THE DEMON OF JEDBURGH.
In 1752, when Captain Archibald Douglass, who was then on a recruiting party in the South of Scotland, his native country, lay in the town of Jedburgh, his serjeant complained to him that the house in which he was quartered was haunted by a spirit, which had several times appeared to him by candle light in a very frightful form. The captain, who was a man of sense and far from being superstitious, treated the serjeant as a person who had lost his reason, threatened to cane him as a coward, and told him that goblins and spirits were beneath the notice of a soldier. The captain thenight following had a strange dream, in which he saw the landlady of the inn, where the serjeant lay, in company with a great number of other females, ascending in the air, some riding on brooms, some on asses, and others on cats, &c. The landlady invited him to accompany them in their aërial excursion, to which consenting, he got upon a goat behind one of the women, and was carried with great velocity to a large heath near London, which he well knew on their arrival.
When all the females had alighted, his ears were suddenly alarmed with a thousand yells the most hideous that could be conceived, to the sound of which they all danced in a circle. The captain was placed in the centre; beholding all the wild vagaries with wonder and horror. When the music had ceased and the dancing closed, suddenly he found himself by a phalanx of infernal furies, whose forks were all aimed at his breast. The horror of this scene suddenly awaked the captain, who was glad to find himself safe and in a sound skin at his mother’s house, where he lay that night.
The next morning the serjeant, like the knight of the sorrowful countenance, waited on the captain for fresh orders, again declaring that he had seen the apparition which had threatened his life. The captain heard him with less impatience and inattention than he had the preceding day, saying, I myself have had a restless night and a terrible dream, but these things, I tell you again, are beneath the notice of a soldier. However, continued the captain, I am resolved to sift this matter till I discover the ground of your complaint. I have anotion that you, like myself, have been making too free with the bottle. The serjeant replied, most solemnly declaring that he was most perfectly in his senses when he saw a frightful spectre standing at the side of his bed, and which changing its appearance, retired in the shape of a great black cat, jumping from the window over the church steeple. Now to let your honour into a secret, continued the soldier, I was informed this morning, that the landlady is neither more nor less than a witch, and her goodman is second-sighted, and can tell, awake him from his sleep when you please, the precise hour of the night, and the exact minute.
To cut short our story, the captain at night accompanied the serjeant, well provided with fire arms, and a sword, to the chamber alluded to. Having placed the arms upon the table, he lay down by the soldier’s side in a bed without curtains, but enclosed with a frame of wainscoting with sliding doors. At midnight, they heard three knocks on one of the pannels, when the captain arose, ran to the door, which he found fast locked, and having a candle, searched every corner of the room without making any discovery. He lay down a second time, and about an hour after again heard the knocking three distinct times as before. Attempting to get up, the whole wainscoting tumbled down upon the bed, the violent noise of which alarmed the serjeant, who cried out, the witch! the witch is within! It was a considerable time before they could extricate themselves from the boarding, but so sooner was the captain disentangled than he saw a prodigious large sable catflying to the window, at which he fired a pistol, and shot off one of its ears.
Next morning the captain called the landlord, and enquired how long his house had been haunted. The landlord replied, you must ask my wife, when she returns home, for she is seldom in bed after midnight. Just as the husband was so saying, the wife came into the kitchen, and falling into a swoon upon seeing the captain, fell down prostrate on the floor, discomposed her head-dress, and discovered a terrible wound on the left side of her head and the want of an ear. The captain swore that he would take her before the provost, in order that she might be committed for trial, but the husband interfering, and the captain well knowing that he could not continue in the country till the next circuit, contented himself with telling the story among the circle of his friends, none of whom had the least reason to doubt his veracity, as he was a gentleman of strict honour, undaunted courage, and tried integrity.—It may be inferred from this that witches have a capacity of changing their outward form, and appearing in the shape of a cat, or the like, at the will; but this might only be in the imagination of the captain and the serjeant, for it would be hard to account for the loss of this witch’s real ear, had she changed her body to that of the animal upon which the captain supposed he had fired.
How to reconcile these and various similar stories to the standard of common credence, is a task no less difficult than problematical; and to ascertain the real cause of the scarcity, now-a-days,of such mysterious and unaccountable occurrences, is at least a proof that the devil has been losing latterly, from some cause or other, much of his ascendancy over the human mind. To attempt to explain, or do away with the supposition, that spirits, apparitions, demons, or other preternatural agents, “hobgoblins damned,” or undamned, would be to attack the fundamental parts of the christian religion, which we are told and taught to believe constitutes a part of the law of the land. The wisest philosophers, heroes, and vagrants, have all, from the remotest antiquity downwards, testified to their appearance; and divines themselves have been equally orthodox, and active in promulgating the force of their testimony in support of the doctrine of preternatural agency; which neither the supposition of a morbid imagination, “contained in tabular views[65]of the various comparative degrees of faintness, vividness, or intensity, supposed to exist between sensations and ideas, when conjointly excited or depressed,” can account for on rational principles, when the mind is curious to be divested of all these presumed causes. That there are states and conditions of the mind, when, from intensity of excitement, the imagination may be played upon no one will deny; but that such causes should always have existed, is equally as preposterous and absurd—still between these and imposture, perhaps truth may lie; and then it is a point of scepticism that does little honour to the social compact, to cast even a shade of doubt on the moral character of a man, whoseveracity was never before impeached on any other subject.