Cock Lane and Common-Sense Part 14

Incidental folklore. Old G. Th.o.r.el and the cure. The wizard's revenge. The haunted parlour boarder. Examples of magical tripping up, and provoked hallucinations. Case of Dr. Gibotteau and Berthe the hospital nurse. Similar case in the Salem affair, 1692.

Evidence of witnesses to abnormal phenomena. Mr. Robert de Saint Victor. M. de Mirville. Th.o.r.el non-suited. Other modern French examples of witchcraft.

Perhaps the last trial for witchcraft was the case of Th.o.r.el v.

Tinel, heard before the juge de paix of Yerville, on January 28, and February 3 and 4, 1851. The trial was, in form, the converse of those with which old jurisprudence was familiar. Tinel, the Cure of Cideville, did not accuse the shepherd Th.o.r.el of sorcery, but Th.o.r.el accused Tinel of defaming his character by the charge of being a warlock. Just as when a man prosecutes another for saying that he cheated at cards, or when a woman prosecutes another for saying that the plaintiff stole diamonds, it is really the guilt or innocence of the plaintiff that is in question, so the issue before the court at Yerville was: 'Is Th.o.r.el a warlock or not?' The court decided that he himself had been the chief agent in spreading the slander against himself, he was non-suited, and had to pay costs, but as to the real cause of the events which were attributed to the magic of Th.o.r.el, the court was unable to p.r.o.nounce an opinion.

This curious case has often been cited, as by Mr. Robert Dale Owen, in his Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, {275} but Mr.

Owen, by accident or design, omitted almost all the essential particulars, everything which connects the affair with such transactions as the witch epidemic at Salem, and the trials for sorcery before and during the Restoration. Yet, in the events at Cideville, and the depositions of witnesses, we have all the characteristics of witchcraft. First we have men by habit and repute sorcerers. Then we have cause of offence given to these.

Then we have their threats, malum minatum, then we have evil following the threats, d.a.m.num secutum. Just as of old, that d.a.m.num, that damage, declares itself in the 'possession' of young people, who become, more or less, subject to trances and convulsions. One of them is haunted, as in the old witchcraft cases, by the phantasm of the sorcerer. The phantasm (as in Cotton Mather's examples) is wounded, a parallel wound is found on the suspected warlock.

Finally, the house where the obsessed victims live is disturbed by knocks, raps, flight of objects, and inexplicable movements of heavy furniture. Thus all the notes of a bad affair of witchcraft are attested in a modern trial, under the third Empire. Finally, some curious folklore is laid bare, light is cast on rural life and superst.i.tion, and a singular corroboration of a singular statement, much more recent than the occurrences at Cideville, is obtained. A more astonis.h.i.+ng example of survival cannot be imagined, of survival, or of disconnected and spontaneous revival and recrudescence. {276}

There was at Auzebosc, near famous Yvetot, an old shepherd named G---: he was the recognised 'wise man,' or white witch of the district, and some less noted rural adepts gave themselves out as his pupils. In March, 1849, M. Tinel, Cure of Cideville, visited a sick peasant, and advised him to discard old G., the shepherd magical, and send for a physician. G. was present, though concealed, heard the cure's criticisms, and said: 'Why does he meddle in my business, I shall meddle in his; he has pupils in his house, we'll see how long he keeps them.' In a few days, G. was arrested, as practising medicine unauthorised, was imprisoned for some months, and fancied that the cure had a share in this persecution. All this, of course, we must take as 'the clash of the country side,' intent, as there was certainly d.a.m.num secutum, on establis.h.i.+ng malum minatum.

On a farm near the cure's house in Cideville was another shepherd, named Th.o.r.el, a man of forty, described as dull, illiterate, and given to boasting about his powers as a disciple of the venerable G.

Popular opinion decided that G. employed Th.o.r.el to procure his vengeance; it was necessary that a sorcerer should _touch_ his intended victim, and G. had not the same conveniency for doing so as Th.o.r.el. In old witch trials we sometimes find the witch kissing her destined prey. {277} Th.o.r.el, so it was said, succeeded in touching, on Nov. 25, 1850, M. Tinel's two pupils, in a crowd at a sale of wood. The lads, of fifteen and twelve, were named Lemonier and Bunel. For what had gone before, we have, so far, only public chatter, for what followed we have the sworn evidence in court of the cure's pupils, in January and February, 1851. According to Lemonier, on Nov. 26, while studying, he heard light blows of a hammer, these recurred daily, about 5. p.m. When M. Tinel, his tutor, said plus fort, the noises were louder. To condense evidence which becomes tedious by its eternal uniformity, popular airs were beaten on demand; the noise grew unbearable, tables moved untouched, a breviary, a knife, a spit, a shoe flew wildly about. Lemonier was buffeted by a black hand, attached to n.o.body. 'A kind of human phantasm, clad in a blouse, haunted me for fifteen days wherever I went; none but myself could see it.' He was dragged by the leg by a mysterious force. On a certain day, when Th.o.r.el found a pretext for visiting the house, M. Tinel made him beg Lemonier's pardon, clearly on the ground that the swain had bewitched the boy. 'As soon as I saw him I recognised the phantasm which had haunted me for a fortnight, and I said to M. Tinel: "There is the man who follows me".' Th.o.r.el knelt to the boy, asked his pardon, and pulled violently at his clothes. As defendant, perhaps, the cure could not be asked to corroborate these statements. The evidence of the other boy, Bunel, was that, on Nov. 26, he heard first a rush of wind, then tappings on the wall. He corroborated Lemonier's testimony to the musical airs knocked out, the volatile furniture, and the recognition in Th.o.r.el of the phantom. 'In the evening,' said Bunel, 'Lemonier en eut une crise de nerfs dans laquelle il avait perdu connaissance.'

Leaving the boys' sworn evidence, and returning to the narrative with its gossip, we learn that Th.o.r.el boasted of his success, and said that, if he could but touch one of the lads again, the furniture would dance, and the windows would be broken. Meanwhile, we are told, nails were driven into points in the floor where Lemonier saw the spectral figure standing. One nail became red hot, and the wood round it smoked: Lemonier said that this nail had hit 'the man in the blouse' on the cheek. Now, when Th.o.r.el was made to ask the boy's pardon, and was recognised by him as the phantom, after the experiment with the nail, Th.o.r.el bore on his cheek the mark of the wound!

This is in accordance with good precedents in witchcraft. A witch- hare is wounded, the witch, in her natural form, has the same wound.

At the trial of Bridget Bishop, in the court of Oyer and Terminer, held at Salem, June 2, 1692, there was testimony brought in that a man striking once at the place where a bewitched person said the _shape_ of Mrs. Bishop stood, the bewitched cried out, _that he had tore her coat_, in the place then particularly specified, and Bishop's coat was found to be torn in that very place. {279a} Next day, after Th.o.r.el touched the boy, the windows broke, as he had prophesied. Then followed a curious scene in which Th.o.r.el tried, in presence of the maire, to touch the cure, who retreated to the end of the room, and struck the shepherd with his cane. Thereupon Th.o.r.el brought his action for libel and a.s.sault against the cure.

Forty-two witnesses were heard, it was proved that Th.o.r.el had, in fact, frequently accused himself, and he was non-suited: his counsel spoke of appealing, but, unluckily, the case was not carried to a higher court. In a few weeks the boys were sent to their homes, when (according to the narrative) there were disturbances at the home of the younger lad. Thus the cure lost his pupils.

A curious piece of traditional folklore came out, but only as hearsay, in court. M. Cheval, Maire of Cideville, deposed that a M.

Savoye told him that Th.o.r.el had once been shepherd to a M. Tricot.

At that time Th.o.r.el said to one of two persons in his company: 'Every time I strike my cabin (a shelter on wheels used by shepherds) you will fall,' and, at each stroke, the victim felt something seize his throat, and fell! {279b} This anecdote is curious, because in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research is a long paper by Dr. Gibotteau, on his experiments with a hospital nurse called Berthe. This woman, according to the doctor, had the power of making him see hallucinations, of a nature more or less horrible, from a distance. She had been taught some traditional feats of rural sorcery, among others that of making a man stumble, or fall, as he walked. The doctor does not make any allusion to the Cideville affair, and it seems probable that this trick is part of the peasant's magical repertoire, or, rather, that the peasant warlocks boast of being able to perform the trick. But, if we can accept the physician's evidence, as 'true for him,' at least, then a person like Berthe really might affect, from a distance, a boy like Lemonier with a haunting hallucination. To do this is witchcraft, and for crimes of this kind, or on false charges of this kind, poor Mrs. Bishop was burned at Salem in 1692.

At the lowest, we have all the notes of sorcery as our rude ancestors knew it, in this modern affair. Two hundred years earlier, Th.o.r.el would have been burned, and G., too, probably, for the Maire of Cideville swore that before the disturbances, and three weeks after G. was let out of prison, Th.o.r.el had warned him of the trouble which G. would bring on the cure. Meanwhile the evidence shows no conscious malignity on the part of the two boys. They at first took very little notice of the raps, attributing the noises to mice. Not till the sounds increased, and showed intelligence, as by drumming tunes, did the lads concern themselves, much about the matter. At no time (it seems) did they ask to be sent home, and, of course, to be relieved from their lessons and sent home would be their motive, if they practised a fraud. We may admit that, from rural tradition, the boys might have learned what the customary phenomena are, knocks, raps, moving tables, heavy objects sailing tranquilly about a room. It would be less easy for them to produce these phenomena, nor did the people of all cla.s.ses who flocked to Cideville detect any imposture.

A land surveyor swore that the raps went on when he had placed the boy in an att.i.tude which made fraud (in his opinion) impossible. A gentleman M. de B. 'took all possible precautions' but, nevertheless, was entertained by 'a noise which performed the tunes demanded'. He could discover no cause of the noise. M. Huet, touching a table with his finger, received responsive raps, which answered questions, 'at the very place where I struck, and beneath my finger. I cannot explain the fact, which, I am convinced, was not caused by the child, nor by any one in the house.' M. Cheval saw things fly about, he slept in the boy's room, and his pillow flew from under his head. He lay down between the children, holding their hands, and placing his feet on theirs, when the coverlet of the bed arose, and floated away. The Marquis de Mirville had a number of answers by raps, which staggered him very much, but the force was quite feeble when he asked for portions of Italian music.

Madame de St. Victor felt herself pushed, and her clothes pulled in the cure's house, when no one was near her. She also saw furniture behave in a fantastic manner, and M. Raoul Robert de St. Victor had many such experiences. M. Paul de St. Victor was not present. A desk sailed along: paused in air, and fell: 'I had never seen a movement of this kind, and I admit that I was alarmed'. Le Seigneur, a farmer, saw 'a variety of objects arise and sail about': he was certain that the boys did not throw them, and when in their company, in the open air, between Cideville and Anzooville, 'I saw stones come to us, without striking us, hurled by some invisible force'. There was other confirmatory evidence, from men of physic, and of the law.

The juge de paix, as we have seen, p.r.o.nounced that the clearest point in the case was 'the absence of known cause for the effects,'

and he non-suited Th.o.r.el, the plaintiff.

The cause of the phenomena is, of course, as obscure for us as for the worthy magistrate. We can only say that, when precisely similar evidence was brought before judges and juries in England and New England, at a period when medicine, law, and religion all recognised the existence of witchcraft, magic, and diabolical possession, they had scarcely any choice but to condemn the accused. Causa patet, they said: 'The devil is at the bottom of it all, and the witch is his minister'.

The affair of Cideville by no means stands alone in modern France.

In 1853, two doctors and other witnesses signed a deposition as to precisely similar phenomena attending Adelaide Francoise Millet, a girl of twelve, at Songhien, in Champagne. The trouble, as at c.o.c.k Lane, began by a sound of scratching on the wood of her bed. The clerk of the juge de la paix, the master of the Douane, two doctors, and others visited her, and tied her hands and feet. The noise continued. Mysterious missiles pursued a girl in Martinique, in 1854. The house, which was stormed by showers of stone, in Paris (1846), entirely baffled the police. {283a} There is a more singular parallel to the Cideville affair, the account was printed from the letter of a correspondent in the Abeille of Chartres, March 11, 1849. {283b} At Gaubert, near Guillonville, a man was imprisoned for thefts of hay, the property of a M. Dolleans. Two days after his arrest, namely, on December 31, 1848, the servant of M. Dolleans had things of all sorts thrown at her from all directions. She fell ill, and went into hospital for five days, _where she was untroubled_. On her return, in the middle of a conversation, ribbons and bits of string would fly at her, and twist themselves round her neck, as in the case of Francis Fey, of Spraiton, given by Aubrey and Bovet. Mademoiselle Dolleans carefully watched the girl for a fortnight, and never let her out of her sight, but could not discover any fraud. After about a month the maid was sent home, where she was not molested. Naturally we see in her the half-insane cunning of hysteria, but that explanation does not apply to little Master Dolleans, a baby of three months old. The curse fell on _him_: however closely his parents watched him, pots and pans showered into his cradle, the narrator himself saw a miscellaneous collection of household furniture mysteriously ama.s.sed there.

The Abeille of Chartres held this letter over, till two of its reporters had visited the scene of action, and interviewed doctors, priests, and farmers, who all attested the facts. Happily, in this case, an exorcism by a priest proved efficacious. At Cideville, holy water and consecrated medals were laughed at by the sprite, who, by the way, answered to the name of Robert.

PRESBYTERIAN GHOST HUNTERS.

Religious excitement and hallucination. St. Anthony. Zulu catechumens. Haunted Covenanters. Strange case of Thomas Smeaton.

Law's 'Memorialls'. A deceitful spirit. Examples of insane and morbidly sensitive ghosts. 'Le revenant qui s'accuse s'excuse.'

Raising the devil in Irvine. Mode of evocation. Wodrow. His account of Margaret Lang, and Miss Shaw of Bargarran. The unlucky Shaws. Lord Torphichen's son. Cases from Wodrow. Lord Middleton's story. Haunted house. Wraiths. Lord Orrery's ghost no metaphysician. The Bride of Lammermoor. Visions of the saints.

Their cautiousness. Ghost appearing to a Jacobite. Ghost of a country tradesman. Case of telepathy known to Wodrow. Avenging spectres. Lack of evidence. Tale of Cotton Mather.

In spite of a very general opinion to the opposite effect, it is not really easy to determine in what kind of age, and in what conditions of thought and civilisation, ghosts will most frequently appear, and ghostly phenomena will chiefly abound. We are all ready to aver that 'ghaists and eldritch fantasies' will be most common 'in the dark ages,' in periods of ignorance or superst.i.tion. But research in mediaeval chronicles, and in lives of the saints makes it apparent that, while marvels on a large and imposing scale were frequent, simple ordinary apparitions and haunted houses occur comparatively seldom. Perhaps they were too common to be thought worth noticing, yet they are noticed occasionally, and, even in these periods of superst.i.tion, were apparently regarded as not quite everyday phenomena.

One thing in this matter is tolerably certain, namely, that intense religious excitement produces a tendency to believe in marvels of all sorts, and also begets a capacity for being hallucinated, for beholding spectres, strange lights, dubious miracles. Thus every one has heard of the temptation of St. Anthony, and of other early Christian Fathers. They were wont to be surrounded by threatening aspects of wild beasts, which had no real existence. In the same way the early Zulu converts of Bishop Callaway, when they retired to lonely places to pray, were haunted by visionary lions, and phantasms of enemies with a.s.segais. They, probably, had never heard of St. Anthony's similar experiences, nor, again, of the diabolical attacks on the converts of Catholic missionaries in Cochin China, and in Peru.

Probably the most recent period of general religious excitement in our country was that of the Covenant in Scotland. Not a mere scattered congregation or two, as in the rise of Irvingism, but a vast proportion of a whole people lived lives of prolonged ecstatic prayer, and often neglected food for days. Consequently devout Covenanters, retired in lonely places to pray, were apt to be infested by spectral animals, black dogs as a rule, and they doubted not at all that the black dog was the Accuser of the Brethren. We have Catholic evidence, in Father Piatti's Life of Father Elphinstone, S. J., to black dogs haunting Thomas Smeaton, the friend of Andrew Melville (1580). But Father Piatti thinks that the dogs were avenging devils, Smeaton being an apostate (MS. Life of Elphinstone). Again Covenanters would see mysterious floods of light, as the heathen also used, but, like the heathen, they were not certain as to whether the light was produced by good or bad spirits. Like poor bewildered Porphyry, many centuries earlier, they found the spirits 'very deceitful'. You never can depend on them. This is well ill.u.s.trated by the Rev. Mr. Robert Law, a Covenanting minister, but _not_ a friend of fanaticism and sedition.

In his Memorialls, a work not published till long after his death, he gives this instance of the deceitfulness of sprites. The Rev.

Mr. John Shaw, in Ireland, was much troubled by witches, and by 'cats coming into his chamber and bed'. He died, so did his wife, 'and, as was supposed, witched'. Before Mr. Shaw's death his groom, in the stable, saw 'a great heap of hay rolling toward him, and then appeared' (the hay not the groom) 'in the shape and lykness of a bair. He charges it to appear in human shape, which it did.' The appearance made a tryst to meet the groom, but Mr. Shaw forbade this tampering with evil in the lykness of a bair. However a stone was thrown at the groom, which he took for a fresh invitation from the bair, so he went to the place appointed. 'The divill appears in human shape, with his heid running down with blood,' and explains that he is 'the spirit of a murdered man who lay under his bed, and buried in the ground, and who was murdered by such a man, naming him by name'. The groom, very naturally, dug in the spot pointed out by this versatile phantom, 'but finds nothing of bones or anything lyke a grave, and shortly after this man dyes,' having failed to discover that the person accused of murder had ever existed at all.

Many ghosts have a perfect craze for announcing that bodies or treasures, are buried where there is nothing of the sort. Glanvill has a tale of a ghost who accused himself of a murder, and led a man to a place in a wood where the corpse of the slain was to be found.

There was no corpse, the ghost was mad. The Psychical Society have published the narratives of a housemaid and a butler who saw a lady ghost. She, later, communicated through a table her intention to appear at eleven p.m. The butler and two ladies saw her, the gentlemen present did _not_. The ghost insisted that jewels were buried in the cellar; the butler dug, but found none. The writer is acquainted with another ghost, not published, who labours under morbid delusions. For reasons wholly unfounded on fact she gave a great deal of trouble to a positive stranger. Now there was literally no sense in these proceedings. Such is ghostly evidence, ever deceitful!

'It's not good,' says Mr. Law, 'to come in communing terms with Satan, there is a snare in the end of it;' yet people have actually been hanged, in England, on the evidence of a ghost! On the evidence of the devil, some other persons were accused of theft, in 1682. This is a remarkable instance; we often hear of raising the ghostly foe, but we are seldom told how it can be done. This is how it was done in February, 1682, at the house of the Hon. Robert Montgomery, in Irvine. Some objects of silver plate were stolen, a maid was suspected, she said 'she would raise the devil, but she would know who the thief was'. Taking, therefore, a Bible, she went into a cellar, where she drew a circle round her, and turned a sieve on end twice, from right to left. In her hand she held nine feathers from the tail of a black c.o.c.k. She next read Psalm li.

forwards, and then backwards Revelations ix. 19. 'He' then appeared, dressed as a sailor with a blue cap. At each question she threw three feathers at him: finally he showed as a black man with a long tail. Meanwhile all the dogs in Irvine were barking, as in Greece when Hecate stood by the cross-ways. The maid now came and told Mrs. Montgomery (on information received) that the stolen plate was in the box of a certain servant, where, of course, she had probably placed it herself. However the raiser of the devil was imprisoned for the spiritual offence. She had learned the rite 'at Dr. Colvin's house in Ireland, who used to practise this'.

The experiment may easily be repeated by the scientific.

Though Mr. Law is strong in witches and magic, he has very few ghost stories; indeed, according to his philosophy, even a common wraith of a living person is really the devil in that disguise. The learned Mr. Wodrow, too, for all his extreme pains, cannot be called a very successful amateur of spectres. A mighty ghost hunter was the Rev. Robert Wodrow of Eastwood, in Renfrews.h.i.+re, the learned historian of the sufferings of the Kirk of Scotland (1679-1734).

Mr. Wodrow was an industrious antiquarian, a student of geology, as it was then beginning to exist, a correspondent for twenty years of Cotton Mather, and a good-hearted kind man, that would hurt n.o.body but a witch or a Papist. He had no opportunity to injure members of either cla.s.s, but it is plain, from his four large quarto volumes, called a.n.a.lecta, that he did not lack the will. In his a.n.a.lecta Mr.

Wodrow noted down all the news that reached him, scandals about 'The Pretender,' Court Gossip, Heresies of Ministers, Remarkable Providences, Woful Apparitions, and 'Strange Steps of Providence'.

Ghosts, second sight, dreams, omens, premonitions, visions, did greatly delight him, but it is fair to note that he does not vouch for all his marvels, but merely jots them down, as matters of hearsay. Thus his pages are valuable to the student of superst.i.tion, because they contain 'the clash of the country' for about forty years, and ill.u.s.trate the rural or ecclesiastical aberglaube of our ancestors, at the moment when witchcraft was ceasing to be a recognised criminal offence.

A diary of Wodrow's exists, dating from April 3, 1697, when he was but nineteen years of age. On June 10, 1697, he announces the execution of some witches at Paisley: seven were burned, among them one, Margaret Lang, who accused herself of horrible crimes. The victim of the witches burned in 1697 was a child of eleven, daughter of John Shaw of Bargarran. This family was unlucky in its spiritual accidents. The previous laird, as we learn from the contemporary Law, in his Memorialls, rode his horse into a river at night, and did not arrive at the opposite bank. Every effort was made to find his body in the stream, which was searched as far as the sea. The corpse was at last discovered in a ditch, two miles away, shamefully mutilated. The money of the laird, and other objects of value, were still in his pockets. This was regarded as the work of fiends, but there is a more plausible explanation. n.o.body but his groom saw the laird ride into the river; the chances are that he was murdered in revenge,--certain circ.u.mstances point to this,--and that the servant was obliged to keep the secret, and invent the story about riding the ford.

The daughter of Bargarran's successor and heir was probably a hysterical child, who was led, by the prevailing superst.i.tion, to believe that witches caused her malady. How keen the apprehensions were among children, we learn from a doc.u.ment preserved by Wodrow.

An eminent Christian of his acquaintance thought in boyhood that an old woman looked crossly at him, and he went in dread of being bewitched for a whole summer. The mere terror might have caused fits, he would then have denounced the old woman, and she would probably have been burned. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, in his preface to Law's Memorialls (p. xcii.), says that Miss Shaw was 'antient in wickedness,' and thus accounts for her 'pretending to be bewitched,' by way of revenging herself on one of the maid-servants.

Twenty people were finally implicated, several were executed, and one killed himself. The child, probably hysterical, and certainly subject to convulsions, was really less to blame than 'the absurd credulity of various otherwise worthy ministers, and some topping professors in and about Glasgow,' as Sharpe quotes the MS. 'Treatise on witchcraft' of the Rev. Mr. Bell. Strangely enough the great thread manufactories of Renfrews.h.i.+re owed their origin to this Miss Shaw, aided by a friend who had acquired some technical secrets in Holland. She married a minister in 1718, and probably her share in an abominable crime lay light on her conscience. Her fellow- sufferer from witchcraft, a young Sandilands, son of Lord Torphichen (1720), became a naval officer of distinguished gallantry.

Wodrow does not appear to have witnessed the execution at Paisley, one of the last in Scotland, but he had no doubt that witches should be put to death. In 1720, when the son of Lord Torphichen exhibited some curious phenomena, exaggerated by report into clairvoyance and flying in the air, n.o.body was punished. In spite of his superst.i.tion in regard to witches, Wodrow (September 20, 1697) sensibly explains a death-wraith by the anxiety of the lady who beheld it. He also, still in the diary, records a case of second sight, but that occurred in Argyles.h.i.+re. It will be found, in fact, that all the second-sighted people except some ministers during the sufferings (and they reckoned as prophets) were Highlanders.

Considering his avidity for ghost-stories, it is remarkable that he scarcely ever receives them at even second hand, and that most of them are remote in point of time. On the other side, he secures a few religious visions, as of s.h.i.+ning lights comforting devout ladies, from the person concerned. His narratives fall into regular categories, Haunted Houses, Ghosts, Wraiths, Second Sight, Consolatory Divine Visions. Thus Mr. Stewart's uncle, Harry, 'ane eminent Christian, and very joviall,' at a drinking party saw himself in bed, and his coffin at his bed-foot. This may be explained as a case of 'the horrors,' a malady incident to the jovial. He died in a week, In vino veritas.

Lord Middleton's ghost-story Wodrow got from the son of a man who, as Lauderdale's chaplain, heard Middleton tell it at dinner. He had made a covenant with the Laird of Babigni that the first who died should appear to the survivor. Babigni was slain in battle, Middleton was put in the Tower, where Babigni appeared to him, sat with him for an hour by the clock, and predicted the Restoration.

'His hand was hote and soft,' but Middleton, brave in the field, was much alarmed. He had probably drunk a good deal in the Tower. This anecdote was very widely rumoured. Aubrey publishes a version of it in his Miscellanies, and Law gives another in his Memorialls (p.

162). He calls 'Babigni'--'Barbigno,' and 'Balbegno'. According to Law, it was not the laird's ghost that appeared, but 'the devil in his lykness'. Law and Aubrey make the spirit depart after uttering a couplet, which they quote variously.

For a haunted house, Wodrow provides us with that of Johnstone of Mellantae, in Annandale (1707). The authority is Mr. Cowan, who had it from Mr. Murray, minister of St. Mungo's, who got it from Mellantae himself, the worthy gentleman weeping as he described his misfortunes. His daughter, Miss Johnstone, was milking a cow in the byre, by daylight, when she saw a tall man, almost naked, probably a tramp, who frightened her into a swoon. The house was then 'troubled and disturbed' by flights of stones, and disappearance of objects. Young Dornock, after a visit to Mellantae, came back with a story that loud knockings were heard on the beds, and sounds of pewter vessels being thrown about, though, in the morning, all were found in their places. The ghost used also to pull the medium, Miss Johnstone, by the foot, and toss her bed-clothes about.

Next, at first hand from Mr. Short, we have a death-wraith beheld by him of his friend Mr. Scrimgeour. The hour was five a.m. on a summer morning, and Mr. Scrimgeour expired at that time in Edinburgh. Again, we have the affair of Mr. Blair, of St. Andrews, the probationer, and the devil, who, in return for a written compact, presented the probationer with an excellent sermon. On the pet.i.tion of Mr. Blair, the compact fell from the roof of the church.

The tale is told by Increase Mather about a French Protestant minister, and, as Increase wrote twenty years before Wodrow, we may regard Wodrow's anecdote as a myth; for the incident is of an unusual character, and not likely to repeat itself. We may also set aside, though vouched for by Lord Tullibardine's butler, 'ane litle old man with a fearful ougly face,' who appeared to the Rev. Mr.

Lesly. Being asked whence he came, he said, 'From h.e.l.l,' and, being further interrogated as to _why_ he came, he observed: 'To warn the nation to repent'. This struck Mr. Lesly as improbable on the face of it; however, he was a good deal alarmed.

Lord Orrery is well known in ghostly circles, as the evidence for a gentleman's butler being levitated, and floating about a room in his house. It may be less familiar that his lords.h.i.+p's own ghost appeared to his sister. She consulted Robert Boyle, F.R.S., who advised her, if Orrery appeared again, to ask him some metaphysical questions. She did so, and 'I know these questions come from my brother,' said the appearance. 'He is too curious.' He admitted, however, that his body was 'an aerial body,' but declined to be explicit on other matters. This anecdote was told by Mr. Smith, who had it from Mr. Wallace, who had it from 'an English gentleman'.

Mr. Menzies, minister of Erskine, once beheld the wraith of a friend smoking a pipe, but the owner of the wraith did not die, or do anything remarkable. To see a friendly wraith smoking a pipe, even if he take the liberty of doing so in one's bedroom, is not very ill-boding. To be sure Mr. Menzies' own father died not long after, but the attempt to connect the wraith of a third person with that event is somewhat desperate.

Wodrow has a tame commonplace account of the Bride of Lammermoor's affair. On the other hand, he tells us concerning a daughter of Lord Stair, the Countess of Dumfries, that she 'was under a very odd kind of distemper, and did frequently fly from one end of the room to the other, and from the one side of the garden to the other. . .

. The matter of fact is certain.' At a garden party this accomplishment would have been invaluable.