Children are naturally visionaries, and, as such, are good subjects for experiment. But it may be a cruel, and is a most injudicious thing, to set children a-scrying. Superstition may be excited, or the half-conscious tendency to deceive may be put in motion.
Socrates and Joan of Arc were visionaries as children. Had Joan’s ears been soundly boxed, as Robert de Baudricourt advised, France might now be an English province. But they were not boxed, happily for mankind. Certainly much that is curious may be learned by any one who, having the confidence of a child, will listen to his, or her, accounts of spontaneous visions. The writer, as a boy, knew a child who used to lie prone on the grass watching fairies at play in the miniature forest of blades and leaves. This child had a favourite familiar whom he described freely, but as his remarks were received with good-humoured scepticism, no harm came to him. He would have made a splendid scryer, still, ‘I speak of him but brotherly,’ his revelations would have been taken with the largest allowances. If scrying, on examination, proves to be of real psychological interest, science will owe another debt to folklore, to the folk who kept alive a practice which common-sense would not deign even to examine.
The Gillie and the fire-raising. Survival of belief in second sight. Belief in ancient Greece and elsewhere. Examples in Lapland. Early evidence as to Scotch second sight. Witches burned for this gift. Examples among the Covenanting Ministers. Early investigations by English authors:Pepys,Aubrey,Boyle,Dicky Steele,De Foe,Martin,Kirk,Frazer,Dr. Johnson. Theory of visions as caused by Fairies. Modern example of Miss H. Theory of Frazer of Tiree(1700).‘Revived impressions of sense.’Examples. Agency of Angels. Martin. Modern cases. Bodily condition of the seer. Not epileptic. The second-sighted Minister. The visionary Beadle. Transference of vision by touch. Conclusion.
Some years ago, the author was fishing in a river of Inverness-shire. He drove to the stream, picked up an old gillie named Campbell, and then went on towards the spot where he meant to begin angling. A sheep that lay on the road jumped up suddenly, almost under the horse’s feet, the horse shied, and knocked the dogcart against a wall. On the homeward way we observed a house burning, opposite the place where the horse shied, and found that a farmer had been evicted, and his cottage set on fire. This unhappy person, it seems, was in debt to all his tradesmen, not to his landlord only. The fire-raising, however, was an excessively barbaric method of getting him to leave the parish, and the view justified the indignation of the gillie. The old gillie, much excited, declared that the horse had foreseen this event in the morning, and had, consequently, shied. In a more sceptical spirit the author reminded Campbell of the sheep which started up. ‘That sheep was the devil,’ Campbell explained, nor could this rational belief of his be shaken. The affair led to a conversation on the second sight, and Campbell said, ‘he had it not,’ ‘but his sister (or sister-in-law) had it’.
Campbell was a very agreeable companion, interested in old events, and a sympathiser, as he said, in spite of his name, with the great Montrose. His remarks led the author to infer that, contrary to what some inquirers wrote in the last, and Graham Dalyell in the present century, the belief in the second sight is still quite common in the Highlands. As will be shown later, this inference was correct.
We must not, from this survival only, draw the conclusion that the Highlanders are more superstitious than many educated people south of the Highland line. Second sight is only a Scotch name which covers many cases called telepathy and clairvoyance by psychical students, and casual or morbid hallucinations by other people. In second sight the percipient beholds events occurring at a distance, sees people whom he never saw with the bodily eye, and who afterwards arrive in his neighbourhood; or foresees events approaching but still remote in time. The chief peculiarity of second sight is, that the visions often, though not always, are of asymbolicalcharacter. A shroud is observed around the living man who is doomed; boding animals, mostly black dogs, vex the seer; funerals are witnessed before they occur, and ‘corpse-candles’ (some sort of light) are watched flitting above the road whereby a burial procession is to take its way.{228}Though we most frequently hear the term ‘second sight’ applied as a phrase of Scotch superstition, the belief in this kind of ominous illusion is obviously universal. Theoclymenus, in the Odyssey, a prophet by descent, and of the same clan as the soothsayer Melampus, beholds the bodies and faces of the doomed wooers, ‘shrouded in night’. The Pythia at Delphi announced a similar symbolic vision of blood-dripping walls to the Athenians, during the Persian War. Again, symbolic visions, especially of blood-dripping walls, are so common in the Icelandic sagas that the reader need only be referred to the prodigies before the burning of Njal, in theSaga of Burnt Njal. Second sight was as popular a belief among the Vikings as among the Highlanders who retain a large share of their blood. It may be argued by students who believe in the borrowing rather than in the independent evolution of ideas, that the Gaelic second sight is a direct inheritance from the Northmen, who have left so many Scandinavian local names in the isles and along the coasts.
However this may be, the Highland second sight is different, in many points, from the clairvoyance and magic of the Lapps, those famous sorcerers. On this matter theHistory of Lapland, by Scheffer, Professor of Law in Upsala, is generally cited (Oxford, 1674). ‘When the devil takes a liking to any person in his infancy,’ says Scheffer, ‘he presently seizes on him by a disease, in which he haunts him with several apparitions.’ This answers, in magical education, to Smalls, or Little Go.
Some Lapps advance to a kind of mystic Moderations, and the great sorcerers attain to Final Schools, and are Bachelors in Black Arts. ‘They become so knowing that,withoutthe drum they can see things at the greatest distances; and are so possessed by the devil that they see things even against their will.’ The ‘drum’ is a piece of hollow wood covered with a skin, on which rude pictures are drawn. An index is laid on the skin, the drum is tapped, and omens are taken from the picture on which the index happens to rest. But this practice has nothing to do with clairvoyance. In Scheffer’s account of Lapp seers we recognise the usual hysterical or epileptic lads, who, in various societies become saints, mediums, warlocks, or conjurers. But Scheffer shows that the Lapp experts try, voluntarily, to see sights, whereas, except when wrapped in a bull’s hide of old, or cowering in a boiler at the present day, the Highland second-sighted man lets his visions come to him spontaneously and uninvoked. Scheffer wished to take a magical drum from a Lapp, who confessed with tears, that, drum or no drum, he would still see visions, as he proved by giving Scheffer a minute relation ‘of whatever particulars had happened to me in my journey to Lapland. And he further complained, that he knew not how to make use of his eyes, since things altogether distant were presented to them.’ When a wizard is consulted he dances round till he falls, lies on the ground as if dead, and, finally, rises and declares the result of his clairvoyance. His body is guarded by his friends, and no living thing is allowed to touch it. Tornaeus was told many details of his journey by a Lapp, ‘which, although it was true, Tornaeus dissembled to him, lest he might glory too much in his devilish practices’. Olaus Magnus gives a similar account. The whole performance, except that the seer is not bound, resembles the Eskimo ‘sleep of the shadow,’ more than ordinary Highland second sight. The soul of the seer is understood to be wandering away, released from his body.
The belief in clairvoyance, in the power of seeing what is distant, and foreseeing what is in the future, obviously and undeniably occurs everywhere, in ancient Israel, as in Mexico before the Spanish Conquest, and among the Red Indian tribes as among the Zulus. It is more probable that similar hallucinatory experiences, morbid, or feigned, or natural, have produced the same beliefs everywhere, than that the beliefs were evolved only by ‘Aryans,’—Greeks or Scandinavians—and by them diffused all over the world, to Zulus, Lapps, Indians of Guiana, Maoris.
One of the earliest references to Scotch second sight is quoted by Graham Dalyell from Higden’sPolychronicon(i. lxiv.).{231a}‘There oft by daye tyme, men of that islonde seen men that bey dede to fore honde, byheded’ (like Argyll, in 1661), ‘or hole, and what dethe they deyde. Alyens setten theyr feet upon feet of the men of that londe, for to see such syghtes as the men of that londe doon.’ This method of communicating the hallucination by touch is described in the later books, such as Kirk’sSecret Commonwealth(1691), and Mr. Napier, in hisFolklore, mentions the practice as surviving in the present century. From some records of the Orkneys, Mr. Dalyell produces a trial for witchcraft on Oct. 2, 1616.{231b}This case included second sight. The husband of Jonka Dyneis being in a fishing-boat at Walls, six miles from her residence at Aith, and in peril, she was ‘fund and sein standing at hir awin hous wall, in ane trans, that same hour he was in danger; and being trappit, she could not give answer, bot stude as bereft of hir senssis: and quhen she was speirit at quhy she wes so movit, she answerit, “Gif our boit be not tynt, she is in great hazard,”—and wes tryit so to be’.
Elspeth Reoch, in 1616, was tried as a witch for a simple piece of clairvoyance, or of charlatanism, as we may choose to believe. The offence is styled ‘secund sicht’ in the official report. Again, Issobell Sinclair, in 1633, was accused, almost in modern spiritualistic phrase, of ‘beincontrolledwith the phairie, and that be thame, shoe hath the second sight’.{232a}Here, then, we find it officially recorded that the second-sighted person is entranced, and more or less unconscious of the outer world, at the moment of the vision. Something likele petit mal, in epilepsy, seems to be intended, the patient ‘stude as bereft of hir senssis’.{232b}Again, we have the official explanation of the second sight, and that is the spiritualistic explanation. The seer has a fairy ‘control’. This mode of accounting for what ‘gentle King Jamie’ calls ‘a sooth dreame, since they see it walking,’ inspires the whole theory of Kirk (1691), but he sees no harm either in ‘the phairie,’ or in the persons whom the fairies control. In Kirk’s own time we shall find another minister, Frazer of Tiree, explaining the visions as ‘revived impressions of sense’ (1705), and rejecting various superstitious hypotheses.
The detestable cruelty of the ministers who urged magistrates to burn second-sighted people, and the discomfort and horror of the hallucinations themselves, combined to make patients try to free themselves from the involuntary experience. As a correspondent of Aubrey’s says, towards the end of the sixteenth century: ‘It is a thing very troublesome to them that have it, and would gladly be rid of it . . . they are seen to sweat and tremble, and shreek at the apparition’.{232c}‘They are troubled for having it judging it a sin,’ and they used to apply to the presbytery for public prayers and sermons. Others protested that it was a harmless accident, tried to teach it, and endeavoured to communicate the visions by touch.
As usual among the Presbyterians a minister might have abnormal accomplishments, work miracles of healing, see and converse with the devil, shine in a refulgence of ‘odic’ light, or be second-sighted. But, if a layman encroached on these privileges, he was in danger of the tar-barrel, and was prosecuted. On the day of the battle of Bothwell Brig, Mr. Cameron, minister of Lochend, in remote Kintyre, had a clairvoyant view of the fight. ‘I see them (the Whigs) flying as clearly as I see the wall,’ and, as near as could be calculated, the Covenanters ran at that very moment.{233a}How Mr. Cameron came to be thought a saint, while Jonka Dyneis was burned as a sinner, for precisely similar experiences, is a question hard to answer. But Joan of Arc, the saviour of France, was burned for hearing voices, while St. Joseph of Cupertino, in spite of his flights in the air, was canonised. Minister or medium, saint or sorcerer, it was all a question of the point of view. As to Cameron’s and Jonka’s visions of distant contemporary events, they correspond to what is told of Apollonius of Tyana, that, at Ephesus, he saw and applauded the murder of Domitian at Rome; that one Cornelius, in Padua, saw Cæsar triumph at Pharsalia; that a maniac in Gascony beheld Coligny murdered in Paris.{233b}In the whole belief there is nothing peculiarly Scotch or Celtic, and Wodrow gives examples among the Dutch.
Second Sight, in the days of James VI. had been a burning matter. After the Restoration, a habit of jesting at everything of the kind came in, on one hand; on the other, a desire to investigate and probe the stories of Scotch clairvoyance. Many fellows of the Royal Society, and learned men, like Robert Boyle, Henry More, Glanvill, Pepys, Aubrey, and others, wrote eagerly to correspondents in the Highlands, while Sacheverell and Waldron discussed the topic as regarded the Isle of Man. Then came special writers on the theme, as Aubrey, Kirk, Frazer, Martin, De Foe (who compiled a catch-penny treatise on Duncan Campbell, a Highland fortune-teller in London), Theophilus Insulanus (who was urged to his task by Sir Richard Steele), Wodrow, a great ghost-hunter: and so we reach Dr. Johnson, who was ‘willing to be convinced,’ but was not under conviction. In answer to queries circulated for Aubrey, he learned that ‘the godly’ have not the faculty, but ‘the virtuous’ may have it. But Wodrow’s saint who saw Bothwell Brig, and another very savoury Christian who saw Dundee slain at Killiecrankie, may surely be counted among ‘the godly’. There was difference of opinion as to the hereditary character of the complaint. A correspondent of Aubrey’s vouches for a second-sighted man who babbled too much ‘about the phairie,’ and ‘was suddenly removed to the farther end of the house, and was there almost strangled’.{234}This implies that spirits or ‘Phairies’ lifted him, as they did to a seer spoken of by Kirk, and do to the tribal medicine-men of the Australians, and of course, to ‘mediums’.
Contemporary with Aubrey was the Rev. Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, a Celtic scholar who translated the Bible into Gaelic. In 1691 he finished hisSecret Commonwealth of Elves,Faunes and Fairies, whereof only a fragment has reached us. It has been maintained that the book was printed in 1691, but no mortal eye has seen a copy. In 1815 Sir Walter Scott printed a hundred copies from a manuscript in the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh. He did not put his name on the book, but Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, in a note on his own copy, affirms that Sir Walter was the editor.{235}Another edition was edited, for Mr. Nutt, by the present writer, in 1893. In the year following the completion of his book Mr. Kirk died, or, as local tradition avers, was carried away to fairyland.
Mr. Kirk has none of the Presbyterian abhorrence of fairies and fauns, though, like the accusers of the Orkney witches, he believes that ‘phairie control’ inspires the second-sighted men, who see them eat at funerals. The seers were wont to observe doubles of living people, and these doubles are explained as ‘co-walkers’ from the fairy world. This ‘co-walker’ ‘wes also often seen of old to enter a hous, by which the people knew that the person of that liknes wes to visite them within a few days’.
Now this belief is probably founded on actual hallucinatory experience, of which we may give a modern example. In the early spring of 1890, a lady, known to the author, saw the ‘copy, echo, or living picture,’ of a stranger, who intended (unknown to her) to visit her house, but who did not carry out his intention. The author can vouch for her perfect integrity, and freedom both from superstition, and from illusions, except in this case. Miss H. lives in Edinburgh, and takes in young men as boarders. At the time of this event, she had four such inmates. Two, as she believed, were in their study on the second floor; two were in the drawing-room on the first floor, where she herself was sitting. The hour was seven o’clock in the evening, and the lamp on the stair was lit. Miss H. left the drawing-room, and went into a cupboard on the landing, immediately above the lamp. She saw a young gentleman, of fair complexion, in a suit of dark blue, coming down the staircase from the second floor. Supposing him to be a friend of her boarders whose study was on that floor, she came out of the cupboard, closed the door to let him pass, and made him a slight bow. She did not hear him go out, nor did the maid who was standing near the street door. She did not see her two friends of the upstairs study till nine o’clock: they had been at a lecture. When they met, she said: ‘Did you take your friend with you?’
‘What friend?’
‘The fair young man who left your rooms at seven.’
‘We were out before seven, we don’t know whom you mean.’
The mystery of the young man, who could not have entered the house without ringing, was unsolved. Next day a lady living exactly opposite Miss H.’s house, asked that lady if she could give hospitality to a young man who was coming to Edinburgh from the country. Miss H. assented, and prepared a room, but the visitor, she was informed, went to stay with a relation of his own. Two days later Miss H. was looking out of her dining-room window after luncheon.
‘Why, there’s my ghost!’ she exclaimed, and her friends, running to the window, allowed that he answered to the description. The ‘ghost’ went into the house of Miss H.’s friend on the other side of the street, and Miss H., with natural curiosity, sallied out, and asked who he was. He was the young man for whom she had prepared a room. During his absence in the country, his ‘co-walker’ had visited the house at which he intended to stay!
Coincidences of this kind, then, gave rise to the belief in this branch of second sight.
Though fairies are the ‘phantasmogenetic agencies’ in second sight, a man may acquire the art by magic. A hair rope which has bound a corpse to a bier is wound about him, and then he looks backward ‘through his legs’ till he sees a funeral. The vision of a seer can be communicated to any one who puts his left foot under the wizard’s right foot.
This is still practised in some parts of the Highlands, as we shall see, but, near Inverness, the custom only survives in the memory of some old people.{237}Mr. Kirk’s wizards defended the lawfulness of their clairvoyance by the example of Elisha seeing Gehazi at a distance.{238}The second sight was hereditary in some families: this is no longer thought to be the case. Kirk gives some examples of clairvoyance, and prescience: he then quotes and criticises Lord Tarbatt’s letters to Robert Boyle. Second sight ‘is a trouble to most of them, and they would be rid of it at any rate, if they could’. One of our own informants says that the modern seers are anxious when they feel the vision beginning: they do not, however, regard the power as unholy or disreputable. Another informant mentions a belief that children born between midnight and one o’clock will be second-sighted. People attempt to hasten or delay the birth, so as to avoid the witching hour; clearly then they regard the second sight as an unenviable accomplishment. ‘It is certane’ says Kirk, ‘he sie more fatall and fearfull things, than he do gladsome.’ For the physical condition of the seer, Kirk describes it as ‘a rapture, transport, and sort of death’. Our contemporary informants deny that, in their experience, any kind of convulsion or fit accompanies the visions, as in Scott’s account of Allan Macaulay, in theLegend of Montrose.
Strangely unlike Mr. Kirk, in style and mode of thought, is his contemporary, the Rev. Mr. Frazer of Tiree and Coll; Dean of the Isles. We cannot call a clergyman superstitious because, 200 years ago, he believed in good and bad angels. Save for this element in his creed, Mr. Frazer may be called strictly and unexpectedly scientific. He was born in Mull in 1647, being the son of the Rev. Farquhard Frazer, a cadet of the house of Lovat. The father was one of the first Masters of Arts who ever held the living of Coll and Tiree: in his time only three landed gentlemen of the McLeans could read and write. The son, John, was educated at Glasgow University, and succeeded to his father’s charge, converting the lairds and others ‘to the true Protestant faith’ (1680). At the Revolution, or later, being an Episcopalian and Jacobite, he was deprived of his stipend, but was not superseded and continued the exercise of his ministry till his death in 1702. Being in Edinburgh in 1700, he met Andrew Symson, a relation of his wife: they fell into discourse on the second sight, and he sent his little manuscript to Symson who published it in 1707. There is an Edinburgh reprint, by Webster, in 1820. The work is dedicated to Lord Cromartie, the Lord Tarbatt of Kirk’s book, and the correspondent of Pepys. Symson adds a preface, apologising for Mr. Frazer’s lack of books and learned society, and giving an example of transference of second sight: the seer placed his foot on that of the person interested, who then saw a ship labouring in a storm. The tale was not at first hand.
Mr. Frazer, in his tractate, first deals with the question of fact, of the hallucinations called second sight: ‘That such representations are made to the eyes of men and women, is to me out of all doubt, and that affects follow answerable thereto, as little questionable’. But many doubt as to the question of fact, ‘wherefore so little has been written about it’. Four or five instances, he thinks, will suffice, 1. A servant of his left a barn where he slept, ‘because nightly he had seen a dead corps in his winding sheet, straighted beside him’. In about half a year a young man diedand was buriedin the barn. 2. Mr. Frazer went to stay in Mull with Sir William Sacheverell, who wrote on second sight in the Isle of Man, and was then engaged in trying to recover treasures from the vessel of the Armada sunk in Tobermory Bay. The Duke of Argyll has a cannon taken from Francis I. at Pavia, which was raised from this vessel, and, lately, the fluke of a ship’s anchor brought up a doubloon. But the treasure still lies in Tobermory Bay. Mr. Frazer’s tale merely is that a woman told a sailor to bid him leave a certain boy behind. The sailor did not give the message, the boy died, and the woman said that she had seen the lad ‘walking with me in his winding sheets, sewed up from top to toe,’ that this portent never deceived her. 3. A funeral was seen by Duncan Campbell, in Kintyre, he soon found himself at the real funeral.
4. John Macdonald saw a sea-captain all wet, who was drowned, ‘about a year thereafter’. The seer ‘was none of the strictest life’. 5. A man in Eigg foretold an invasion and calamities. The vision was fulfilled by a landing of English forces in 1689, when Mr. Frazer himself was a prisoner of Captain Pottinger’s, in Eigg. He next mentions an old woman who, in a syncope or catalepsy, believed she had been in heaven. She had a charm of barbarous words, whereby she could see the answers to questions ‘in live images before her eyes, or upon the wall, but the images were not tractable (tangible), which she found by putting to her hand, but could find nothing’. In place of burning this poor crone, Mr. Frazer reasoned with her, ‘taught her the danger and vanity of her practice,’ and saw her die peacefully in extreme old age.
Seeking for an explanation Mr. Frazer gives a thoroughly modern doctrine of visual and auditory hallucinations, as revived impressions of sense. The impressions, ‘laid up in the brain, will be reversed back to the retiform coat and crystalline humour,’ hence ‘a lively seeing, as if,de novo, the object had been placed before the eye’. He illustrates this by experiments in after-images. He will not deny, however, that angels, good or bad, may intentionally cause the revival of impressions, and so, for their own purposes, produce the hallucinations from within. The coincidence of the hallucination with future events may arise from the fore-knowledge of the said angels, who, if evil, are deceptive, like Ahab’s false prophets. The angel then, who, through one channel or another, fore-knows, or anticipates an event, ‘has no more to do than to reverse the species of these things from a man’s brain to the organ of the eye’. Substitute telepathy, the effect produced by a distant mind, for angels, and we have here the very theory of some modern inquirers. Mr. Frazer thinks it unlikely thatbadangels delude ‘several men that I have known to be of considerable sense, and pious and good conversation’. He will not hear of angels making bodies of ‘compressed air’ (an old mystic idea), which they place before men’s eyes. His own hypothesis is more economical of marvel. He has not observed second sight to be hereditary. If asked why it is confined to ignorant islanders, he denies the fact. It is as common elsewhere, but is concealed, for fear of ridicule and odium. He admits that credulity and ignorance give opportunities to evil spirits ‘to juggle more frequently than otherwise they would have done’. So he ‘humbly submits himself to the judgment of his betters’. Setting aside the hypothesis of angels, Mr. Frazer makes only one mistake, he does not giveinstantiæ contradictoriæ, where the hallucination existed without the fulfilment. He shows a good deal of reading, and a liking for Sir Thomas Browne. The difference between him and his contemporary, Mr. Kirk, is as great as that between Herodotus and Thucydides.
Contemporary with Frazer is Martin Martin, whoseDescription of the Western Isles(1703, second edition 1716) was a favourite book of Dr. Johnson’s, and the cause of his voyage to the Hebrides. Martin took his M.A. degree at Edinburgh University in 1681. He was a curious observer, political and social, and an antiquarian. He offers no theory of the second sight, and merely recounts the current beliefs in the islands. The habit is not, in his opinion, hereditary, nor does he think that the vision can be communicated by touch, except by one to another seer. Where several seers are present, all do not necessarily see the vision. ‘At the sight of a vision, the eyelids of the person are erected, and the eyes continue staring until the object vanish,’ as Martin knew by observing seers at the moment of the experience. Sometimes it was necessary to draw down the eyelids with the fingers. Sickness and swooning occasionally accompanied the hallucination. The visions were usually symbolical, shrouds, coffins, funerals. Visitors were seen before their arrival. ‘I have been seen thus myself by seers of both sexes at some 100 miles distance; some that saw me in this manner had never seen me personally, and it happened according to their visions, without any previous design of mine to go to those places, my coming there being purely accidental.’ Children are subject to the vision, the horse of a seer, or the cow a second-sighted woman is milking, receives the infection, at the moment of a vision, sweats and trembles. Horses are very nervous animals, cows not so much so.
As to objections, the people are very temperate, and madness is unknown, hence they are not usually visionary. That the learned ‘are not able to oblige the world with a satisfying account of those visions,’ is no argument against the fact of their occurrence. The seers are not malevolent impostors, and there are cases of second-sighted folk of birth and education, ‘nor can a reasonable man believe that children, horses, and cows could be pre-engaged in a combination to persuade the world of the reality of the second sight’. The gift is not confined to the Western Islands, and Martin gives a Dutch example, with others from the Isle of Man. His instances are of the usual sort, the fulfilment was sometimes long deferred. He mentions a case, but not that given by Mr. Frazer, in the Isle of Eigg. The natives had been at Killiecrankie, and one of them murdered an English soldier in Skye, hence the English invasion of 1689, in which a pretty girl (as had been prophesied by a seer) was brutally ill-treated. The most interesting cases are those in which strangers are seen, and peculiarities in their dress observed before their arrival. In thePirateScott shows how Norna of the Fitful Head managed to utter such predictions by aid of early information; and so, as Cleveland said, ‘prophesied on velvet’. There are a few cases of a brownie being seen, once by a second-sighted butler, who observed brownie directing a man’s game at chess. Martin’s book was certainly not calculated to convince Dr. Johnson; his personal evidence only proves that a kind of hallucinatory trance existed, or was feigned.
Later than Martin we have the long work of Theophilus Insulanus, which contains many ‘cases,’ of more or less interest or absurdity. But Theophilus is of no service to the framer of philosophical or physiological theories of the second sight. The Presbyterian clergy generally made war on the belief, but one of them, as Mrs. Grant reports in her Essays,{244}had an experience of his own. This good old pastor’s ‘daidling bit,’ or lounge, was his churchyard. In an October twilight, he saw two small lights rise from a spot unmarked by any stone or memorial. These ‘corpse-candles’ crossed the river, stopped at a hamlet, and returned, attended by a larger light. All three sank into the earth on the spot whence the two lights had risen. The minister threw a few stones on the spot, and next day asked the sexton who lay there. The man remembered having buried there two children of a blacksmith who lived at the hamlet on the opposite side of the water. The blacksmith died next day! This did more for second sight, probably, than all the minister’s sermons could do against the belief.
As we began by stating, it is a popular superstition among the learned that the belief in second sight has died out among the Highlanders. Fifty years ago, Dr. McCulloch, in hisDescription of the Western Islands, wrote thus: ‘Second sight has undergone the fate of witchcraft; ceasing to be believed, it has ceased to exist’.{245}Now, as to whether second sight exists or not, we may think as we please, but the belief in second sight is still vivacious in the Highlands, and has not altered in a single feature. A well-known Highland minister has been kind enough to answer a few questions on the belief as it is in his parish He first met a second-sighted man in his own beadle, ‘a most respectable person of entirely blameless life’. After citing a few examples of the beadle’s successful hits, our informant says: ‘He told me that he felt the thing coming on, and that it was always preceded by a sense of discomfort and anxiety. . . . There was no epilepsy, and no convulsion of any kind. He felt a sense of great relief when the vision had passed away, and he assured me repeatedly that the gift was an annoyance rather than a pleasure to him,’ as the Lapp also confessed to Scheffer. ‘Others who had the same gift have told me the same thing.’ Out of seven or eight people liable to this malady, or whatever we are to call it, only one, we learn, was other than robust, healthy, and steady. In two instances the seers were examined by a physician of experience, and got clean bills of mental and bodily health. An instance is mentioned in which the beadle, alone in a boat with a friend, on a salt-water loch, at night, saw a vision of a man drowning in a certain pool of a certain river. A shepherd’s plaid lay on the bank. The beadle told his companion what he saw, and set his foot on his friend’s, who then shared his experience. This proves the continuity of the belief that the hallucination can be communicated by contact.{246}As a matter of evidence, it would have been better if the beadle had not first told his friend what he saw. Both men told our informant next day, and the vision was fulfilled ‘scarcely a week afterwards’. This vision, granting the honesty of the seers, was a case of ‘clairvoyance,’ but ‘symbolical hallucinations’ frequently occur. In our informant’s experience the gift is not hereditary.
On the whole subject Dr. Stewart, of Nether Lochaber, wrote several articles in theInverness Courier, during the autumn of 1893. The Highland clergy have, doubtless, some difficulty in dealing with the belief among their parishioners. But, as the possession of the accomplishment is no longer regarded as criminal, and as the old theories of diabolical possession, or fairy inspiration, are not entertained, at least by the educated, the seers are probably to be regarded as merely harmless visionaries. At most we may say, with the poet:—
Lo, the sublime telepathist is here.
Lo, the sublime telepathist is here.
The belief in witchcraft is also as lively in the Highlands, as in Devonshire, but, while the law takes no cognisance of it, no great harm is done. The witchcraft mainly relies on ‘sympathetic magic,’ on perforating a clay image of an enemy with needles and so forth. There is a very recent specimen in the Pitt Rivers collection, at the museum in Oxford. It was presented, in a scientific spirit, by the victim, who was ‘not a penny the worse,’ unlike Sir George Maxwell of Pollok, two centuries ago.
Though second sight is so firmly rooted in Celtic opinion, the tourist or angler who ‘has no Gaelic’ is not likely to hear much of it. But, when trout refuse to rise, and time hangs heavy in a boat on a loch, it is a good plan to tell the boatman some ghostly Sassenach tales. Then, perhaps, he will cap them from his own store, but point-blank questions from an inquiring southron are of very little use. Nobody likes to be cross-examined on such matters. Unluckily the evidence, for facts not for folklore, is worthless till it has stood the severest cross-examination.
Sir Walter Scott on rarity of ghostly evidence. His pamphlet for the Bannatyne Club. His other examples. Case of Mirabel. The spectre,the treasure,the deposit repudiated. Trials of Auguier and Mirabel. The case of Clenche’s murder. The murder of Sergeant Davies. Acquittal of the prisoners. An example from Aubrey. The murder of Anne Walker. The case of Mr. Booty. An example from Maryland,the story of Briggs and Harris. The Valogne phantasm. Trials in the matter of haunted houses. Cases from Le Loyer. Modern instances of haunted houses before the law. Unsatisfactory results of legal investigations.
‘What I do not know is not knowledge,’ Sir Walter Scott might have said, with regard to bogles and bar-ghaists. His collection at Abbotsford of such works as the Ephesian converts burned, is extensive and peculiar, while his memory was rich in tradition and legend. But as his Major Bellenden sings,
Was never wight so starkly made,But time and years will overthrow.
Was never wight so starkly made,But time and years will overthrow.
When Sir Walter in 1831, wrote a brief essay on ghosts before the law, his memory was no longer the extraordinary engine, wax to receive, and marble to retain, that it had been. It is an example of his dauntless energy that, even in 1831, he was not only toiling at novels, and histories, and reviews, to wipe out his debts, but that, as a pure labour of love, he edited, for the Bannatyne Club, ‘The trial of Duncan TerigaliasClerk, and Alexander Bane Macdonald, for the murder of Arthur Davis, sergeant in General Guise’s regiment of foot, June, 1754’.
The trial, as Sir Walter says, in his dedication to the Bannatyne Club, ‘involves a curious point of evidence,’ a piece of ‘spectral evidence’ as Cotton Mather calls it. In another dedication (for there are two) Scott addresses Sir Samuel Shepherd, remarking that the tract deals with ‘perhaps the only subject of legal inquiry which has escaped being investigated by his skill, and illustrated by his genius’. That point is the amount of credit due to the evidence of a ghost. In his preface Sir Walter cites the familiar objection of a learned judge that ‘the ghost must be sworn in usual form, but in case he does not come forward, he cannot be heard, as now proposed, through the medium’ (medium indeed!) ‘of a third party’. It seems to be a rule of evidence that what a dead man said may be received, on the report of the person with whom he communicated. A ghost is a dead man, and yet he is deprived, according to the learned judge’s ruling, of his privilege. Scott does not cite the similar legend inHibernian Tales, the chap book quoted by Thackeray in hisIrish Sketch-book. In that affair, when the judge asked the ghost to give his own evidence: ‘Instantly there came a dreadful rumbling noise into the court—“Here am I that was murdered by the prisoner at the bar”’. TheHibernian Talesare of no legal authority, nor can we give chapter and verse for another well-known anecdote. A prisoner on a charge of murder was about to escape, when the court observed him looking suspiciously over his shoulder. ‘Is there no one present,’ the learned judge asked in general, ‘who can give better testimony?’ ‘My lord,’ exclaimed the prisoner, ‘that wound he shows in his chest is twice as big as the one I gave him.’ In this anecdote, however, the prisoner was clearly suffering from a hallucination, as the judge detected, and we do not propose to consider cases in which phantasms bred of remorse drove a guilty man to make confession.
To return to Scott; he remarks that believers in ghosts must be surprised ‘to find how seldom inanycountry an allusion hath been made to such evidence in a court of justice’. Scott himself has only ‘detected one or two cases of such apparition evidence,’ which he gives. Now it is certain, as we shall see, that he must have been acquainted with several other examples, which did not recur to his memory: the memory of 1831 was no longer that of better years. Again, there were instances of which he had probably never possessed any knowledge, while others have occurred since his death. We shall first consider the cases of spectral evidence (evidence that is of a dead man’s ghost, not of a mere wraith) recorded by Sir Walter, and deal later with those beyond his memory or knowledge.{250}Sir Walter’s first instance is fromCauses Célèbres, (vol. xii., La Haye, 1749, Amsterdam, 1775, p. 247). Unluckily the narrator, in this collection, is anesprit fort, and is assiduous in attempts to display his wit. We have not a plain unvarnished tale, but something more like a facetious leading article based on a trial
Honoré Mirabel was a labouring lad, under age, near Marseilles. His story was that, in May (year not given), about eleven at night, he was lying under an almond tree, near the farm of a lady named Gay. In the moonlight he saw a man at an upper window of a building distant five or six paces, the house belonged to a Madame Placasse. Mirabel asked the person what he was doing there; got no answer, entered, and could see nobody. Rather alarmed he went to a well, drew some water, drank, and then heard a weak voice, bidding him dig there for treasure, and asking that masses might be said for the soul of the informant. A stone then fell on a certain spot; stone-throwing is a favourite exercise with ghosts everywhere.
With another labourer, one Bernard, Mirabel dug, found a packet of dirty linen, and, fearing that it might hold the infection of plague, dipped it in wine, for lack of vinegar. The parcel contained more than a thousand Portuguese gold coins. Bernard and his mistress were present at the opening of the parcel, but Mirabel managed to conceal from them the place where he hid it, not a very likely story. He was grateful enough to pay for the desired masses, and he had himself bled four times to relieve his agitation. Mirabel now consulted a merchant in Marseilles, one Auguier, who advised him to keep his old coins a mystery, as to put them into circulation would lead to inquiry and inconvenience. He lent Mirabel some ready money, and, finally, induced Mirabel to entrust the Portuguese hoard to his care. The money was in two bags, one fastened with gold-coloured ribbon, the other with linen thread. Auguier gave a receipt, and now we get a date, Marseilles, September 27, 1726. Later Auguier (it seems) tried to murder Mirabel, and refused to return the deposit. Mirabel went to law with him: Auguier admitted that Mirabel had spoken to him about having found a treasure which he would entrust to Auguier, but denied the rest. In his house was found a ribbon of a golden hue, such as Mirabel used to tie up his bag, and a little basket which has no obvious connection with the matter. The case was allowed to come on, there were sixteen witnesses. A woman named Caillot swore to Mirabel’s having told her about the ghost: she saw the treasure excavated, saw the bags, and recognised the ribbon. A man had seen Mirabel on his way to give Auguier his bags, and, indeed, saw him do so, and receive a piece of paper. He also found, next day, a gold coin on the scene of the interview. A third witness, a woman, was shown the treasure by Mirabel.
The narrator here makes the important reflection that Providence could not allow a ghost to appear merely to enrich a foolish peasant. But, granting ghosts (as the narrator does), we can only say that, in ordinary life, Providence permits a number of undesirable events to occur. Why should the behaviour of ghosts be an exception?
Other witnesses swore to corroborating circumstances. Auguier denied everything, experts admitted that the receipt was like his writing, but declared it to be forged; the ribbon was explained as part of his little daughter’s dress. The judge decided—no one will guess what—that Auguier should be put to the torture!
Auguier appealed: his advocate urged the absurdity of a ghost-story ona priorigrounds: if there was no ghost, then there was no treasure: if there was a treasure, would not the other digger have secured his share? That digger, Bernard, was not called. Then Auguier pled analibi, he was eight leagues away when he was said to have received the treasure. Why he did not urge this earlier does not appear.
Mirabel’s advocate first defended from the Bible and the Fathers, the existence of ghosts. The Faculty of Theology, in Paris, had vouched for them only two years before this case, in 1724. The Sorbonne had been as explicit, in 1518. ‘The Parliament of Parisoftenpermitted the tenant of a haunted house to break his contract.’{253}Ghosts or no ghosts, Mirabel’s counsel said, therewasa treasure. In his receipt Auguier, to deceive a simple peasant, partially disguised his hand. Auguier’salibiis worthless, he might easily have been at Marseilles and at Pertuis on the same day: the distance is eight leagues.
Bernard was now at last called in; he admitted that Mirabel told him of the ghost, that they dug, and found some linen, but that he never saw any gold. He had carried the money from Mirabel to pay for the masses due to the ghost. Mirabel had shown him a document, for which he said he had paid a crown, and Bernard (who probably could not read) believed it to be like Auguier’s receipt. Bernard, of course, having been denied his share, was not a friendly witness. A legal document was put in, showing that Madame Placasse (on whose land the treasure lay) summoned Mirabel to refund it to her. The document was a summons to him. But this document was forged, and Mirabel, according to a barrister whom he had consulted about it, said it was handed to him by a man unknown. Why the barrister should have betrayed his client is not clear. Mirabel and Marguérite Caillot, his first witness, who had deposed to his telling her about the ghost, and to seeing the excavation of the packet, were now arrested, while Auguier remained in prison. Marguérite now denied her original deposition, she had only spoken to oblige Mirabel. One Étienne Barthélemy was next arrested: he admitted that he had ‘financed’ Mirabel during the trial, but denied that he had suborned any witnesses. Two experts differed, as usual, about Auguier’s receipt; a third was called in, and then they unanimously decided that it was not in his hand. On February 18, 1729, Auguier was acquitted, Mirabel was condemned to the torture, and to the galley, for life. Marguérite Caillot was fined ten francs.Under tortureMirabel accused Barthélemy of having made him bring his charge against Auguier, supplying him with the forged receipt and with the sham document, the summons to restore the gold to Madame Placasse. Oddly enough he still said that he had handed sacks of coin to Auguier, and that one of them was tied up with the gold-coloured ribbon. Two of his witnesses,under torture, stuck to their original statements. They were sentenced to be hung up by the armpits, and Barthélemy was condemned to the galleys for life.
It is a singular tale, and shows strange ideas of justice. Once condemned to the galleys, Mirabel might as well have made a clean breast of it; but this he did not do: he stuck to his bags and gold-coloured ribbon. Manifestly Mirabel would have had a better chance of being believed in court if he had dropped the ghost altogether. It is notable that Sir Walter probably gave his version of this affair from memory: he says that Mirabel ‘was non-suited upon the ground that, if his own story was true, the treasure, by the ancient laws of France, belonged to the crown’.
Scott’s next case is very uninteresting, at least as far as it is given in Howell’sState Trials, vol. xii. (1692), p. 875.
A gentleman named Harrison had been accused of beguiling a Dr. Clenche into a hackney coach, on pretence of taking him to see a patient. There were two men in the coach, besides the doctor. They sent the coachman on an errand, and when he came back he found the men fled and Clenche murdered. He had been strangled with a handkerchief. On evidence which was chiefly circumstantial, Harrison was found guilty, and died protesting his innocence. Later a Mrs. Milward declared that her husband, before his death, confessed to her that he and a man named Cole were the murderers of Dr. Clenche. The ghost of her husband persecuted her, she said, till Cole was arrested. Mr. Justice Dolben asked her in court for the story, but feared that the jury would laugh at her. She asserted the truth of her story, but, if she gave any details, they are not reported. Cole was acquitted, and the motives of Mrs. Milward remain obscure.
Coming to the tract which he reprints, Sir Walter says that his notice was first drawn to it, in 1792, by Robert McIntosh, Esq., one of the counsel in the case, which was heard in Edinburgh, June 10, 1754. Grant of Prestongrange, the Lord Advocate well known to readers of Mr. Stevenson’sCatriona, prosecuted Duncan Terig or Clerk, and Alexander Bain Macdonald, for the murder of Sergeant Arthur Davies on September 28, 1749. They shot him on Christie Hill, at the head of Glenconie. There his body remained concealed for some time, and was later found with a hat marked with his initials, A. R. D. They are also charged with taking his watch, two gold rings, and a purse of gold, whereby Clerk, previously penniless, was enabled to take and stock two farms.
Donald Farquharson, in Glendee, deposes that, in June, 1750, Alexander Macpherson sent for him, and said that he was much troubled by the ghost of the serjeant, who insisted that he should bury his bones, and should consult Farquharson. Donald did not believe this quite, but trembled lest the ghost should vex him. He went with Macpherson, who showed the body in a peat-moss. The body was much decayed, the dress all in tatters. Donald asked Macpherson whether the apparition denounced the murderers: he replied that the ghost said it would have done so, had Macpherson not asked the question. They buried the body on the spot, Donald attested that he had seen the Serjeant’s rings on the hand of Clerk’s wife. For three years the prisoners had been suspected by the country side.
Macpherson declared that he had seen an apparition of a man in blue, who said, ‘I am Serjeant Davies,’ that he at first took this man for a brother of Donald Farquharson’s, that he followed the man, or phantasm, to the door, where the spectre repeated its assertions, and pointed out the spot where the bones lay. He found them, and then went, as already shown, to Donald Farquharson. Between the first vision and the burying, the ghost came to him naked, and this led him to inter the remains. On the second appearance, the ghost denounced the prisoners. Macpherson gave other evidence, not spectral, which implicated Clerk. But, when asked what language the ghost spoke in, he answered, ‘as good Gaelic as he had ever heard in Lochaber’. ‘Pretty well,’ said his counsel, Scott’s informant, McIntosh, ‘for the ghost of an English serjeant.’ This was probably conclusive with the jury, for they acquitted the prisoners, in the face of the other incriminating evidence. This was illogical. Modern students of ghosts, of course, would not have been staggered by the ghost’s command of Gaelic: they would explain it as a convenient hallucinatory impression made by the ghost on the mind of the ‘percipient’. The old theologians would have declared that a good spirit took Davies’s form, and talked in the tongue best known to Macpherson. Scott’s remark is, that McIntosh’s was ‘no sound jest, for there was nothing more ridiculous in a ghost speaking a language which he did not understand when in the body, than there was in his appearing at all’. But jurymen are not logicians. Macpherson added that he told his tale to none of the people with him in the sheiling, but that Isobel McHardie assured him she ‘saw such a vision’. Isobel, in whose service Macpherson had been, deponed that, while she lay at one end of the sheiling and Macpherson at the other, ‘she saw something naked come in at the door, which frighted her so much that she drew the clothes over her head’. Next day she asked Macpherson what it was, and he replied ‘she might be easy, for that it would not trouble them any more’.
The rest of the evidence went very strongly against the accused, but the jury unanimously found them ‘Not Guilty’.
Scott conjectures that Macpherson knew of the murder (as indeed he had good reason, if his non-spectral evidence is true), but that he invented the ghost, whose commands must be obeyed, that he might escape the prejudice entertained by the Celtic race against citizens who do their duty. Davies, poor fellow, was a civil good-humoured man, and dealt leniently (as evidence showed) with Highlanders who wore the tartan. Their national costume was abolished, as we all know, by English law, after the plaid had liberally displayed itself, six miles south of Derby, in 1745.
So far it is plain that ‘what the ghost said is not evidence,’ and may even ruin a very fair case, for there can be little doubt as to who killed Serjeant Davies. But examples which Scott forgot, for of course he knew them, prove that, in earlier times, a ghost’s testimony was not contemned by English law. Cases are given, with extracts from documents, in a book so familiar to Sir Walter as Aubrey’sMiscellanies. Aubrey (b. 1626, d. 1697) was a F.R.S., and, like several other contemporary Fellows of the Royal Society, was a keen ghost hunter. He published{259}‘A full and true Relation of the Examination and Confession of William Barwick, and Edward Mangall, of two horrid murders’.
Barwick killed his wife, who was about to bear a child, near Cawood in Yorkshire, on April 14, 1690. Barwick had intrigued with his wife before marriage, and perhaps was ‘passing weary of her love’. On April 14, Palm Monday, he went to his brother-in-law, Thomas Lofthouse, near York, who had married Mrs. Barwick’s sister. He informed Lofthouse that he had taken Mrs. Barwick, for her confinement, to the house of his uncle, Harrison, in Selby. On September 17, at York assizes, Lofthouse swore that on Easter Tuesday (eight days after Palm Monday, namely April 22), he was watering a quickset hedge, at mid-day, when he saw ‘the apparition in the shape of a woman walking before him’. She sat down opposite the pool whence he drew water, he passed her as he went, and, returning with his pail filled, saw her again. She was dandling on her lap some white object which he had not observed before. He emptied his pail, and, ‘standing in his yard’ looked for her again. She was no longer present. She wore a brown dress and a white hood, ‘such as his wife’s sister usually wore, and her face looked extream pale, her teeth in sight, no gums appearing, her visage being like his wife’s sister’.
It certainly seems as if this resemblance was an after-thought of Lofthouse’s, for he dismissed the matter from his mind till prayers, when it ‘discomposed his devotions’. He then mentioned the affair to his wife, who inferred that her sister had met with foul play. On April 23, that is the day after the vision, he went to Selby, where Harrison denied all knowledge of Mrs. Barwick. On April 24, Lofthouse made a deposition to this effect before the mayor of York, but, in his published statement of that date, he only avers that ‘hearing nothing of the said Barwick’s wife, he imagined Barwick had done her some mischief’. There is not a word hereof the phantasm sworn to by Lofthouse at the assizes on September 17. Nevertheless, on April 24, Barwick confessed to the mayor of York, that ‘on Monday was seventh night’ (there seems to be an error here) he ‘found the conveniency of a pond’ (as Aubrey puts it) ‘adjoining to a quickwood hedge,’ and there drowned the woman, and buried her hard by. At the assizes, Barwick withdrew his confession, and pleaded ‘Not Guilty’. Lofthouse, his wife, and a third person swore, however, that the dead woman was found buried in her clothes by the pond side, and on the prisoner’s confession being read, he was found guilty, and hanged in chains. Probably he was guilty, but Aubrey’s dates are confused, and we are not even sure whether there were two ponds, and two quickset hedges, or only one of each. Lofthouse may have seen a stranger, dressed like his sister-in-law, this may have made him reflect on Barwick’s tale about taking her to Selby; he visited that town, detected Barwick’s falsehood, and the terror of that discovery made Barwick confess.
Surtees, in hisHistory of Durham, published another tale, which Scott’s memory did not retain. In 1630, a girl named Anne Walker was about to have a child by a kinsman, also a Walker, for whom she kept house. Walker took her to Dame Care, in Chester le Street, whence he and Mark Sharp removed her one evening late in November. Fourteen days afterwards, late at night, Graime, a fuller, who lived six miles from Walker’s village, Lumley, saw a woman, dishevelled, blood-stained, and with five wounds in her head, standing in a room in his mill. She said she was Anne Walker, that Mark Sharp had slain her with a collier’s pick, and thrown her body into a coal-pit, hiding the pick under the bank. After several visitations, Graime went with his legend to a magistrate, the body and pick-axe were discovered, Walker and Sharp were arrested, and tried at Durham, in August, 1631. Sharp’s boots, all bloody, were found where the ghost said he had concealed them ‘in a stream’; how they remained bloody, if in water, is hard to explain. Against Walker there was no direct evidence. The prisoners, the judge summing up against them, were found guilty and hanged, protesting their innocence.
It is suggested that Graime himself was the murderer, else, how did he know so much about it? But Walker and Sharp were seen last with the woman, and the respectable Walker was not without a motive, while, at this distance, we can conjecture no motive in the case of Graime.{262}Cockburn’sVoyage up the Mediterraneanis the authority (ii. 35) for a very odd trial in the Court of King’s Bench, London. The logs of three ships, under Captains Barnaby, Bristow and Brown, were put in to prove that, on Friday, 15th May, 1687, these men, with many others, were shooting rabbits on Stromboli: that when beaters and all were collected, about a quarter to four, theyallsaw a man in grey, and a man in black run towards them, the one in grey leading, that Barnaby exclaimed, ‘The foremost is old Booty, my next door neighbour,’ that the figures vanished into the flames of the volcano. This occurrence, by Barnaby’s desire, they noted in their journals. They were all making merry, on October 6, 1687, at Gravesend, when Mrs. Barnaby remarked to her husband: ‘My dear, old Booty is dead!’ The captain replied: ‘We all saw him run into hell’. Mrs. Booty, hearing of this remark, sued Barnaby for libel, putting her damages at £1000. The case came on, the clothes of old Booty were shown in court: the date and hour of his death were stated, and corresponded, within two minutes, to the moment when the mariners beheld the apparition in Stromboli, ‘so the widow lost her cause’. A mediæval legend has been revived in this example.
All these curious legal cases were, no doubt, familiar to Sir Walter Scott. He probably had no access to an American example which was reprinted four years after his death, by a member of the club which he founded, the Bannatyne Club,{263}in 1836.
The evidence of the ghost-seer was republished by Mrs. Crowe, in herNight Side of Nature. But Mrs. Crowe neither gives the facts of the trial correctly, nor indicates the sources of the narrative. The source was a periodical,The Opera Glass, February 3, 1827, thirty years after the date of the trial. The document, however, had existed ‘for many years,’ in the possession of the anonymous contributor toThe Opera Glass. He received it from one of the counsel in the case, Mr. Nicholson, afterwards a judge in Maryland, who compiled it from attested notes made by himself in court.
The suit was that of James, Fanny, Robert, and Thomas Harris, devisees of Thomas Harris,v. Mary Harris, relict and administratrix of James Harris, brother of Thomas, aforesaid (1798-99). Thomas Harris had four illegitimate children. He held, as he supposed, a piece of land in fee, but, in fact, he was only seized in tail. Thus he could not sell or devise it, and his brother James was heir in tail, the children being bastards. These legal facts were unknown both to James and Thomas. Thomas made a will, leaving James his executor, and directing that the land should be sold, and the money divided among his own children. James, when Thomas died, sold the land, and, in drawing the conveyance, it was discovered that he had no right to do so for Thomas, as it was held by Thomas in tail. James then conveyed his right to the purchaser, and kept the money as legal heir. Why James could sell, if Thomas could not, the present writer is unable to explain. In two years, James died intestate, and the children of Thomas brought a suit against James’s widow. Before James’s death, the ghost of Thomas had appeared frequently to one Briggs, an old soldier in the Colonial Revolt, bidding James ‘return the proceeds of the sale to the orphans’ court, and when James heard of this from Briggs he did go to the orphans’ court, and returned himself to the estate of his brother, to the amount of the purchase money of the land’.
Now, before the jury were sworn, the counsel, Wright and Nicholson for the plaintiffs, Scott and Earle for the defendant, privately agreed that the money could not be recovered, for excellent legal reasons. But they kept this to themselves, and let the suit go on, merely for the pleasure of hearing Briggs, ‘a man of character, of firm, undaunted spirit,’ swear to his ghost in a court of law. He had been intimate with Thomas Harris from boyhood. It may be said that he invented the ghost, in the interest of his friend’s children. He certainly mentioned it, however, some time before he had any conversation with it.
Briggs’s evidence may be condensed very much, as the learned Mrs. Crowe quotes it correctly in herNight Side of Nature. In March, 1791, about nine a.m., Briggs was riding a horse that had belonged to Harris. In a lane adjoining the field where Harris was buried, the horse shied, looked into the field where the tomb was, and ‘neighed very loud’. Briggs now saw Harris coming through the field, in his usual dress, a blue coat. Harris vanished, and the horse went on. As Briggs was ploughing, in June, Harris walked by him for two hundred yards. A lad named Bailey, who came up, made no remark, nor did Harris tell him about the hallucination. In August, after dark, Harris came and laid his arms on Briggs’s shoulder. Briggs had already spoken to James Harris, ‘brither to the corp,’ about these and other related phenomena, a groan, a smack on the nose from a viewless hand, and so forth. In October Briggs saw Harris, about twilight in the morning. Later, at eight o’clock in the morning, he was busy in the field with Bailey, aforesaid, when Harris passed and vanished: Bailey saw nothing. At half-past nine, the spectre returned, and leaned on a railing: Briggs vainly tried to make Bailey see him. Briggs now crossed the fence, and walked some hundreds of yards with Harris, telling him that his will was disputed. Harris bade Briggs go to his aforesaid brother James, and remind him of a conversation they had held, ‘on the east side of the wheat-stacks,’ on the day when Harris’s fatal illness began. James remembered the conversation, and said he would fulfil his brother’s desire which he actually did. There was a later interview between Briggs and Harris, the matter then discussed Briggs declined to impart to the court, and the court overruled the question. ‘He had never related to any person the last conversation, and never would.’
Bailey was sworn, and deposed that Briggs had called his attention to Harris, whomhecould not see, had climbed the fence, and walked for some distance, ‘apparently in deep conversation with some person. Witness saw no one.’
It is plain that the ghost never really understood the legal question at issue. The dates are difficult to reconcile. Thomas Harris died in 1790. His ghost appeared in 1791. Why was there no trial of the case till ‘about 1798 or 1799’? Perhaps research in the Maryland records would elucidate these and other questions; we do but give the tale, with such authority as it possesses. Possibly it is an elaborate hoax, played off by Nicholson, the plaintiffs’ counsel, on the correspondent ofThe Opera Glass, or by him on the editor of that periodical.
The hallucinations of Briggs, which were fortunate enough, it is said, to get into a court of justice, singularly resemble those of M. Bezuel, in July and August, 1697, though these were not matter of a sworn deposition. The evidence is inHistoire d’une Apparition Arrivée à Valogne.{267}The narrator of 1708, having heard much talk of the affair, was invited to meet Bezuel, a priest, at dinner, January 7, 1708. He told his one story ‘with much simplicity’.
In 1695, when about fifteen, Bezuel was a friend of a younger boy, one of two brothers, Desfontaines. In 1696, when Desfontaines minor was going to study at Caen, he worried Bezuel into signing, in his blood, a covenant that the first who died should appear to the survivor. The lads corresponded frequently, every six weeks. On July 31, 1697, at half-past two, Bezuel, who was hay-making, had a fainting fit. On August 1, at the same hour, he felt faint on a road, and rested under a shady tree. On August 2, at half-past two, he fainted in a hay-loft, and vaguely remembered seeing a half-naked body. He came down the ladder, and seated himself on a block, in the Place des Capucins. Here he lost sight of his companions, but did see Desfontaines, who came up, took his left arm, and led him into an alley. The servant followed, and told Bezuel’s tutor that he was talking to himself. The tutor went to him, and heard him asking and answering questions. Bezuel, for three-quarters of an hour, conversed, as he believed, with Desfontaines, who said that he had been drowned, while bathing, at Caen, about half-past two on July 31. The appearance was naked to the waist, his head bare, showing his beautiful yellow locks. He asked Bezuel to learn a school task that had been set him as a penalty, the seven penitential psalms: he described a tree at Caen, where he had cut some words; two years later Bezuel visited it and them; he gave other pieces of information, which were verified, but not a word would he say of heaven, hell, or purgatory; ‘he seemed not to hear my questions’. There were two or three later interviews, till Bezuel carried out the wishes of the phantasm.
When the spectral Desfontaines went away, on the first occasion, Bezuel told another boy that Desfontaines was drowned. The lad ran to the parents of Desfontaines, who had just received a letter to that effect. By some error, the boy thought that theelderDesfontaines had perished, and said so to Bezuel, who denied it, and, on a second inquiry, Bezuel was found to be right.
The explanation that Bezuel was ill (as he certainly was), that he had heard of the death of his friend justbeforehis hallucination, and had forgotten an impressive piece of news, which, however, caused the apparition, is given by the narrator of 1708. The kind of illusion in which a man is seen and heard to converse with empty air, is common to the cases of Bezuel and of Briggs, and the writer is acquainted, at first hand, with a modern example.
Mrs. Crowe cites, on the authority of the late Mr. Maurice Lothian, solicitor for the plaintiff, a suit which arose out of ‘hauntings,’ and was heard in the sheriff’s court, at Edinburgh, in 1835-37. But we are unable to discover the official records, or extracts of evidence from them. This is to be regretted, but, by way of consolation, we have the pleadings on both sides in an ancient French case of a haunted house. These are preserved in hisDiscours des Spectres, a closely printed quarto of nearly 1000 pages, by Pierre le Loyer, Conseiller du Roy au Siège Présidial d’Angers.{269}Le Loyer says, ‘De gayétè de coeur semble m’estre voulu engager au combat contre ceux qui impugnent les spectres!’ As Le Loyer observes, ghosts seldom come into court in civil cases, except when indicted as nuisances, namely, when they make a hired house uninhabitable by their frolics. Then the tenant often wants to quit the house, and to have his contract annulled. The landlord resists, an action is brought, and is generally settled in accordance with the suggestion of Alphenus, in hisDigests, book ii. Alphenus says, in brief, that the fear must be a genuine fear, and that reason for no ordinary dread must be proved. Hence Arnault Ferton, in hisCustomal of Burgundy, advises that ‘legitimate dread of phantasms which trouble men’s rest and make night hideous’ is reason good for leaving a house, and declining to pay rent after the day of departure. Covarruvias, a Spanish legist, already quoted, agrees with Arnault Ferton. The Parliament of Grenada, in one or two cases, decided in favour of the tenant, and against the landlord of houses where spectres racketed. Le Loyer now reports the pleadings in a famous case, of which he does not give the date. Incidentally, however, we learn that it can hardly have been earlier than 1550. The cause was heard, on appeal, before the Parlement de Paris.
Pierre Piquet, guardian of Nicolas Macquereau (a minor), let to Giles Bolacre a house in the suburbs of Tours. Poor Bolacre was promptly disturbed by a noise and routing ofinvisiblespirits, which suffered neither himself nor his family to sleep o’ nights. He then cited Piquet, also Daniel Macquereau, who was concerned in the letting of the house, before the local seat of Themis. The case was heard, and the judge at Tours broke the lease, the hauntings being insupportable nuisances. But this he did without letters royal. The lessors then appealed, and the case came before the Cour de Parlement in Paris. Maître Chopin was for the lessors, Nau appeared for the tenant. Chopin first took the formal point, the Tours judge was formally wrong in breaking a covenant without letters royal, a thing particularly bad in the case of a minor, Nicolas Macquereau.
So much for the point of form; as to the matter, Maître Chopin laughed at the bare idea of noisy spirits. This is notable because, in an age when witches were burned frequently, the idea of a haunted house could be treated by the learned counsel as a mere waggery. Yet the belief in haunted houses has survived the legal prosecution of witches. ‘The judge in Tours has merely and mischievously encouraged superstition.’ All ghosts, brownies,lutins, are mere bugbears of children; here Maître Chopin quotes Plato, and Philo Judæus in the original, also Empedocles, Marcus Aurelius, Tertullian, Quintilian, Dioscorides. Perhaps Bolacre and his family suffer from nightmare. If so, a physician, not a solicitor, is their man. Or again, granting that their houseishaunted, they should appeal to the clergy, not to the law.
Manifestly this is a point to be argued. Do the expenses of exorcism fall on landlord or tenant? This, we think, can hardly be decided by a quotation from Epictetus. Alexis Comnenus bids us seek a bishop in the case of psychical phenomena (τα ψυχικα απαντα). So Maître Chopin argues, but he evades the point. Is it not the business of the owner of the house to ‘whustle on his ain parten,’ to have his own bogie exorcised? Of course Piquet and Macquereau may argue that the bogie is Bolacre’s bogie, that it flitted to the house with Bolacre; but that is a question of fact and evidence.
Chopin concludes that a lease is only voidable in case of material defect, or nuisance, as of pestilential air, not in a case which, after all, is a merevice d’esprit. Here Maître Chopin sits down, with a wink at the court, and Nau pleads for the tenant. First, why abuse the judge at Tours? The lessors argued the case before him, and cannot blame him for credulity. The Romans, far from rejecting such ideas (as Chopin had maintained), used a ritual service for ejecting spooks, so Ovid testifies. Greek and Roman hauntings are cited from Pliny, Plutarch, Suetonius; in the last case (ghost of Caligula), the house had to be destroyed, like the house at Wolflee where the ghost, resenting Presbyterian exorcism, killed the Rev. Mr. Thomson of Southdean, father of the author ofThe Castle of Indolence. ‘As to Plato, cited by my learned brother, Plato believed in hauntings, as we read in thePhaedo,’ Nau has him here. In brief, ‘the defendants have let a house as habitable, well knowing the same to be infested by spirits’. The Fathers are then cited as witnesses for ghosts. The learned counsel’s argument about avice d’espritis a pitiable pun.
The decision of the court, unluckily, is not preserved by Le Loyer. The counsel for Bolacre told Le Loyer that the case was adjourned on the formal point, but, that, having obtained letters royal for his client, he succeeded in getting the remainder of the lease declared void. Comparing, however, Bouchel,s. v. Louage, in hisBibliothèque du droit François, one finds that the higher court reversed the decision of the judge at Tours. In the Edinburgh case, 1835, the tenant, Captain Molesworth, did not try to have his lease quashed, but he did tear up floors, pull down wainscots, and bore a hole into the next house, that of his landlord, Mr. Webster, in search of the cause of the noises. Mr. Webster, therefore, brought an action to restrain him from these experiments.
Le Loyer gives two cases of ghosts appearing to denounce murderers in criminal cases. He possessed the speech of the President Brisson (at that time an advocate), in which he cited the testimony of the spectre of Madame de Colommiers, mysteriously murdered in full day, with her children and their nurse. Her ghost appeared to her husband, when wide awake, and denounced her own cousins. As there was no other evidence, beyond the existence of motive, the accused were discharged. In another well-known case, before the Parlement de Bretagne, the ghost of a man who had mysteriously vanished, guided his brother to the spot where his wife and her paramour had buried him, after murdering him. Le Loyer does not give the date of this trial. The wife was strangled, and her body was burned.