apparition is known
to the peasantry by the name of 'shuck'--the provincial word for
'shag'--and is reported to haunt churchyards and other lonely places.
A dreary lane in the parish of Overstrand is called from this spectral
animal 'Shuck's Lane,' and it is said that if the spot where it has
been seen be examined after its disappearance, it will be found to be
scorched, and strongly impregnated with the smell of brimstone. Mrs.
Latham tells[119] how a man of notoriously bad character, who lived in
a lonely spot at the foot of the South Downs, without any companion
of either sex, was believed to be nightly haunted by evil spirits in
the form of rats. Persons passing by his cottage late at night heard
him cursing them, and desiring them to let him rest in peace. It was
supposed they were sent to do judgment on him, and would carry him away
some night. But he received his death-blow in a drunken brawl.

In the neighbourhood of Leeds there is the Padfoot, a weird apparition
about the size of a small donkey, 'with shaggy hair and large eyes
like saucers.' Mr. Baring-Gould relates[120] how a man in Horbury once
saw 'the Padfooit,' which 'in this neighbourhood is a white dog like
a "flay-craw."' It goes sometimes on two legs, sometimes it runs on
three, and to see it is a prognostication of death. He was going home
by Jenkin, and he saw a white dog in the hedge. He struck at it, and
the stick passed through it. Then the white dog looked at him, and
it had 'great saucer e'en'; and he was so 'flayed,' that he ran home
trembling and went to bed, when he fell ill and died. With this strange
apparition may be compared the Barguest, Bahrgeist, or Boguest of
Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire, and the Boggart of Lancashire;
an uncanine creature, which generally assumes the form of a large black
dog with flaming eyes, and is supposed to be a presage of death. The
word 'barguest,' according to Sir Walter Scott, is from the German
'bahrgeist'--spirit of the bier; and, as it has been pointed out, the
proverbial expression to 'war like a Barguest,' shows how deep a hold
this apparition once had on the popular mind. There is a Barguest in a
glen between Darlington and Houghton, near Throstlenest, and another
haunted a piece of waste land above a spring called the Oxwells,
between Wreghorn and Headingly Hill, near Leeds. On the death of any
person of local importance in the neighbourhood the creature would
come forth, followed by all the dogs barking and howling.[121] Another
form of this animal spectre is the Capelthwaite, which, according to
common report, had the power of appearing in the form of any quadruped,
but usually chose that of a large black dog. It does not seem to have
appeared of late years, for tradition tells how a vicar of Beetham went
out in his ecclesiastical vestments to lay this troublesome spirit in
the River Bela.[122]

In Wales, there is the Gwyllgi, or 'dog of darkness,' a terrible
spectre of a mastiff which, with a baleful breath and blazing red
eyes, has often inspired terror even amongst the strong-minded Welsh
peasantry. Many stories are told of its encountering unwary travellers,
who have been so overcome by its unearthly howl, or by the glare of its
fiery eyes, that they have fallen senseless on the ground. A certain
lane, leading from Mowsiad to Lisworney-Crossways, is said to have been
haunted by a Gwyllgi of the most terrible aspect. A farmer, living near
there, was one night returning home from market on a young mare, when
suddenly the animal shied, reared, tumbled the farmer off, and bolted
for home. The farm-servants, finding the mare trembling by the barn
door, suspected she had seen the Gwyllgi, and going in search of their
master, they found him on his back in the mud, who, being questioned,
protested 'it was the Gwyllgi, and nothing less, that had made all this
trouble.'[123]

It is a popular belief in Wales that horses have the peculiar 'gift'
of seeing spectres, and carriage horses have been known to display
every sign of the utmost terror when the occupants of the carriage
could see no cause for alarm. Such an apparition is an omen of death,
and an indication that a funeral will pass before long, bearing to the
grave some person not dead at the time of the horses' fright. Another
famous dog-fiend, in the shape of a shaggy spaniel, was the 'Mauthe
Doog,' which was said to haunt Peel Castle, Isle of Man. Its favourite
place was the guard-chamber, where it would lie down by the fireside.
According to Waldron, 'the soldiers lost much of their terror by the
frequency of the sight; yet, as they believed it to be an evil spirit
waiting for an opportunity to hinder them, the belief kept them so far
in order that they refrained from swearing in its presence. But, as
the Mauthe Doog used to come out and return by the passage through the
church, by which also somebody must go to deliver the keys every night
to the captain, they continued to go together; he whose turn it was to
do that duty being accompanied by the next in rotation. On a certain
night, however, one of the soldiers, being the worse for liquor, would
go with the key alone, though it really was not his turn. His comrades
tried to dissuade him, but he said he wanted the Mauthe Doog's company,
and would try whether he was dog or devil. Soon afterwards a great
noise alarmed the soldiers; and when the adventurer returned, he was
struck with horror and speechless, nor could he even make such signs
as might give them to understand what had happened to him; but he died
with distorted features in violent agony. After this the apparition was
never seen again.'

Then there are the packs of spectral hounds, which some folk-lorists
tell us are evil spirits that have assumed this form in order to mimic
the sports of men, or to hunt their souls. They are variously named
in different parts of the country--being designated in the North,
'Gabriel's Hounds'; in Devon, the 'Wisk,' 'Yesk,' 'Yeth,' or 'Heath
Hounds'; in Wales, 'Cwn Annwn' or 'Cwn y Wybr'; and in Cornwall,
the 'Devil and his Dandy-Dogs.' Such spectral hounds are generally
described as 'monstrous human-headed dogs,' and 'black, with fiery
eyes and teeth, and sprinkled all over with blood.' They are often
heard though seldom seen, 'and seem to be passing along simply in the
air, as if in hot pursuit of their prey'; and when they appear to hang
over a house, then death or misfortune may shortly be expected. In the
gorge of Cliviger the spectre huntsman, under the name of 'Gabriel
Ratchets,' with his hounds yelping through the air, is believed to hunt
a milk-white doe round the Eagle's Crag, in the Vale of Todmorden,
on All Hallows Eve.[124] Mr. Holland, of Sheffield, has embodied the
local belief in the subjoined sonnet, and says: 'I never can forget the
impression made upon my mind when once arrested by the cry of these
Gabriel hounds as I passed the parish church of Sheffield one densely
dark and very still night. The sound was exactly like the questing
of a dozen beagles on the foot of a race, but not so loud, and highly
suggestive of ideas of the supernatural.'

    Oft have I heard my honoured mother say,
      How she has listened to the Gabriel hounds--
      Those strange, unearthly, and mysterious sounds
    Which on the ear through murkiest darkness fell;
    And how, entranced by superstitious spell,
      The trembling villager nor seldom heard,
      In the quaint notes of the nocturnal bird,
    Of death premonished, some sick neighbour's knell.
    I, too, remember, once at midnight dark,
      How these sky-yelpers startled me, and stirred
      My fancy so, I could have then averred
    A mimic pack of beagles low did bark.
    Nor wondered I that rustic fear should trace
    A spectral huntsman doomed to that long moonless chase.

In the neighbourhood of Leeds these hounds are known as 'Gabble
Retchets,' and are supposed, as in other places, to be the souls of
unbaptized children who flit restlessly about their parents' abode. The
Yeth hounds were heard some few years ago in the parish of St. Mary
Tavy by an old man named Roger Burn. He was walking in the fields, when
he suddenly heard the baying of the hounds, the shouts and horn of
the huntsman, and the smacking of his whip. The last point the old man
quoted as at once settling the question, 'How could I be mistaken? Why,
I heard the very smacking of his whip.'

But, as Mr. Yarrell has long ago explained, this mysterious noise is
caused by bean-geese, which, coming southwards in large flocks on the
approach of winter--partly from Scotland and its islands, but chiefly
from Scandinavia--choose dark nights for their migration, and utter a
loud and very peculiar cry. The sound of these birds has been observed
in every part of England, and as far west as Cornwall. One day a man
was riding alone near Land's End on a still dark night, when the
yelping cry broke out above his head so suddenly, and to appearance so
near, that he instinctively pulled up the horse as if to allow the pack
to pass, the animal trembling violently at the unexpected sounds.

An amusing account of the devil and his dandy-dogs is given by Mr.
J. Q. Couch, in his 'Folk-lore of a Cornish Village,' from which it
appears that 'a poor herdsman was journeying homeward across the
moors one windy night, when he heard at a distance among the Tors
the baying of hounds, which he soon recognised as the dismal chorus
of the dandy-dogs. It was three or four miles to his house, and, very
much alarmed, he hurried onward as fast as the treacherous nature of
the soil and the uncertainty of the path would allow; but, alas! the
melancholy yelping of the hounds, and the dismal holloa of the hunter,
came nearer and nearer. After a considerable run they had so gained
upon him that on looking back--oh, horror! he could distinctly see
hunter and dogs. The former was terrible to look at, and had the usual
complement of _saucer-eyes_, horns, and tail accorded by common consent
to the legendary devil. He was black, of course, and carried in his
hand a long hunting pole. The dogs, a numerous pack, blackened the
small patch of moor that was visible, each snorting fire, and uttering
a yelp of indescribably frightful tone. No cottage, rock, or tree was
near to give the herdsman shelter, and nothing apparently remained
to him but to abandon himself to their fury, when a happy thought
suddenly flashed upon him and suggested a resource. Just as they were
about to rush upon him, he fell on his knees in prayer. There was a
strange power in the holy words he uttered, for immediately, as if
resistance had been offered, the hell hounds stood at bay, howling more
dismally than ever, and the hunter shouted, "Bo Shrove," which means
"The boy prays," at which they all drew off on some other pursuit and
disappeared.'

Gervase of Tilbury informs us that in the thirteenth century the wild
hunt was often seen by full moon in England traversing forest and down.
In the twelfth century it was known as the Herlething, the banks of the
Wye having been the scene of the most frequent chases.

In Wales, the Cwn Annwn, or Dogs of Hell, or, as they are sometimes
called, 'Dogs of the Sky,' howl through the air 'with a voice
frightfully disproportionate to their size, full of a wild sort of
lamentation,' but, although terrible to hear, they are harmless, and
have never been known to commit any mischief. One curious peculiarity
is that the nearer these spectral hounds are to a man, the less loud
their voices sound; and the farther off they are, the louder is their
cry. According to one popular tradition, they are supposed to be
hunting through the air the soul of the wicked man the instant it
quits the body.

This superstition occupies, too, a conspicuous place in the folk-lore
of Germany and Norway. Mr. Baring-Gould, in his 'Iceland, its Scenes
and Sages,' describes it as he heard it from his guide Jon, who
related it to him under the title of the 'Yule Host.' He tells us how
'Odin, or Wodin, is the wild huntsman who nightly tears on his white
horse over the German and Norwegian forests and moor-sweeps, with his
legion of hell hounds. Some luckless woodcutter, on a still night,
is returning through the pine-woods when suddenly his ear catches a
distant wail; a moan rolls through the interlacing branches; nearer
and nearer comes the sound. There is the winding of a long horn waxing
louder and louder, the baying of hounds, the rattle of hoofs and paws
on the pine-tree tops.' This spectral chase goes by different names.
In Thuringia and elsewhere it is 'Hakelnberg' or 'Hackelnbärend,' and
the story goes that Hakelnberg was a knight passionately fond of the
chase, who, on his death-bed, would not listen to the priest, but
said, 'I care not for heaven, I care only for the chase.' Then 'hunt
until the last day,' exclaimed the priest. And now, through storm and
sunshine, he fleets, a faint barking or yelping in the air announcing
his approach. Thorpe quotes a similar story as current in the
Netherlands,[125] and in Denmark it occurs under various forms.[126]
In Schleswig it is Duke Abel, who slew his brother in 1252. Tradition
says that in an expedition against the Frieslanders, he sank into a
deep morass as he was fording the Eyder, where, being encumbered with
the weight of his armour, he was slain. His body was buried in the
Cathedral, but his spirit found no rest. The canons dug up the corpse,
and buried it in a morass near Gottorp, but in the neighbourhood of
the place where he is buried all kinds of shrieks and strange sounds
have been heard, and 'many persons worthy of credit affirm that they
have heard sounds so resembling a huntsman's horn, that anyone would
say that a hunter was hunting there. It is, indeed, the general rumour
that Abel has appeared to many, black of aspect, riding on a small
horse, and accompanied by three hounds, which appear to be burning
like fire.'[127] In Sweden, when a noise like that of carriage and
horses is heard at night, the people say, 'Odin is passing by,' and in
Norway this spectral hunt is known as the 'Chase of the inhabitants of
Asgarth.' In Danzig, the leader of the hounds is Dyterbjernat, _i.e._
Diedrick of Bern. Near Fontainebleau, Hugh Capet is supposed to ride,
having, it is said, rushed over the palace with his hounds before
the assassination of Henry IV.; and at Blois, the hunt is called the
'Chasse Macabee.' In some parts of France the wild huntsman is known
as Harlequin, or Henequin, and in the Franche Comté he is 'Herod in
pursuit of the Holy Innocents.' This piece of folk-lore is widespread,
and it may be added that in Normandy, the Pyrenees, and in Scotland,
King Arthur has the reputation of making nightly rides.

Another form of spectre animal is the kirk-grim, which is believed
to haunt many churches. Sometimes it is a dog, sometimes a pig,
sometimes a horse, the haunting spectre being the spirit of an animal
buried alive in the churchyard for the purpose of scaring away the
sacrilegious. Swedish tradition tells how it was customary for the
early founders of Christian churches to bury a lamb under the altar.
It is said that when anyone enters a church out of service time he may
chance to see a little lamb spring across the choir and vanish. This
is the church lamb, and its appearance in the churchyard, especially
to the grave-digger, is said to betoken the death of a child.[128]
According to a Danish form of this superstition, the kirk-grim dwells
either in the tower or wherever it can find a place of concealment,
and is thought to protect the sacred building; and it is said that
in the streets of Kroskjoberg, a grave-sow, or as it is also called,
a 'gray-sow,' has frequently been seen. It is thought to be the
apparition of a sow formerly buried alive, and to forebode death and
calamity.

FOOTNOTES:

[105] _Shropshire Folk-lore_, p. 131.

[106] Hunt's _Popular Romances of the West of England_, p. 377.

[107] _Shropshire Folk-lore_, pp. 105, 106.

[108] See _Ibid._ pp. 108-111.

[109] See Hartshorne's _Salopia Antiqua_, p. 522

[110] _Notes and Queries_, 1st S. ii. p. 515.

[111] _Nineteenth Century_, April 1885, p. 625.

[112] See Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_, ii. pp. 289, 290.

[113] _Nineteenth Century_, April 1885, p. 625.

[114] Letourneau's _Sociology_, p. 250.

[115] _Ibid._ p. 264.

[116] _Ibid._ p. 266.

[117] _Book of Days_, ii. p. 433.

[118] See Harland and Wilkinson's _Lancashire Folk-lore_, p. 91.

[119] 'West Sussex Superstitions,' _Folk-lore Record_, i. p. 23.

[120] Henderson's _Folk-lore of Northern Counties_, pp. 274, 275.

[121] Henderson's _Folk-lore of Northern Counties_, p. 275.

[122] See Henderson's _Folk-lore of Northern Counties_, pp. 274-278.

[123] See Wirt Sikes' _British Goblins_, pp. 167-169.

[124] See Roby's _Traditions of Lancashire_; Homerton's _Isles of
Loch Awe_; Hardwick's _Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-lore_, pp.
153-176.

[125] _Northern Mythology_, iii. p. 219.

[126] _Ibid._ ii. pp. 195-202.

[127] _Northern Mythology_, ii. pp. 198, 199.

[128] See Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_, ii. pp. 102, 166, 167.




CHAPTER IX

PHANTOM LIGHTS


Stories of mysterious lights suddenly illuminating the nocturnal
darkness of unfrequented spots have long been current throughout the
world. In the 'Odyssey,' when Athene was mystically present as Odysseus
and Telemachus were moving the weapons out of the hall (xix. 21-50),
Telemachus exclaims, 'Father, surely a great marvel is this I behold!
Meseemeth that the walls of the hall, and the fair spaces between the
pillars, and the beams of pine, and the columns that run aloft, are
bright as it were with flaming fire. Verily some god is within of them
that hold the wide heaven.' Odysseus answers, 'Lo, this is the wont
of the gods that possess Olympus.' In Theocritus, when Hera sends
the snakes to attack the infant Heracles, a mysterious flame shines
forth. The same phenomenon occurs in the Sagas of Burut Njas, when
Gunnar sings within his tomb. The brilliance of the light which attends
the presence of the supernatural is indeed widely diffused, and, as
Mr. Andrew Lang writes,[129] 'Philosophers may dispute whether any
objective fact lies at the bottom of this belief, or whether a savage
superstition has survived into Greek epic and idyll and into modern
ghost stories.'

Although science has years ago explained many such phosphoric
appearances as governed by certain atmospheric laws, superstitious
fancy has not only attributed to them supernatural causes, but
associated them with all kinds of weird and romantic tales. According
to one popular notion, strange lights of this kind are the spirits of
persons who, for some reason, cannot remain quiet. Thus a spectre known
as the 'Lady and the Lantern,' has long been said to haunt the beach
at St. Ives, Cornwall, in stormy weather. The story goes that a lady
and her child had been saved from a wreck, but the child was swept away
and drowned, and she is supposed to be hunting for its body. Similar
tales are told elsewhere, but the object of search is not always the
same. A light, for instance, hovers about a stone on the Cornish coast,
locally designated 'Madge Figg's Chair,' which is supposed to be the
ghost of a wrecked lady whom Madge stripped of her jewels. In Scotland
the appearance of a spectral 'lady of the golden casket' was attended
by a phantom light, and it is also related how the ghost of a murdered
woman is seen by her lover at sea, approaching in the shape of a bright
light, which assumes the human form as it draws nearer. She finally
calls him, and he springs into her arms, and disappears in a flash of
fire.[130]

There is the popular legend of the 'Radiant Boy'--a strange boy with
a shining face, who has been seen in certain Lincolnshire houses and
elsewhere. This ghost was described to Mr. Baring-Gould[131] by a
Yorkshire farmer, who, as he was riding one night to Thirsk, suddenly
saw pass by him a 'radiant boy' on a white horse. To quote his own
words, 'there was no sound of footfall as the boy drew nigh. He was
first aware of the approach of the mysterious rider by seeing the
shadow of himself and his horse flung before him on the high road.
Thinking there might be a carriage with lamps, he was not alarmed till,
by the shortening of the shadow, he knew that the light must be near
him, and then he was surprised to hear no sound. He thereupon turned
in his saddle, and at the same moment the "radiant boy" passed him.
He was a child of about eleven, with a fresh bright face. "Had he any
clothes on? and if so, what were they like?" I asked. But the old man
could not tell. His astonishment was so great that he took no notice
of particulars. The boy rode on till he came to a gate which led into
a field; he stooped as if to open the gate, rode through, and all was
instantly dark.'

At the commencement of the present century the little village of Black
Heddon, near Stamfordham, in Northumberland, was greatly disturbed
by an apparition known as 'Silky,' from the nature of her dress. She
suddenly appeared to benighted travellers, breaking forth upon them in
dazzling splendour, in the darkest and most lonely parts of the road.
This spirit exercised a marvellous power over the brute creation, and
once, it is said, waylaid a waggon bringing coals to a farm near Black
Heddon, and fixed the team upon a bridge, since called, after her,
'Silky's Brig.' Do what he could, the driver could not make the horses
move a step, and there they would have stayed all night had not another
farm servant come up with some mountain ash about him. It was generally
supposed that Silky, who suddenly disappeared, was the troubled phantom
of some person who had died miserable because she owned treasure, and
was overtaken by death before she had disclosed its hiding-place.

An old barn situated near Birchen Tower, Hollinwood, which was noted
for the apparition of Madame Beswick on dark and wintry nights, at
times, it is said, appears to be on fire, a red glare of glowing heat
being observable through the loopholes and crevices of the building.
Sometimes the sight is so threatening that the neighbours will raise an
alarm that the barn is in flames. But when the premises are searched,
everything is in order, and nothing found wrong.[132] And a Welsh
romance tells how, after Howel Sele slew his cousin Glendower, and
buried him in 'a broad and blasted oak, scorched by the lightning's
vivid glare,'

    Pale lights on Cader's rocks were seen,
    And midnight voices heard to moan.

Such phantom lights are not confined to land, and most of the tales of
spectre ships speak of their being seen by the affrighted crews. In the
'Salem Spectre Ship' we are told how

    The night grew thick, but a phantom light
    Around her path was shed.

They are generally dreaded as foreboding a catastrophe, and have given
rise to a host of curious stories. A light is said to hover about in
Sennen Cove, which is thought to be an ill-omened apparition; and a
Welsh story speaks of a ghost, the 'Cyhyraeth,' that appears on the
beach, in a light, with groanings and cries.[133] Flames are reported
to issue from the Eider River, and from several lakes in Germany.
Where ships have been wrecked, blue lights are supposed to faintly
glimmer, occasionally accompanied by the spirits of wrecked or injured
persons. A notable instance is told of Sable Island,[134] where, with
the leaping flames, is seen the 'Lady of Copeland' wrecked and murdered
by pirates from the Amelie transport. She has one finger missing on her
hand.

Sometimes weird lights flickering in solitary places are thought to be
the unhappy spirits of wicked persons who have no rest in the grave.
Milton refers to this fancy in his 'Paradise Lost' (ix. 634):

                            A wandering fire,
    Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night
    Condenses, and the cold environs round,
    Kindled through agitation to a flame,
    Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends,
    Hovering and blazing with delusive light,
    Misleads the amazed night wanderer from his way
    To bogs and mires; and oft through pond or pool
    There swallowed up and lost from succour far.

Hence they were doomed to wander backwards and forwards carrying
a light. A tradition current in Normandy says that a pale light
occasionally seen by travellers is the unquiet spirit of some
unfortunate woman who, as a punishment for her intrigues with a
minister of the Church, is doomed to this existence. There are various
versions of this story, and one formerly current in this country tells
how the hovering flame--the cause of terror to many--is the soul of a
priest who has been condemned to expiate his vows of perpetual chastity
by thus haunting the scenes of his disobedience. Brand, quoting from an
old work on 'Lights that Lead People out of their Ways in the Night,'
informs us that the lights which are seen in churchyards and Moorish
places were represented by the Popish clergy to be 'souls come out of
purgatory all in flame, to move the people to pray for their entire
deliverance, by which they gulled them of much money to say mass for
them, everyone thinking it might be the soul of his or her deceased
relations.'

According to another explanation, it is believed on the Continent that
the ghosts of those who in their lifetime were guilty of removing their
neighbours' landmarks are fated to roam hither and thither, lantern in
hand, 'sometimes impelled to replace the old boundary mark, then to
move it again, constantly changing their course with their changing
purpose.' A Swedish tradition adds that such a spirit may be heard
saying in a harsh, hoarse voice, 'It is right! it is right! it is
right!' But the next moment qualms of conscience and anguish seize him,
and he then exclaims, 'It is wrong! it is wrong! it is wrong!'[135]
It is also said that these lights are the souls of land-measurers,
who, having acted dishonestly in their business, are trying to remedy
the wrong measurements they made. A German legend tells how, at the
partition of the land, there arose between the villages of Alversdorf
and Röst, in South Ditmarschen, great disputes. One man gave fraudulent
measurements, but after his death he wandered about as a fire sprite. A
flame, the height of a man, was seen dancing about till the moor dried
up. Whenever it flared up higher than usual, the people would cry out,
'Dat is de Scheelvalgt'--that is the land-divider. There is a tale told
of a certain land-measurer near Farsum, in the Netherlands, who had in
his lifetime acted dishonestly when he had a piece of land to measure.
He suffered himself 'to be bribed by one or other, and then allotted
to the party more than was just, for which offence he was condemned
after death to wander as a burning man with a burning measuring-staff.'

Popular fancy, too, has long identified phantom lights as being the
souls of unbaptized children. Because such souls cannot enter heaven,
they make their abodes in forests, and in dark and lonely places, where
they mourn over their hard lot. If at night they chance to meet anyone,
they run up to him, and walk on before to show him the way to some
water where they may be baptized. The mysterious lady, Frau Bertha, is
ever attended by troops of unbaptized children, whom she takes with her
when she joins the wild huntsman. One tradition relates how a Dutch
parson, happening to return home later than usual, was confronted with
no less than three of these fiery phenomena. Remembering them to be
the souls of unbaptized children, he thoughtfully stretched out his
hand, and pronounced the words of baptism over them. But, much to his
unexpected surprise, in the same instant hundreds of these moving
lights made their appearance, which so frightened him that, forgetting
his good intentions, he ran home as fast as he could. In Ireland
unbaptized children have been represented as sitting blindfolded within
fairy moats, the peasantry supposing such souls 'go into nought.' A
somewhat similar idea may be found in Longfellow's 'Evangeline,' where
we have introduced among the _contes_ of an Arcadian village notary
allusion to

    The white Létiche, the ghost of a child unchristened,
    Died, and was doomed to haunt unseen the chambers of children.

Closely allied with the notion of phantom lights are the strange
phosphoric appearances said occasionally to be seen about the dying.
In Russia, the soul under certain circumstances is believed to assume
the form of a flame, and such a ghostly apparition cannot be banished
till the necessary prayers have been offered up.[136] According to
a Sussex death-omen, lights of a circular form seen in the air are
significant, and it is supposed that the death of sick persons is
shown by the prognostic of 'shell-fire.' This is a sort of lambent
flame, which seems to rise from the bodies of those who are ill, and
to envelope the bed. On one occasion, considerable alarm was created
in a Sussex village by a pale light being observed to move over the
bed of a sick person, and after flickering for some time in different
parts of the room, to vanish through the window. But the difficulty
was eventually explained, for the light was found to proceed from a
luminous insect--the small glow-worm.[137] Marsh[138] relates how a
pale moonlight-coloured glimmer was once seen playing round the head
of a dying girl about an hour and a half before her last breath. The
light proceeded from her head, and was faint and tremulous like the
reflection of summer lightning, which at first those watching her
mistook it to be. Another case, reported by a medical man in Ireland,
was that of a consumptive patient, in whose cabin strange lights had
been seen, filling the neighbourhood with alarm. To quote a further
instance, from the mouth of a patient in a London hospital, some time
since, the nurses observed issuing a pale bluish flame, and soon after
the man died. The frightened nurses were at a loss to account for this
unusual sight, but a scientific explanation of the phenomenon ascribed
it to phosphoretted hydrogen, a result of incipient decomposition.[139]

Dante Rossetti, in his 'Blessed Damozel,' when he describes her as
looking down from heaven towards the earth that 'spins like a fretful
image,' whence she awaits the coming of her lover, depicts the souls
mounting up to God as passing by her 'like thin flames.'

Another form of this superstitious fancy is the corpse-candle, or
'tomb-fire,' which is invariably a death-warning. It sometimes appears
'as a stately flambeau, stalking along unsupported, burning with a
ghastly blue flame. Sometimes it is a plain tallow "dip" in the hand
of a ghost; and when the ghost is seen distinctly, it is recognised as
that of some person still living, who will now soon die[140]--in fact,
a wraith.' Occasionally the light issues from the person's mouth, or
nostrils. The size of the candle indicates the age of the person who is
about to die, being large when it is a full-grown person whose death
is foretold, small when it is a child, still smaller when an infant.
When two candles together are seen, one of which is large and the
other small, it is a mother and child who are to die. When the flame is
white the doomed person is a woman, when red a man. A Carmarthenshire
tradition relates how one evening, when the coach which runs between
Llandilo and Carmarthen was passing by Golden Grove, the property of
the Earl of Cawdor, three corpse-candles were observed on the surface
of the water gliding down the stream which runs near the road. A few
days afterwards, just as many men were drowned there. Such a light,
too, has long been thought to hover near the grave of the drowned,
reminding us of Moore's lines--

    Where lights, like charnel meteors, burned the distant wave,
    Bluely as o'er some seaman's grave,

and stories of such uncanny appearances have been told of nearly every
village churchyard.

It should be added that, according to a popular idea, the presence of
ghosts was announced, in bygone years, by an alteration in the tint of
the lights which happened to be burning--an item of folk-lore alluded
to in 'Richard III.' (Act v. sc. 3), where the tyrant exclaims as he
awakens--

    The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight,
    Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.

           *       *       *       *       *

    Methought the souls of all that I had murder'd
    Came to my tent.

So in 'Julius Cæsar,' (Act iv. sc. 3), Brutus, on seeing the ghost of
Cæsar, exclaims:

    How ill this taper burns! Ha! Who comes here?

Phantom lights have also been associated with buildings, as in the case
of the ancient chapel of Roslin, founded in the year 1446 by William
St. Clair, Prince of Orkney. It is believed that whenever any of the
founder's descendants are about to depart this life, the chapel appears
to be on fire, a weird and terrible occurrence graphically portrayed by
Harold's song in 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel':

    O'er Roslin all that dreary night,
      A wondrous blaze was seen to gleam;
    'Twas broader than the watch-fire light,
      And redder than the bright moonbeam.

    It glared on Roslin's castled rock,
      It ruddied all the copse-wood glen;
    'Twas seen from Dryden's groves of oak,
      And seen from cavern'd Hawthornden.

    Seem'd all on fire that chapel proud,
      Where Roslin's chiefs uncoffin'd lie;
    Each Baron, for a sable shroud,
      Sheathed in his iron panoply.

    Seem'd all on fire, within, around,
      Deep sacristy and altar's pale;
    Shone every pillar foliage-bound,
      And glimmer'd all the dead men's mail.

    Blazed battlement and pinnet high,
      Blazed every rose-carved buttress fair;
    So still they blaze when fate is nigh,
      The lordly line of Hugh St. Clair.

But notwithstanding the fact that the last 'Roslin,' as he was
called, died in 1778, and the estates passed into the possession of
the Erskines, Earls of Rosslyn, the old tradition has not yet been
extinguished.[141] Sir Walter Scott also tells us that the death of
the head of a Highland family is sometimes announced by a chain of
lights, of different colours, called Dr'eug, or death of the Druid.
The direction which it takes is supposed to mark the place of the
funeral.[142] A correspondent of 'Notes and Queries' gives a curious
account of a house at Taunton which possessed 'a luminous chamber,'
for, as common report said, 'the room had a light of its own.' As an
eye-witness observed, 'A central window was generally illuminated.'
All the other windows were dark, but from this was a wan, dreary light
visible; and as the owners had deserted the place, and it had no
occupant, the lighted window became a puzzle.

With the North American tribes one form of spiritual manifestation is
fire; and among the Hurons, a female spirit, who was supposed to cause
much of their sickness, appeared like a flame of fire. Of the New
England Indians it is related that 'they have a remarkable observation
of a flame that appears before the death of an Indian, upon their
wigwams, in the dead of night. Whenever this appears, there will be a
death.'[143] The Eskimos believe that the Inue, or powerful spirits,
'generally have the appearance of a fire or bright light, and to see
them is very dangerous, particularly as foreshadowing the death of a
relation.'[144]

FOOTNOTES:

[129] The _Nineteenth Century_, 'Comparative Study of Ghost Stories,'
1885, xvii. pp. 629, 630.

[130] Rev. W. Gregor, _Folk-lore of North-East of Scotland_, 1881, p.
69.

[131] _Yorkshire Oddities_, ii. p. 105.

[132] See Ingram's _Haunted Homes_, 2nd S. pp. 29, 30.

[133] See Wirt Sikes' _British Goblins_, pp. 219-221.

[134] 'Secrets of Sable Island,' _Harper's Magazine_.

[135] See Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_, ii. pp. 97, 202, 211; iii. pp.
11, 158, 268.

[136] _Songs of the Russian People_, 1872, p. 116.

[137] _Folk-lore Record_, 1878, i. p. 54.

[138] _Evolution of Light from the Living Subject._

[139] _Transactions Cardiff Natural Society_, iv. p. 5.

[140] Wirt Sikes, _British Goblins_, p. 239.

[141] See Ingram's _Haunted Homes_, 2nd S. pp. 219-221.

[142] See 'Essay on Fairy Superstitions' in the _Border Minstrelsy_.

[143] Rink's _Tales and Traditions of the Eskimos_, p. 43.

[144] Josselyn's _Two Voyages_, p. 133.




CHAPTER X

THE HEADLESS GHOST


Localities where any fatal accident has happened, or murder been
committed, are frequently supposed to be haunted by that uncanny
apparition known as 'the headless ghost.' Many curious tales are still
told by the peasantry of this mysterious spectre, whose weird movements
have long been the subject of comment. Sir Walter Scott, it may be
remembered, speaking of the Irish dullahan, writes: 'It puts me in
mind of a spectre at Drumlanrick Castle, of no less a person than the
Duchess of Queensberry--"Fair Kitty, blooming, young, and gay"--who,
instead of setting fire to the world in mama's chariot, amuses herself
with wheeling her own head in a wheelbarrow through the great gallery.'

But it has often puzzled the folk-lorist why ghosts should assume this
form, although the idea is by no means a modern one, for, as Dr. Tylor
has pointed out,[145] a people of wide celebrity are Pliny's Blemmyæ,
said 'to be headless, and accordingly to have their mouths and eyes in
their breasts--creatures over whom Prester John reigned in Asia, and
who dwelt far and wide in South America.' Stories, too, like that of
St. Denis, who is said to have walked from Paris, _sans tête_, to the
place which bears his name, show that the living, as well as the dead,
occasionally managed to do without their heads--a strange peculiarity
which Kornmann, in his 'De Miraculis Vivorum,' would attempt to account
for philosophically. Princess Marie Lichtenstein, in her 'History of
Holland House,' tells us that one room of this splendid old mansion
is believed to be haunted by Lord Holland, the first of his name, and
the chief builder of Holland House. To quote her words, 'The gilt
room is said to be tenanted by the solitary ghost of its just lord,
who, according to tradition, issues forth at midnight from behind a
secret door, and walks slowly through the scenes of former triumphs
with his head in his hand. To add to this mystery, there is a tale of
three spots of blood on one side of the recess whence he issues--three
spots which can never be effaced.' Such a strange act, on the part of
the dead, is generally regarded as a very bad omen. The time of the
headless ghost's appearance is always midnight, and in Crofton Croker's
'Fairy Legends of Ireland' it is thus described:

    'Tis midnight; how gloomy and dark!
      By Jupiter, there's not a star!
    'Tis fearful! 'tis awful! and hark!
      What sound is that comes from afar?

    A coach! but the coach has no head;
      And the horses are headless as it,
    Of the driver the same may be said,
      And the passengers inside who sit.

According to the popular opinion, there is no authority to prove that
headless people are unable to speak; on the contrary, a variation
of the story of 'The Golden Mountain,' given in a note to the
'Kindermärchen,' relates how a servant without a head informed the
fisherman (who was to achieve the adventure) of the enchantment of
the king's daughter, and of the mode of liberating her. There is the
Belludo, a Spanish ghost mentioned by Washington Irving in his 'Tales
of the Alhambra.' It issues forth in the dead of night, and scours the
avenues of the Alhambra, and the streets of Granada, in the shape of
a headless horse, pursued by six hounds, with terrible yellings and
howlings. It is said to be the spirit of a Moorish king, who killed
his six sons, who, in revenge, hunt him in the shape of hounds at
night-time.

In some cases, as it has been humorously observed, the headless ghosts
of well-known persons have continued to set up their carriage after
death. Thus, for years past, it has been firmly believed that Lady Anne
Boleyn rides down the avenue of Blickling Park once a year, with her
bloody head in her lap, sitting in a hearse-like coach drawn by four
headless horses, and attended by coachmen and attendants, who have, out
of compliment to their mistress, also left their heads behind them.
Nor, if tradition is to be believed, is her father more at rest than
she, for Sir Thomas Boleyn is said to be obliged to cross forty bridges
to avoid the torments of the furies. Like his daughter, he is reported
to drive about in a coach and four with headless horses, carrying
his head under his arm.[146] Young Lord Dacre, who is said to have
been murdered at Thetford, through the contrivance of his guardian,
Sir Richard Fulmerston, in 1569, by the falling of a wooden horse,
purposely rendered insecure, used to prance up and down on the ghost of
a headless rocking-horse.

Another romantic story is told[147] of a large field at Great Melton,
divided from the Yare by a plantation, along which the old Norwich road
ran. 'Close to the edge of where the road is said to have run is a deep
pit or hole of water, locally reputed to be fathomless. Every night
at midnight, and every day at noon, a carriage drawn by four horses,
driven by headless coachmen and footmen, and containing four headless
ladies in white, rises silently and dripping wet from the pool, flits
stately and silently round the field, and sinks as silently into the
pool again.' The story goes that long, long ago, a bridal party driving
along the old Norwich Road were accidentally upset into the deep
hole, and were never seen again. Strangely enough the same story is
told of fields near Bury St. Edmunds, and at Leigh, Dorsetshire.[148]
Another Norfolk story, amusingly told by the late Cuthbert Bede,[149]
informs us how, 'on the anniversary of the death of the gentleman whose
spectre he is supposed to be, his ghostship drives up to his old family
mansion. He drives through the wall, carriage and horses and all, and
is not seen again for a twelvemonth. He leaves, however, the traces
of his visit behind him; for, in the morning, the stones of the wall
through which he had ridden over-night are found to be loosened and
fallen; and though the wall is constantly repaired, yet the stones are
as constantly loosened.' In the little village of Acton, Suffolk, it
was currently reported not many years ago that on certain occasions
the park gates were wont to fly open at midnight 'withouten hands,'
and that a carriage drawn by four spectral horses, and accompanied by
headless grooms and outriders, proceeded with great rapidity from the
park to a spot called 'the nursery corner,' a spot where tradition
affirms a very bloody engagement took place in olden times, when the
Romans were governors of England.[150] A similar tale is related of
Caistor Castle, the seat of the Falstofs, where the headless apparition
drives round the courtyard, and carries away some unearthly visitors.

At Beverley, in Yorkshire, the headless ghost of Sir Joceline Percy
drives four headless horses at night, above its streets, passing over
a certain house which was said to contain a chest with one hundred
nails in it, one of which dropped out every year. The reason assigned
for this nocturnal disturbance is attributed to the fact that Sir
Joceline once rode on horseback into Beverley Minster. It has long been
considered dangerous to meet such spectral teams, for fear of being
carried off by them, so violent and threatening are their movements. In
'Rambles in Northumberland' we are told how, 'when the death-hearse,
drawn by headless horses, and driven by a headless driver, is seen
about midnight proceeding rapidly, but without noise, towards the
churchyard, the death of some considerable personage in the parish is
sure to happen at no distant period.'

Night after night, too, when it is sufficiently dark, the headless
coach whirls along the rough approach to Langley Hall, near Durham,
drawn by black and fiery steeds; and many years ago a headless boggart
was supposed to haunt Preston streets and neighbouring lanes. Its
presence was often accompanied by the rattling of chains. It presently
changed its form, and whether it appeared as a woman or a black dog,
it was always headless. The story went that this uncanny apparition
was at length 'laid' by some magical or religious ceremony in Walton
churchyard.[151]

Many spots where suicides have been buried are supposed to be
haunted by headless ghosts attired in white grave-clothes. Some few
years ago, as a peasant was passing in a waggon with three horses a
'four-lane-end' in Lyneal Lane, Ellesmere, Shropshire, where a man was
buried with a forked stake run through the body to keep it down, a
woman was seen without a head. The horses took fright, and started off,
overturning the waggon, and pitching the man into the Drumby Hole,
where the waggon and shaft-horse fell upon him. The other horses broke
loose and galloped home, where they arrived covered with foam, and on
a search being made, the dead body of the waggoner was found in the
hole.[152] Exactly twelve months afterwards, his son, it is said, was
killed by the same horses on the same spot. As Miss Jackson points out,
the headless ghost in this story is of a different sex from the person
whose death is supposed to cause its restlessness. The same, she adds,
is the case 'with the ghost of the Mary Way, a now almost forgotten
spectre of more than a hundred years ago. The figure of a woman in
white was supposed to haunt the spot where a murderer was buried--more
probably a suicide--at the cross roads about two miles from Wenlock, on
the Bridgnorth road, which is known as the "Mary Way," no doubt from
some chapel, or processional route, in honour of the Virgin.' Another
story is told of the Baschurch neighbourhood, where the ghost of a man
who hanged himself at Nesscliff is to be seen 'riding about in his trap
at night without a head.'

A tragic case is recorded by Crofton Croker, who tells how, many
years ago, a clergyman belonging to St. Catharine's Church, Dublin,
resided at the old Castle of Donore, in the vicinity of that city.
From melancholy, or some other cause, he put an end to his existence
by hanging himself out of a window near the top of the castle. After
his death, a coach, sometimes driven by a coachman without a head, and
occasionally drawn by headless horses, was observed at night driving
furiously by Roper's Rest.

Referring to spots where murders have taken place, a Shropshire
tradition informs us how, at a certain house at Hampton's Wood, near
Ellesmere, six illegitimate children were murdered by their parents,
and buried in a garden. But, soon after this unnatural event, a
ghost in the form of a man, sometimes headless, at other times not
so, haunted the stables, rode the horses to water, and talked to
the waggoner. Once it appeared to a young lady who was passing on
horseback, and rode before her on her horse. Eventually, after much
difficulty, this troublesome ghost was laid, but 'the poor minister was
so exhausted by the task that he died.'[153]

There is a haunted room at Walton Abbey frequented by a spectre known
as 'The Headless Nun of Walton.' The popular belief is that this is the
unquiet spirit of a transgressing nun of the twelfth century, but some
affirm it to be that of a lady brutally beheaded in the seventeenth
century.[154] Another instance is that of Calverley Hall, in the same
county. In 'The Yorkshireman' for January 5, 1884, the particulars of
this strange apparition are given, from which it appears that Walter
Calverley, on April 23, 1604, went into a fit of insane frenzy of
jealousy, or pretended to do so. Money-lenders were pressing him hard,
and he had become desperate. Rushing madly into the house, he plunged a
dagger into one and then into another of his children, and then tried
to take the life of their mother, a crime for which he was pressed to
death at York Castle. But his spirit could not rest, and he was often
seen galloping about the district at night on a headless horse, being
generally accompanied by a number of followers similarly mounted, who
attempted to run down any poor benighted folks whom they chanced to
meet. These spectral horsemen nearly always disappeared in a cave in
the wood, but this cave has now been quarried away.[155]

It would seem that in years gone by one of the punishments assigned
to evil doers guilty of a lesser crime than that of murder, was their
ceaselessly frequenting those very spots where in their lifetime they
had committed their wicked acts, carrying their heads under their arms.
Numerous tales of this kind have been long current on the Continent,
and at the present day are told by the simple-minded peasantry of many
a German village with the most implicit faith. It is much the same
in this country, and Mr. Henderson[156] has given several amusing
anecdotes. At Dalton, near Thirsk, there was an old barn, said to be
haunted by a headless woman. One night a tramp went into it to sleep;
at midnight he was awakened by a light, and, sitting up, he saw a
woman coming towards him from the end of the barn, holding her head
in her hands like a lantern, with light streaming out of the eyes,
nostrils, and mouth. Hunt, too, in his 'Popular Romances,' notices this
superstition as existing in the West of England; and Mrs. Latham, in
her 'Sussex Superstitions,' tells us how spirits are reported to walk
about without their heads; others carry them under their arms; and one
haunting a dark lane is said to have 'a ball of fire upon its shoulders
in lieu of the natural finial.' At Haddington, Worcestershire, there
is an avenue of trees locally known as 'Lady Winter's Walk,' where, it
is said, the lady of Thomas Winter, who was obliged to conceal himself
on account of his share in the Gunpowder Plot, was in the habit of
awaiting her husband's further visits, and here the headless spectre of
her ladyship used to be seen occasionally pacing up and down beneath
the sombre shade of the aged trees.

Lady Wilde[157] has given a laughable specimen of the headless ghost as
believed in by the Irish peasantry. One Denis Molony, a cow-jobber, was
on his way to the great fair at Navan when he was overtaken by night.
He laid down under a hedge, but 'at that moment a loud moaning and
screaming came to his ear, and a woman rushed past him all in white,
as if a winding sheet were round her, and her cries of despair were
terrible to hear. Then, after her, a great black coach came thundering
along the road, drawn by two black horses. But when Denis looked close
at them he saw that the horses had no heads, and the coachman had no
head; and out sprang two men from the coach, and they had no heads
either; and they seized the woman and carried her by force into the
carriage and drove off.'

It appears that the woman Denis saw was 'an evil liver and a wicked
sinner, and no doubt the devils were carrying her off from the
churchyard, for she had been buried that morning. To make sure, they
went next morning to the churchyard to examine the grave, and there,
sure enough, was the coffin, but it was open, and not a trace of the
dead woman was to be seen. So they knew that an evil fate had come on
her, and that her soul was gone to eternal tortures.'[158]

Connected also with the legend of the headless ghost is the old belief
that persons prior to their death occasionally appear to their friends
without their heads. Dr. Ferrier, in his 'Theory of Apparitions,' tells
of an old Northern chieftain who informed a relative of his 'that
the door of the room in which they and some ladies were sitting had
appeared to open, and that a little woman without a head had entered
the room; and that the apparition indicated the sudden death of some
person of his acquaintance.' The 'Glasgow Chronicle' (January, 1826)
records how, on the occasion of some silk-weavers being out of work,
mourning-coaches drawn by headless horses were seen about the town;
and some years ago a very unpleasant kind of headless ghost used to
drive every Saturday night through the town of Doneraile, Ireland,
and to stop at the doors of different houses, when, if anyone were so
foolhardy as to open the door, a basin of blood was instantly flung in
his face.

FOOTNOTES:

[145] _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 390.

[146] See _The Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany_, 1877, i. pp. 288, 289.

[147] _Eastern Counties Collectanea_, p. 3.

[148] See _Notes and Queries_, 1st S. xii. p. 486, for another hole or
pit story.

[149] _The Curate of Cranston, and other Stories_, 1862, 'Carriage and
Four Ghosts.'

[150] _Notes and Queries_, 1st S. v. p. 295.

[151] Hardwick's _Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-lore_, p. 130.

[152] _Shropshire Folk-lore_, p. 112.

[153] _Shropshire Folk-lore_, pp. 113, 114.

[154] A full account will be found in a paper by Mr. F. Ross, in the
_Leeds Mercury_, 1884, entitled 'Yorkshire Legends and Traditions.'

[155] See Ingram's _Haunted Homes_, 2nd S. pp. 72-78.

[156] _Folk-lore of the Northern Counties_, pp. 326-328.

[157] _Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland_, pp. 163, 164.

[158] See notes to Crofton Croker's _Fairy Legends and Traditions of
the South of Ireland_, where much curious information will be found on
this subject.




CHAPTER XI

PHANTOM BUTTERFLIES


Departed souls, according to a Cornish piece of folk-lore, are
occasionally said to take the form of moths, and in Yorkshire, writes
a correspondent of 'Notes and Queries,' 'the country people used,
and perhaps do still, call night-flying white moths, especially the
_Hepialus humuli_, which feeds while in the grub state on the roots
of docks and other coarse plants, "souls."' By the Slavonians the
butterfly seems to have been universally accepted as an emblem of the
soul. Mr. Ralston, in his 'Songs of the Russian People' (p. 117), says
that in the Government of Yaroslaw one of its names is _dushichka_,
a caressing diminutive of _dusha_, the soul. In that of Kherson it
is believed that if the usual alms are not distributed at a funeral,
the dead man's soul will reveal itself to its relatives in the form
of a moth flying about the flame of a candle. The day after receiving
such a warning visit they call together the poor and distribute food
among them. In Bohemia there is a popular tradition that if the first
butterfly a man sees in the spring-time is a white one, he is destined
to die within the year. According to a Servian belief, the soul of a
witch often leaves her body while she is asleep, and flies abroad in
the shape of a butterfly. If, during its absence, her body be turned
round, so that her feet are placed where her head was before, the soul
will not be able to find her mouth, and so will be shut out from her
body. Thereupon the witch will die. The Bulgarians believe that at
death the soul assumes the form of a butterfly, and flits about on the
nearest tree till the funeral is over. The Karens of Burma 'will run
about pretending to catch a sick man's wandering soul, or, as they say
with the ancient Greeks, his "butterfly," and at last drop it down upon
his head.'[159] The idea is an old one, and, as Gubernatis remarks
in his 'Zoological Mythology' (ii. 213), 'the butterfly was both a
phallic symbol and a funereal one, with promises of resurrection and
transformation; the souls of the departed were represented in the forms
of butterflies carried towards Elysium by the dolphin.' According to
another belief, the soul was supposed to take the form of a bee, an
old tradition telling us that 'the bees alone of all animals descended
from Paradise.' In the Engadine, in Switzerland, it is believed that
the souls of men emigrate from the world and return to it in the forms
of bees. In this district bees are considered messengers of death. When
someone dies, the bee is invoked as follows, 'almost as if requesting
the soul of the departed,' says De Gubernatis, 'to watch for ever over
the living':[160]

    Bienchen, unser Herr ist todt,
    Verlass mich nicht in meiner Noth.

In Russia gnats and flies are often looked upon as equally spiritual
creatures. 'In Little Russia,' says Mr. Ralston,[161] 'the old women of
a family will often, after returning from a funeral, sit up all night
watching a dish in which water and honey in it have been placed, in
the belief that the spirit of their dead relative will come in the form
of a fly, and sip the proffered liquid.'

Among North American tribes we are told how the Ojibways believe that
innumerable spirits appear in the varied forms of insect life,[162]
while some tribes supposed that 'most souls went to a common resort
near their living habitat, but returned in the daytime in the shape of
flies in order to get something to eat.'[163]

FOOTNOTES:

[159] Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 437.

[160] _Zoological Mythology_, ii. p. 218.

[161] _Folk-songs of the Russian People_, p. 118.

[162] Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 23.

[163] _Ibid._ p. 42.




CHAPTER XII

RAISING GHOSTS


The trade of raising spirits has probably existed at all times in which
superstition has been sufficiently prevalent to make such a practice a
source of power or of profit, and nations--the most polished as well as
the most barbarous--have admitted the claims of persons who professed
to be able to control spirits. One of the most graphic illustrations of
an incantation for evoking spirits is in connection with the appearance
of the shade of Darius in the 'Persæ' of Æschylus, which is very nobly
given. After receiving news of the great defeat of her son Xerxes at
Salamis, Atossa has prepared the requisite offerings to the dead--milk
from a white cow, honey, water from a pure fountain, unadulterated
wine, olives, and flowers--and she instructs the ancient counsellors of
the deceased king to evoke his shade. They who form the tragic chorus
commence an incantation from which we quote the following:

    Royal lady, Persia's pride,
    Thine offerings in earth's chamber hide;
    We, meanwhile, with hymns will sue
    The powers who guard hell's shadowy crew,
    Till they to our wish incline.
    Gods below, ye choir divine,
    Earth, Hermes, and thou King of night,
    Send his spirit forth to light!
    If he knows worse ills impending,
    He alone can teach their ending.
              &c., &c., &c.

The incantation is successful, but Darius assures his friends that exit
from below is far from easy, and that the subterranean gods are far
more willing to take than to let go. Indeed, the raising of spirits
was a trick of magic much in use in ancient times, and the scene that
took place at Endor when Saul had recourse to a professor of the art
is familiar to all. The Egyptian magicians, Simon Magus, and Elymas
the sorcerer, all, it is said, exhibited such corporeal deceptions.
Tertullian, in his tract 'De Anima,' inquires whether a departed soul,
either at his own will, or in obedience to the command of another,
can return from the 'Inferi'? After discussing the subject, he sums up
thus: 'If certain souls have been recalled into their bodies by the
power of God, as manifest proof of His prerogative, that is no argument
that a similar power should be conferred on audacious magicians,
fallacious dreamers, and licentious poets.'

Among certain Australian tribes the necromants are called Birraark. It
is said that a Birraark was supposed to be initiated by the 'mrarts'
(ghosts) when they met him wandering in the bush. It was from the
ghosts that he obtained replies to questions concerning events passing
at a distance, or yet to happen, which might be of interest or moment
to his tribe. An account of a spiritual séance in the bush is given in
'Kamilaroi and Kurnai' (p. 254): 'The fires were let down; the Birraark
uttered the cry "Coo-ee" at intervals. At length a distant reply was
heard, and shortly afterwards the sound as of persons jumping on the
ground in succession. A voice was then heard in the gloom asking in
a strange intonation, "What is wanted?" At the termination of the
séance, the spirit voice said, "We are going." Finally, the Birraark
was found in the top of an almost inaccessible tree, apparently asleep.'

In Japan, ghosts can be raised in various ways. One mode is to 'put
into an andon' (a paper lantern in a frame) 'a hundred rushlights, and
repeat an incantation of a hundred lines. One of these rushlights is
taken out at the end of each line, and the would-be ghost-seer then
goes out in the dark with one light still burning, and blows it out,
when the ghost ought to appear. Girls who have lost their lovers by
death often try that sorcery.'[164]

Shakespeare has several allusions to the popular belief of certain
persons being able to exorcise, or raise, spirits, and he represents
Ligarius, in 'Julius Cæsar' (iv. 2) as saying:

                            Soul of Rome!
    Brave son, derived from honourable loins!
    Thou, like an exorcist, has conjured up
    My mortified spirit. Now bid me run,
    And I will strive with things impossible;
    Yea, get the better of them.

In days gone by, it would seem, numerous formalities were observed
by the person whose object was to 'constrain' some spirit to appear
before him. It was necessary to fix upon a spot proper for such a
purpose, 'which had to be either in a subterranean vault hung round
with black, and lighted by a magical torch, or else in the centre of
some thick wood or desert, or upon some extensive unfrequented plain,
where several roads met, or amidst the ruins of ancient castles,
abbeys, monasteries, &c., or amongst the rocks on the sea-shore, in
some private detached churchyard, or any other solemn melancholy
place, between the hours of twelve and one in the morning, either
when the moon shone very bright, or else when the elements were
disturbed with storms of thunder, lightning, wind, and rain, for in
these places, times, and seasons it was contended that spirits could
with less difficulty manifest themselves to mortal eyes, and continue
visible with the least pain in this elemental external world.'[165]
Great importance was attached to the magic circle in the invocation
of spirits, the mode of procedure being thus: 'A piece of ground was
usually chosen, nine feet square, at the full extent of which parallel
lines were drawn, one within the other, having sundry crosses and
triangles described between them, close to which was formed the first
or outer circle; then, about half a foot within the same, a second
circle was described, and within that another square correspondent
to the first, the centre of which was the spot where the master and
associate were to be placed. The vacancies formed by the various lines
and angles of the figure were filled up by the holy names of God,
having crosses and triangles described between them.... The reason
assigned for the use of circles was, that so much ground being blessed
and consecrated by such holy words and ceremonies as they made use of
in forming it, had a secret force to expel all evil spirits from the
bounds thereof, and being sprinkled with pure sanctified water, the
ground was purified from all uncleanness; besides, the holy names of
God being written over every part of it, its force became so powerful
that no evil spirits had ability to break through it, or to get at the
magician and his companion, by reason of the antipathy in nature they
bore to these sacred names. And the reason given for the triangles
was, that if the spirit was not easily brought to speak the truth, they
might by the exorcist be conjured to enter the same, where, by virtue
of the names of the essence and divinity of God, they could speak
nothing but what was true and right.'[166] We are further informed,
that if the ghost of a deceased person was to be raised, the grave
had to be resorted to at midnight, when a special form of conjuration
was deemed necessary; and there was another for 'any corpse that hath
hanged, drowned, or otherwise made away with itself.' And in this case,
it is added, 'the conjurations are performed over the body, which will
at last arise, and, standing upright, answer with a faint and hollow
voice the questions that are put to it.'

The mode of procedure as practised in Scotland was thus. The haunted
room was made ready. He 'who was to do the daring deed, about nightfall
entered the room, bearing with him a table, a chair, a candle, a
compass, a crucifix if one could be got, and a Bible. With the compass
he cast a circle on the middle of the floor, large enough to hold the
chair and the table. He placed within the circle the chair and the
table, and on the table he laid the Bible and the crucifix beside the
lighted candle. If he had not a crucifix, then he drew the figure of a
cross on the floor within the circle. When all this was done, he seated
himself on the chair, opened the Bible, and waited for the coming of
the spirit. Exactly at midnight the spirit came. Sometimes the door
opened slowly, and there glided in noiselessly a lady sheeted in white,
with a face of woe, and told her story to the man on his asking her
in the name of God what she wanted. What she wanted was done in the
morning, and the spirit rested ever after. Sometimes the spirit rose
from the floor, and sometimes came forth from the wall. One there was
who burst into the room with a strong bound, danced wildly round the
circle, and flourished a long whip round the man's head, but never
dared to step within the circle. During a pause in his frantic dance
he was asked, in God's name, what he wanted. He ceased his dance and
told his wishes. His wishes were carried out, and the spirit was in
peace.'[167]

In Wraxall's 'Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, and
Vienna'[168] there is an amusing account of the raising of the ghost of
the Chevalier de Saxe. Reports had been circulated that at his palace
at Dresden there was secreted a large sum of money, and it was urged
that if his spirit could be compelled to appear, that interesting
secret might be extorted from him. Curiosity, combined with avarice,
accordingly prompted his principal heir, Prince Charles, to try the
experiment, and on the appointed night, Schrepfer was the operator in
raising the apparition. He commenced his proceedings by retiring into
a corner of the gallery, where, kneeling down with many mysterious
ceremonies, he invoked the spirit to appear. At length a loud clatter
was heard at all the windows on the outside, resembling more the effect
produced by a number of wet fingers drawn over the edge of glasses than
anything else to which it could well be compared. This sound announced
the arrival of the good spirits, and was shortly followed by a yell
of a frightful and unusual nature, which indicated the presence of
malignant spirits. Schrepfer continued his invocations, when 'the door
suddenly opened with violence, and something that resembled a black
ball or globe rolled into the room. It was enveloped in smoke or cloud,
in the midst of which appeared a human face, like the countenance
of the Chevalier de Saxe, from which issued a loud and angry voice,
exclaiming in German, "Carl, was wollte du mit mich?"--Charles, what
would thou do with me?' By reiterated exorcisms Schrepfer finally
dismissed the apparition, and the terrified spectators dispersed, fully
convinced of his magical powers.[169] Roscoe has given an interesting
account[170] of Benvenuto Cellini's experiences of raising spirits
by incantation, but the Sicilian priest who acquainted him with the
mysteries of his art of necromancy, as it has been remarked, had far
greater knowledge of 'chemistry and pharmacy than he required for his
thurible or incense pot.' His accomplices, of course, could see and
report sights of any wonderful kind. Those who penetrate into 'magic
circles may expect startling sights, overpowering smells, strange
sounds, and even demoniacal dreams.' Instances, it is stated, are
recorded of many who perished by raising up spirits, particularly
'Chiancungi,' the famous Egyptian fortune-teller, who was so famous in
England in the seventeenth century. He undertook for a wager to raise
up the spirit 'Bokim,' and having described the circle, he seated his
sister Napula by him as his associate. 'After frequently repeating the
form of exorcism, and calling upon the spirit to appear, and nothing
as yet answering his demand, they grew impatient of the business,
and quitted the circle; but it cost them their lives, for they were
instantaneously seized and crushed to death by that infernal spirit,
who happened not to be sufficiently constrained till that moment to
manifest himself to human eyes.'

Among the many curious stories told of ghost-raising may be mentioned a
somewhat whimsical one related by a correspondent of a Bradford paper,
who tells how, in his youthful days, he assisted in an attempt to raise
the ghost of the wicked old squire of Calverley Hall. 'About a dozen
scholars,' to quote his words, 'used to assemble close to the venerable
church of Calverley, and then put their hats and caps on the ground, in
a pyramidal form. Then taking hold of each other's hands, they formed
a "magic circle," holding firmly together, and making use of an old
refrain:

    Old Calverley, old Calverley, I have thee by the ears,
    I'll cut thee into collops, unless thee appears.

Whilst this incantation was going on, crumbs of bread mixed with pins
were strewn on the ground, the lads meanwhile tramping round in the
circle with a heavy tread. Some of the more venturesome boys had to
go round to each of the church doors, and whistle aloud through the
keyholes, repeating the magic couplet which their comrades in the
circle were chanting. But, at this critical point, a pale and ghostly
figure was expected to appear, and, on one occasion, some kind of
apparition is said to have issued forth from the church, the lads in
their terrified haste making their escape as quickly as they could.'

In the search after the philosopher's stone, and elixir of life, the
most revolting ingredients were turned to use, such as blood and dead
men's bones, but occasionally with unexpected results. On one occasion,
for instance, three alchemists obtained some earth mould from St.
Innocent's Church, Paris, thinking that from it might be extracted the
philosopher's stone. But, after subjecting it to distillation, they
perceived in their receivers forms of men produced which caused them to
desist from their labours. The Paris Institute took up the matter, and
the result of their inquiries appears in the 'Miscellanea Curiosa.' An
abstract of one of these French documents was published by Dr. Ferrier
in the 'Manchester Philosophical Transactions,' which we quote below:

'A malefactor was executed, of whose body a grave physician got
possession for the purpose of dissection. After disposing of the other
parts of the body, he ordered his assistant to pulverise a part of the
cranium, which was a remedy at that time administered in dispensaries.
The powder was left in a paper on the table in the museum, where the
assistant slept. About midnight he was awakened by a noise in the room,
which obliged him to rise immediately. The noise continued about the
table without any visible agent, and at length he traced it to the
powder, in the midst of which he now beheld, to his unspeakable dismay,
a small head, with large eyes, staring at him. Presently two branches
appeared, which formed into arms and hands. Next the ribs became
visible, which were soon clothed with muscles and integuments. Next the
lower extremities sprouted out, and, when they appeared perfect, the
puppet (for his size was small) reared himself on his feet; instantly
his clothes came upon him, and he appeared in the very cloak he wore at
his execution. The affrighted spectator, who stood hitherto mumbling
his prayers with great application, was simply awe-struck; but still
greater was his bewilderment when the apparition planted himself in his
way, and after divers fierce looks and threatening gestures, opened the
door and went out. No doubt the powder was missing next day.'

A similar strange experience is recorded by Dr. Webster in his book on
witchcraft, on the authority of Dr. Flud, the facts of which were thus:

'A certain chemical operator, named La Pierre, received blood from the
hands of a certain bishop to operate upon, which he, setting to work
upon the Saturday, did continue it for a week, with divers degrees of
fire. But about midnight the Friday following, this artificer, lying in
a chamber next to his laboratory, betwixt sleep

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