The astonished party then resolved that they would remain absolutely
silent respecting the wonderful sight which they had seen. Their habits
were too philosophical to permit them to believe that they had actually
seen the ghost of their deceased brother, and at the same time they were
too wise men to wish to confirm the superstition of the vulgar by what
might seem indubitable evidence of a ghost. The affair was therefore
kept a strict secret, although, as usual, some dubious rumours of the
tale found their way to the public. Several years afterwards, an old
woman who had long filled the place of a sick-nurse, was taken very ill,
and on her death-bed was attended by a medical member of the
philosophical club. To him, with many expressions of regret, she
acknowledged that she had long before attended Mr.----, naming the
president whose appearance had surprised the club so strangely, and that
she felt distress of conscience on account of the manner in which he
died. She said that as his malady was attended by light-headedness, she
had been directed to keep a close watch upon him during his illness.
Unhappily she slept, and during her sleep the patient had awaked and
left the apartment. When, on her own awaking, she found the bed empty
and the patient gone, she forthwith hurried out of the house to seek
him, and met him in the act of returning. She got him, she said,
replaced in bed, but it was only to die there. She added, to convince
her hearer of the truth of what she said, that immediately after the
poor gentleman expired, a deputation of two members from the club came
to enquire after their president's health, and received for answer that
he was already dead. This confession explained the whole matter. The
delirious patient had very naturally taken the road to the club, from
some recollections of his duty of the night. In approaching and retiring
from the apartment he had used one of the pass-keys already mentioned,
which made his way shorter. On the other hand, the gentlemen sent to
enquire after his health had reached his lodging by a more circuitous
road; and thus there had been time for him to return to what proved his
death-bed, long before they reached his chamber. The philosophical
witnesses of this strange scene were now as anxious to spread the story
as they had formerly been to conceal it, since it showed in what a
remarkable manner men's eyes might turn traitors to them, and impress
them with ideas far different from the truth.

Another occurrence of the same kind, although scarcely so striking in
its circumstances, was yet one which, had it remained unexplained, might
have passed as an indubitable instance of a supernatural apparition.

A Teviotdale farmer was riding from a fair, at which he had indulged
himself with John Barleycorn, but not to that extent of defying goblins
which it inspired into the gallant Tam o'Shanter. He was pondering with
some anxiety upon the dangers of travelling alone on a solitary road
which passed the corner of a churchyard, now near at hand, when he saw
before him in the moonlight a pale female form standing upon the very
wall which surrounded the cemetery. The road was very narrow, with no
opportunity of giving the apparent phantom what seamen call a wide
berth. It was, however, the only path which led to the rider's home, who
therefore resolved, at all risks, to pass the apparition. He accordingly
approached, as slowly as possible, the spot where the spectre stood,
while the figure remained, now perfectly still and silent, now
brandishing its arms and gibbering to the moon. When the farmer came
close to the spot he dashed in the spurs and set the horse off upon a
gallop; but the spectre did not miss its opportunity. As he passed the
corner where she was perched, she contrived to drop behind the horseman
and seize him round the waist, a manoeuvre which greatly increased the
speed of the horse and the terror of the rider; for the hand of her who
sat behind him, when pressed upon his, felt as cold as that of a corpse.
At his own house at length he arrived, and bid the servants who came to
attend him, "Tak aff the ghaist!" They took off accordingly a female in
white, and the poor farmer himself was conveyed to bed, where he lay
struggling for weeks with a strong nervous fever. The female was found
to be a maniac, who had been left a widow very suddenly by an
affectionate husband, and the nature and cause of her malady induced
her, when she could make her escape, to wander to the churchyard, where
she sometimes wildly wept over his grave, and sometimes, standing on the
corner of the churchyard wall, looked out, and mistook every stranger on
horseback for the husband she had lost. If this woman, which was very
possible, had dropt from the horse unobserved by him whom she had made
her involuntary companion, it would have been very hard to have
convinced the honest farmer that he had not actually performed part of
his journey with a ghost behind him.

There is also a large class of stories of this sort, where various
secrets of chemistry, of acoustics, ventriloquism, or other arts, have
been either employed to dupe the spectators, or have tended to do so
through mere accident and coincidence. Of these it is scarce necessary
to quote instances; but the following may be told as a tale recounted by
a foreign nobleman known to me nearly thirty years ago, whose life, lost
in the service of his sovereign, proved too short for his friends and
his native land.

At a certain old castle on the confines of Hungary, the lord to whom it
belonged had determined upon giving an entertainment worthy of his own
rank and of the magnificence of the antique mansion which he inhabited.
The guests of course were numerous, and among them was a veteran officer
of hussars, remarkable for his bravery. When the arrangements for the
night were made this officer was informed that there would be difficulty
in accommodating the company in the castle, large as was, unless some
one would take the risk of sleeping in a room supposed to be haunted,
and that, as he was known to be above such prejudices, the apartment was
in the first place proposed for his occupation, as the person least
likely to suffer a bad night's rest from such a cause. The major
thankfully accepted the preference, and having shared the festivity of
the evening, retired after midnight, having denounced vengeance against
any one who should presume by any trick to disturb his repose; a threat
which his habits would, it was supposed, render him sufficiently ready
to execute. Somewhat contrary to the custom in these cases, the major
went to bed, having left his candle burning and laid his trusty pistols,
carefully loaded, on the table by his bedside.

He had not slept an hour when he was awakened by a solemn strain of
music. He looked out. Three ladies, fantastically dressed in green, were
seen in the lower end of the apartment, who sung a solemn requiem. The
major listened for some time with delight; at length he tired. "Ladies,"
he said, "this is very well, but somewhat monotonous--will you be so
kind as to change the tune?" The ladies continued singing; he
expostulated, but the music was not interrupted. The major began to grow
angry: "Ladies," he said, "I must consider this as a trick for the
purpose of terrifying me, and as I regard it as an impertinence, I shall
take a rough mode of stopping it." With that he began to handle his
pistols. The ladies sung on. He then get seriously angry: "I will but
wait five minutes," he said, "and then fire without hesitation." The
song was uninterrupted--the five minutes were expired. "I still give you
law, ladies," he said, "while I count twenty." This produced as little
effect as his former threats. He counted one, two, three accordingly;
but on approaching the end of the number, and repeating more than once
his determination to fire, the last numbers,
seventeen--eighteen--nineteen, were pronounced with considerable pauses
between, and an assurance that the pistols were cocked. The ladies sung
on. As he pronounced the word twenty he fired both pistols against the
musical damsels--but the ladies sung on! The major was overcome by the
unexpected inefficacy of his violence, and had an illness which lasted
more than three weeks. The trick put upon him may be shortly described
by the fact that the female choristers were placed in an adjoining room,
and that he only fired at their reflection thrown forward into that in
which he slept by the effect of a concave mirror.

Other stories of the same kind are numerous and well known. The
apparition of the Brocken mountain, after having occasioned great
admiration and some fear, is now ascertained by philosophers to be a
gigantic reflection, which makes the traveller's shadow, represented
upon the misty clouds, appear a colossal figure of almost immeasurable
size. By a similar deception men have been induced, in Westmoreland and
other mountainous countries, to imagine they saw troops of horse and
armies marching and countermarching, which were in fact only the
reflection of horses pasturing upon an opposite height, or of the forms
of peaceful travellers.

A very curious case of this kind was communicated to me by the son of
the lady principally concerned, and tends to show out of what mean
materials a venerable apparition may be sometimes formed. In youth this
lady resided with her father, a man of sense and resolution. Their house
was situated in the principal street of a town of some size. The back
part of the house ran at right angles to an Anabaptist chapel, divided
from it by a small cabbage-garden. The young lady used sometimes to
indulge the romantic love of solitude by sitting in her own apartment in
the evening till twilight, and even darkness, was approaching. One
evening, while she was thus placed, she was surprised to see a gleamy
figure, as of some aerial being, hovering, as it were, against the
arched window in the end of the Anabaptist chapel. Its head was
surrounded by that halo which painters give to the Catholic saints; and
while the young lady's attention was fixed on an object so
extraordinary, the figure bent gracefully towards her more than once, as
if intimating a sense of her presence, and then disappeared. The seer of
this striking vision descended to her family, so much discomposed as to
call her father's attention. He obtained an account of the cause of her
disturbance, and expressed his intention to watch in the apartment next
night. He sat accordingly in his daughter's chamber, where she also
attended him. Twilight came, and nothing appeared; but as the gray light
faded into darkness, the same female figure was seen hovering on the
window; the same shadowy form, the same pale light-around the head, the
same inclinations, as the evening before. "What do you think of this?"
said the daughter to the astonished father. "Anything, my dear," said
the father, "rather than allow that we look upon what is supernatural."
A strict research established a natural cause for the appearance on the
window. It was the custom of an old woman, to whom the garden beneath
was rented, to go out at night to gather cabbages. The lantern she
carried in her hand threw up the refracted reflection of her form on the
chapel window. As she stooped to gather her cabbages the reflection
appeared to bend forward; and that was the whole matter.

Another species of deception, affecting the credit of such supernatural
communications, arises from the dexterity and skill of the authors who
have made it their business to present such stories in the shape most
likely to attract belief. Defoe--whose power in rendering credible that
which was in itself very much the reverse was so peculiarly
distinguished--has not failed to show his superiority in this species of
composition. A bookseller of his acquaintance had, in the trade phrase,
rather overprinted an edition of "Drelincourt on Death," and complained
to Defoe of the loss which was likely to ensue. The experienced
bookmaker, with the purpose of recommending the edition, advised his
friend to prefix the celebrated narrative of Mrs. Veal's ghost, which he
wrote for the occasion, with such an air of truth, that although in fact
it does not afford a single tittle of evidence properly so called, it
nevertheless was swallowed so eagerly by the people that Drelincourt's
work on death, which the supposed spirit recommended to the perusal of
her friend Mrs. Bargrave, instead of sleeping on the editor's shelf,
moved off by thousands at once; the story, incredible in itself, and
unsupported as it was by evidence or enquiry, was received as true,
merely from the cunning of the narrator, and the addition of a number of
adventitious circumstances, which no man alive could have conceived as
having occurred to the mind of a person composing a fiction.

It did not require the talents of Defoe, though in that species of
composition he must stand unrivalled, to fix the public attention on a
ghost story. John Dunton, a man of scribbling celebrity at the time,
succeeded to a great degree in imposing upon the public a tale which he
calls the Apparition Evidence. The beginning of it, at least (for it is
of great length), has something in it a little new. At Mynehead, in
Somersetshire, lived an ancient gentlewoman named Mrs. Leckie, whose
only son and daughter resided in family with her. The son traded to
Ireland, and was supposed to be worth eight or ten thousand pounds. They
had a child about five or six years old. This family was generally
respected in Mynehead; and especially Mrs. Leckie, the old lady, was so
pleasant in society, that her friends used to say to her, and to each
other, that it was a thousand pities such an excellent, good-humoured
gentlewoman must, from her age, be soon lost to her friends. To which
Mrs. Leckie often made the somewhat startling reply: "Forasmuch as you
now seem to like me, I am afraid you will but little care to see or
speak with me after my death, though I believe you may have that
satisfaction." Die, however, she did, and after her funeral was
repeatedly seen in her personal likeness, at home and abroad, by night
and by noonday.

One story is told of a doctor of physic walking into the fields, who in
his return met with this spectre, whom he at first accosted civilly, and
paid her the courtesy of handing her over a stile. Observing, however,
that she did not move her lips in speaking, or her eyes in looking
round, he became suspicious of the condition of his companion, and
showed some desire to be rid of her society. Offended at this, the hag
at next stile planted herself upon it, and obstructed his passage. He
got through at length with some difficulty, and not without a sound
kick, and an admonition to pay more attention to the next aged
gentlewoman whom he met. "But this," says John Dunton, "was a petty and
inconsiderable prank to what she played in her son's house and
elsewhere. She would at noonday appear upon the quay of Mynehead, and
cry, 'A boat, a boat, ho! a boat, a boat, ho!' If any boatmen or seamen
were in sight, and did not come, they were sure to be cast away; and if
they did come, 'twas all one, they were cast away. It was equally
dangerous to please and displease her. Her son had several ships sailing
between Ireland and England; no sooner did they make land, and come in
sight of England, but this ghost would appear in the same garb and
likeness as when she was alive, and, standing at the mainmast, would
blow with a whistle, and though it were never so great a calm, yet
immediately there would arise a most dreadful storm, that would break,
wreck, and drown the ship and goods; only the seamen would escape with
their lives--the devil had no permission from God to take them away. Yet
at this rate, by her frequent apparitions and disturbances, she had made
a poor merchant of her son, for his fair estate was all buried in the
sea, and he that was once worth thousands was reduced to a very poor and
low condition in the world; for whether the ship were his own or hired,
or he had but goods on board it to the value of twenty shillings, this
troublesome ghost would come as before, whistle in a calm at the
mainmast at noonday, when they had descried land, and then ship and
goods went all out of hand to wreck; insomuch that he could at last get
no ships wherein to stow his goods, nor any mariner to sail in them; for
knowing what an uncomfortable, fatal, and losing voyage they should make
of it, they did all decline his service. In her son's house she hath her
constant haunts by day and night; but whether he did not, or would not
own if he did, see her, he always professed he never saw her. Sometimes
when in bed with his wife, she would cry out, 'Husband, look, there's
your mother!' And when he would turn to the right side, then was she
gone to the left; and when to the left side of the bed, then was she
gone to the right; only one evening their only child, a girl of about
five or six years old, lying in a ruckle-bed under them, cries out, 'Oh,
help me, father! help me, mother! for grandmother will choke me!' and
before they could get to their child's assistance she had murdered it;
they finding the poor girl dead, her throat having been pinched by two
fingers, which stopped her breath and strangled her. This was the sorest
of all their afflictions; their estate is gone, and now their child is
gone also; you may guess at their grief and great sorrow. One morning
after the child's funeral, her husband being abroad, about eleven in the
forenoon, Mrs. Leckie the younger goes up into her chamber to dress her
head, and as she was looking into the glass she spies her mother-in-law,
the old beldam, looking over her shoulder. This cast her into a great
horror; but recollecting her affrighted spirits, and recovering the
exercise of her reason, faith, and hope, having cast up a short and
silent prayer to God, she turns about, and bespeaks her: 'In the name of
God, mother, why do you trouble me?' 'Peace,' says the spectrum; 'I will
do thee no hurt.' 'What will you have of me?' says the daughter,"
&c.[86] Dunton, the narrator and probably the contriver of the story,
proceeds to inform us at length of a commission which the wife of Mr.
Leckie receives from the ghost to deliver to Atherton, Bishop of
Waterford, a guilty and unfortunate man, who afterwards died by the
hands of the executioner; but that part of the subject is too
disagreeable and tedious to enter upon.

[Footnote 86: "Apparition Evidence."]

So deep was the impression made by the story on the inhabitants of
Mynehead, that it is said the tradition of Mrs. Leckie still remains in
that port, and that mariners belonging to it often, amid tempestuous
weather, conceive they hear the whistle-call of the implacable hag who
was the source of so much mischief to her own family. However, already
too desultory and too long, it would become intolerably tedious were I
to insist farther on the peculiar sort of genius by which stories of
this kind may be embodied and prolonged.

I may, however, add, that the charm of the tale depends much upon the
age of the person to whom it is addressed; and that the vivacity of
fancy which engages us in youth to pass over much that is absurd, in
order to enjoy some single trait of imagination, dies within us when we
obtain the age of manhood, and the sadder and graver regions which lie
beyond it. I am the more conscious of this, because I have been myself
at two periods of my life, distant from each other, engaged in scenes
favourable to that degree of superstitious awe which my countrymen
expressively call being _eerie_.

On the first of these occasions I was only ninteeen or twenty years old,
when I happened to pass a night in the magnificent old baronial castle
of Glammis, the hereditary seat of the Earls of Strathmore. The hoary
pile contains much in its appearance, and in the traditions connected
with it, impressive to the imagination. It was the scene of the murder
of a Scottish king of great antiquity; not indeed the gracious Duncan,
with whom the name naturally associates itself, but Malcolm the Second.
It contains also a curious monument of the peril of feudal times, being
a secret chamber, the entrance of which, by the law or custom of the
family, must only be known to three persons at once, viz., the Earl of
Strathmore, his heir apparent, and any third person whom they may take
into their confidence. The extreme antiquity of the building is vouched
by the immense thickness of the walls, and the wild and straggling
arrangement of the accommodation within doors. As the late Earl of
Strathmore seldom resided in that ancient mansion, it was, when I was
there, but half-furnished, and that with movables of great antiquity,
which, with the pieces of chivalric armour hanging upon the walls,
greatly contributed to the general effect of the whole. After a very
hospitable reception from the late Peter Proctor, Esq., then seneschal
of the castle, in Lord Strathmore's absence, I was conducted to my
apartment in a distant corner of the building. I must own, that as I
heard door after door shut, after my conductor had retired, I began to
consider myself too far from the living and somewhat too near the dead.
We had passed through what is called "The King's Room," a vaulted
apartment, garnished with stags' antlers and similar trophies of the
chase, and said by tradition to be the spot of Malcolm's murder, and I
had an idea of the vicinity of the castle chapel.

In spite of the truth of history, the whole night-scene in Macbeth's
castle rushed at once upon my mind, and struck my imagination more
forcibly than even when I have seen its terrors represented by the late
John Kemble and his inimitable sister. In a word, I experienced
sensations which, though not remarkable either for timidity or
superstition, did not fail to affect me to the point of being
disagreeable, while they were mingled at the same time with a strange
and indescribable kind of pleasure, the recollection of which affords me
gratification at this moment.

In the year 1814 accident placed me, then past middle life, in a
situation somewhat similar to that which I have described.

I had been on a pleasure voyage with some friends around the north coast
of Scotland, and in that course had arrived in the salt-water lake under
the castle of Dunvegan, whose turrets, situated upon a frowning rock,
rise immediately above the waves of the loch. As most of the party, and
I myself in particular, chanced to be well known to the Laird of
Macleod, we were welcomed to the castle with Highland hospitality, and
glad to find ourselves in polished society, after a cruise of some
duration. The most modern part of the castle was founded in the days of
James VI.; the more ancient is referred to a period "whose birth
tradition notes not." Until the present Macleod connected by a
drawbridge the site of the castle with the mainland of Skye, the access
must have been extremely difficult. Indeed, so much greater was the
regard paid to security than to convenience, that in former times the
only access to the mansion arose through a vaulted cavern in a rock, up
which a staircase ascended from the sea-shore, like the buildings we
read of in the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe.

Such a castle, in the extremity of the Highlands, was of course
furnished with many a tale of tradition, and many a superstitious
legend, to fill occasional intervals in the music and song, as proper to
the halls of Dunvegan as when Johnson commemorated them. We reviewed the
arms and ancient valuables of this distinguished family--saw the dirk
and broadsword of Rorie Mhor, and his horn, which would drench three
chiefs of these degenerate days. The solemn drinking-cup of the Kings of
Man must not be forgotten, nor the fairy banner given to Macleod by the
Queen of Fairies; that magic flag which has been victorious in two
pitched fields, and will still float in the third, the bloodiest and the
last, when the Elfin Sovereign shall, after the fight is ended, recall
her banner, and carry off the standard-bearer.

Amid such tales of ancient tradition I had from Macleod and his lady the
courteous offer of the haunted apartment of the castle, about which, as
a stranger, I might be supposed interested. Accordingly, I took
possession of it about the witching hour. Except perhaps some tapestry
hangings, and the extreme thickness of the walls, which argued great
antiquity, nothing could have been more comfortable than the interior of
the apartment; but if you looked from the windows the view was such as
to correspond with the highest tone of superstition. An autumnal blast,
sometimes driving mist before it, swept along the troubled billows of
the lake, which it occasionally concealed, and by fits disclosed. The
waves rushed in wild disorder on the shore, and covered with foam the
steep piles of rock, which, rising from the sea in forms something
resembling the human figure, have obtained the name of Macleod's
Maidens, and in such a night seemed no bad representatives of the
Norwegian goddesses called Choosers of the Slain, or Riders of the
Storm. There was something of the dignity of danger in the scene; for on
a platform beneath the windows lay an ancient battery of cannon, which
had sometimes been used against privateers even of late years. The
distant scene was a view of that part of the Quillan mountains which are
called, from their form, Macleod's Dining-Tables. The voice of an angry
cascade, termed the Nurse of Rorie Mhor, because that chief slept best
'in its vicinity, was heard from time to time mingling its notes with
those of wind and wave. Such was the haunted room at Dunvegan, and as
such it well deserved a less sleepy inhabitant. In the language of Dr.
Johnson, who has stamped his memory on this remote place, "I looked
around me, and wondered that I was not more affected; but the mind is
not at all times equally ready to be moved." In a word, it is necessary
to confess that, of all I heard or saw, the most engaging spectacle was
the comfortable bed, in which I hoped to make amends for some rough
nights on ship-board, and where I slept accordingly without thinking of
ghost or goblin till I was called by my servant in the morning.

From this I am taught to infer that tales of ghosts and demonology are
out of date at forty years and upwards; that it is only in the morning
of life that this feeling of superstition "comes o'er us like a summer
cloud," affecting us with fear which is solemn and awful rather than
painful; and I am tempted to think that, if I were to write on the
subject at all, it should have been during a period of life when I could
have treated it with more interesting vivacity, and might have been at
least amusing if I could not be instructive. Even the present fashion of
the world seems to be ill suited for studies of this fantastic nature;
and the most ordinary mechanic has learning sufficient to laugh at the
figments which in former times were believed by persons far advanced in
the deepest knowledge of the age.

I cannot, however, in conscience carry my opinion of my countrymen's
good sense so far as to exculpate them entirely from the charge of
credulity. Those who are disposed to look for them may, without much
trouble, see such manifest signs, both of superstition and the
disposition to believe in its doctrines, as may render it no useless
occupation to compare the follies of our fathers with our own. The
sailors have a proverb that every man in his lifetime must eat a peck of
impurity; and it seems yet more clear that every generation of the human
race must swallow a certain measure of nonsense. There remains hope,
however, that the grosser faults of our ancestors are now out of date;
and that whatever follies the present race may be guilty of, the sense
of humanity is too universally spread to permit them to think of
tormenting wretches till they confess what is impossible, and then
burning them for their pains.


THE END.


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