The Ghost World

Keppel, in his ‘Visit to the Indian Archipelago,’ says that in Northern Australia the natives will not willingly approach graves at night, alone, ‘but when they are obliged to pass them, they carry a firestick to keep off the spirit of darkness.’

There is still a belief that the ghost of the last person watches round the churchyard till another is buried, to whom he delivers his charge. Crofton Croker says that in Ireland it is the general opinion among the lower orders that ‘the last buried corpse has to perform an office like that of “fag” in our public schools by the junior boy, and that the attendance on his churchyard companions is duly relieved by the interment of some other person.’ Serious disturbances have resulted from this superstition, and terrific fights have at times taken place to decide which corpse should be buried first. The ancient churchyard of Truagh, county Monaghan, is said to be haunted by an evil spirit, whose appearance generally forebodes death. The legend runs, writes Lady Wilde,288 ‘that at funerals the spirit watches for the person who remains last in the graveyard. If it be a young man who is there alone, the spirit takes the form of a beautiful young girl, inspires him with an ardent passion, and exacts from him a promise that he will meet her that day month in the churchyard. The promise is then sealed by a kiss, which sends a fatal fire through his veins, so that he is unable to resist her caresses, and makes the promise required. Then she disappears, and the young man proceeds homewards; but no sooner has he passed the boundary wall of the churchyard than the whole story of the evil rushes on his mind, and he knows that he has sold himself, soul and body, for a demon’s kiss. Then terror and dismay take hold of him, till despair becomes insanity, and on the very day month fixed for the meeting with the demon bride, the victim dies the death of a raving lunatic, and is laid in the fatal graveyard of Truagh.’

The dead, too, particularly object to persons treading carelessly on their graves, an allusion to which occurs in one of the songs of Greek outlawry:289

All Saturday we held carouse, and far through Sunday night,And on the Monday morn we found our wine expended quite.To seek for more, without delay, the captain made me go;I ne’er had seen nor known the way, nor had a guide to show.And so through solitary roads and secret paths I sped,Which to a little ivied church long time deserted led.This church was full of tombs, and all by gallant men possest;One sepulchre stood all alone, apart from all the rest.I did not see it, and I trod above the dead man’s bones,And as from out the nether world came up a sound of groans.‘What ails thee, sepulchre? Why thus so deeply groan and sigh?Doth the earth press, or the black stone weigh on thee heavily?’‘Neither the earth doth press me down, nor black stone do me scath,But I with bitter grief am wrung, and full of shame and wrath,That thou dost trample on my head, and I am scorned in death.Perhaps I was not also young, nor brave and stout in fight,Nor wont, as thou, beneath the moon, to wander through the night.’

According to the Guiana Indians, ‘every place is haunted where any have died;’ and in Madagascar the ghosts of ancestors are said to hover about their tombs. The East Africans ‘appear to imagine the souls to be always near the place of sepulture,’ and on the Gold Coast ‘the spirit is supposed to remain near the spot where the body has been buried.’ The souls of warriors slain on the field of battle are considered by the Mangaians to wander for a while amongst the rocks and trees of the neighbourhood in which their bodies were thrown. At length ‘the first slain on each battlefield would collect his brothers’ ghosts, and lead them to the summit of a mountain, whence they leap into the blue expanse, thus becoming the peculiar clouds of the winter.’290 And the Mayas of Yucatan think the souls of the dead return to the earth if they choose, and, in order that they may not lose the way to the domestic hearth, they mark the path from the hut to the tomb with chalk.291

The primitive doctrine of souls obliges the savage, says Mr. Dorman,292 ‘to think of the spirit of the dead as close at hand. Most uncultured tribes, on this account, regard the spot where death has taken place as haunted. A superstitious fear soon instigates worship, and this worship, beginning at the tombs and burial-places, develops into the temple ritual of higher culture.’

The Iroquois believe the space between the earth and sky is full of spirits, usually invisible, but occasionally seen, and the Ojibways affirm that innumerable spirits are ever near, and dwell in all kinds of places. European folk-lore has similar beliefs, it having been a Scandinavian idea that the souls of the departed dwell in the interior of mountains, a phase of superstition which frequently presents itself in the Icelandic sagas, and exists in Germany at the present day. ‘Of some German mountains,’ writes Thorpe, ‘it is believed that they are the abodes of the damned. One of these is the Horselberg, near Eisenach, which is the habitation of Frau Holle; another is the fabulous Venusberg, in which the Tannhäuser sojourns, and before which the trusty Eckhart sits as a warning guardian.’293

Departed souls were also supposed to dwell in the bottom of wells and ponds, with which may be compared the many tales current throughout Germany and elsewhere of towns and castles that have been sunk in the water, and are at times visible. But, as few subjects have afforded greater scope for the imagination than the hereafter of the human soul, numerous myths and legendary stories have been invented to account for its mysterious departure in the hour of death. Shakespeare has alluded to the numerous destinations of the disembodied spirit, enumerating the many ideas prevalent, in his day, on the subject. In ‘Measure for Measure’ (Act iii. sc. 1) Claudio pathetically says:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;This sensible warm motion to becomeA kneaded clod, and the delighted spiritTo bathe in fiery floods, or to resideIn thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,And blown with restless violence round aboutThe pendent world.294

Indeed, it would be a long task to enter into the mass of mystic details respecting ‘the soul’s dread journey by caverns and rocky paths and weary plains, over steep and slippery mountains, by frail bank or giddy bridge, across gulfs or rushing rivers,’ to its destined home.

According to the Mazovians the soul remains with the coffin, sitting upon the upper part of it until the burial is over, when it flies away. Such traditions, writes Mr. Ralston,295 ‘vary in different localities, but everywhere, among all the Slavonic people, there seems always to have prevailed an idea that death does not finally sever the ties between the living and the dead. This idea has taken various forms, and settled into several widely differing superstitions, lurking in the secrecy of the cottage, and there keeping alive the cultus of the domestic spirit, and showing itself openly in the village church, where on a certain day it calls for a service in remembrance of the dead. The spirits of those who are thus remembered, say the peasants, attend the service, taking their place behind the altar. But those who are left unremembered weep bitterly all through the day.’

In some parts of Ireland, writes Mr. McAnally, ‘there exists a belief that the spirits of the dead are not taken from earth, nor do they lose all their former interest in earthly affairs, but enjoy the happiness of the saved, or suffer the punishment imposed for their sins in the neighbourhood of the scenes among which they lived while clothed in flesh and blood. At particular crises in the affairs of mortals these disenthralled spirits sometimes display joy and grief in such a manner as to attract the attention of living men and women. At weddings they are frequently unseen guests; at funerals they are always present; and sometimes, at both weddings and funerals, their presence is recognised by aerial voices, or mysterious music, known to be of unearthly origin. The spirits of the good wander with the living as guardian angels; but the spirits of the bad are restrained in their action, and compelled to do penance at, or near, the place where their crimes were committed. Some are chained at the bottom of lakes, others buried underground, others confined in mountain gorges, some hang on the sides of precipices, others are transfixed on the tree-tops, while others haunt the homes of their ancestors, all waiting till the penance has been endured and the hour of deliverance arrives.’

Harriet Martineau, speaking of the English lakes, says that Souter or Soutra Fell is the mountain on which ghosts appeared in myriads at intervals during ten years of the last century. ‘On the Midsummer Eve of the fearful 1745, twenty-six persons, expressly summoned by the family, saw all that had been seen before, and more. Carriages were now interspersed with the troops; and everybody knew that no carriages had been, or could be, on the summit of Souter Fell. The multitude was beyond imagination; for the troops filled a space of half a mile, and marched quickly till night hid them, still marching. There was nothing vaporous or indistinct about the appearance of these spectres. So real did they seem, that some of the people went up the next morning to look for the hoof-marks of the horses; and awful it was to them to find not one footprint on heather or grass.’ This spectral march was similar to that seen at Edge Hill, in Leicestershire, in 1707, and corresponds with the tradition of the tramp of armies over Helvellyn, on the eve of the battle of Marston Moor.

With such phantoms may be compared the mock suns, the various appearances of halos and wandering lights, and such a phenomenon as the ‘Spectre of the Brocken.’ Calmet relates a singular instance at Milan, where some two thousand persons saw, as they supposed, an angel hovering in the air: he cites Cardan as an eye-witness, who says that the populace were only undeceived when it was shown, by a sharp-sighted lawyer, to be a reflection from one of the statues of a neighbouring church, the image of which was caught on the surface of a cloud. The mirage, or water of the desert, owes its appearance to similar laws of refraction. Mountain districts, we know, abound in these illusions, and ‘the splendid enchantment presented in the Straits of Reggio by the Fata Morgana’ has attracted much notice. At such times, ‘minarets, temples, and palaces, have seemed to rise out of the distant waves;’ and spectral huntsmen, soldiers in battle array, and gay but mute cavalcades, have appeared under similar circumstances, pictured on the table of the clouds. It was thus, we are told, that the Duke of Brunswick and Mrs. Graham saw the image of their balloon distinctly exhibited on the face of a cumulous cloud, in 1836; and travellers on Mont Blanc have been startled by their own magnified shadows, floating among the giant peaks.296 It is difficult to say how many of the apparitions which have been supposed to haunt certain spots might be attributed to similar causes.

CHAPTER XXV

CHECKS AND SPELLS AGAINST GHOSTS

Amongst the qualities ascribed to the cock was the time-honoured belief that by its crow it dispelled all kinds of ghostly beings – a notion alluded to by the poet Prudentius, who flourished at the commencement of the fourth century. There is, also, a hymn said to have been composed by St. Ambrose, and formerly used in the Salisbury Missal, in which allusion is made to this superstition. In Blair’s ‘Grave’ the apparition vanishes at the crowing of the cock, and in ‘Hamlet,’ on the departure of the ghost, Bernardo says:

It was about to speak when the cock crew;

to which Horatio answers:

And then it started like a guilty thingUpon a fearful summons. I have heardThe cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throatAwake the god of day; and, at his warning,Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,The extravagant and erring spirit hiesTo his confine: and of the truth hereinThis present object made probation.

Whereupon Marcellus adds the well-known lines:

It faded on the crowing of the cock.Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes,Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,The bird of dawning singeth all night long;And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

Even the devil is powerless at the sound of cock-crow. An amusing story is told on the Continent of how a farmer’s wife tricked the devil by means of this spell. It appears that her husband was mourning the loss of his barn – either by wind or fire – when a stranger addressed him, and said: ‘That I can easily remedy. If you will just write your name in your blood on this parchment, your barn shall be fixed and ready to-morrow before the cock crows; if not, our contract is void.’ But afterwards the farmer repented of the bargain he had made, and, on consulting his wife, she ran out in the middle of the night, and found a number of workmen employed on the barn. Thereupon she cried with all her might, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo! cock-a-doodle-doo!’ and was followed by all the cocks in the neighbourhood, each of which sent forth a hearty ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ At the same moment all the phantom workmen disappeared, and the barn remained unfinished. In a pretty Swedish ballad of ‘Little Christina,’ a lover rises from the grave to console his beloved. One night Christina hears light fingers tapping at the door; she opens it and sees her betrothed. She washes his feet with pure wine, and for a long while they converse. Then the cocks begin to crow, and the dead get them underground. The young girl follows her sweetheart through the white forest, and when they reach the graveyard, the fair hair of the young man begins to disappear. ‘See, maiden,’ he says, ‘how the moon has reddened all at once; even so, in a moment, thy beloved will vanish.’ She sits down on the tomb, and says, ‘I shall remain here till the Lord calls me.’ Then she hears the voice of her betrothed, ‘Little Christina, go back to thy dwelling-place. Every time a tear falls from thine eyes my shroud is full of blood. Every time thy heart is gay, my shroud is full of rose-leaves.’ These folk-tales are interesting, as embodying the superstitions of the people among whom they are current.

A similar idea prevails in India, where the cock is with the Hindoos, as with the English peasant, a most potent instrument in the subjugation of troublesome spirits. A paragraph in the ‘Carnatic Times’ tells us how a Hindoo exorcist tied his patient’s hair in a knot, and then with a nail attached it to a tree. Muttering some ‘incantatory’ lines, he seized a live cock, and holding it over the girl’s head with one hand, he, with the other, cut its throat. The blood-stained knot of hair was left attached to the tree, which was supposed to detain the demon. It is further supposed that ‘one or a legion thus exorcised will haunt that tree till he or they shall choose to take possession of some other unfortunate.’

It was said that chastity was of itself a safeguard against the malignant power of bad ghosts; a notion to which Milton has referred:

Some say no evil thing that walks by night,In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen,Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost,That breaks the magic chains at curfew-time,No goblin, or swart faery of the mine,Hath hurtful power o’er true virginity.

The cross and holy water have, too, generally been considered sacred preservatives against devils and spirits, illustrations of which will be found in many of our old romances.297

Fire, like water,298 has been employed for the purpose of excluding or barring the ghost, and Mr. Frazer writes how ‘the Siberians seek to get rid of the ghost of the departed by leaping over a fire. At Rome, mourners returning from a funeral stepped over fire,’ a practice which still exists in China. A survival of this custom prevails among the south Slavonians, who, on their return from a funeral, are met by an old woman carrying a vessel of live coals. On these they pour water, or else they take a live coal from the hearth and fling it over their heads. The Brahmans simply touched fire, while in Ruthenia ‘the mourners merely look steadfastly at the stove or place their hands on it.’299 It is noteworthy that in the Highlands of Scotland and in Burma, the house-fires were always extinguished when a death happened; for fear, no doubt, of the ghost being accidentally burnt.

The Eskimos drive away spirits by blowing their breath at them,300 and the Mayas of Yucatan had evil spirits which could be driven away by the sorcerers; but they never came near when their fetiches were exposed. They had a ceremony for expelling evil spirits from houses about to be occupied by newly married persons.301 The natives of Brazil so much dread the ghosts of the dead that it is recorded how some of them have been struck with sudden death because of an imaginary apparition of them. They try to appease them by fastening offerings on stakes fixed in the ground for that purpose.302

Mutilations of the dead were supposed to keep his ghost harmless, and on this account Greek murderers hacked off the extremities of their victims. Australians cut off the right thumb of a slain enemy that his ghost might not be able to draw the bow. And in Arabia, Germany, and Spain, as the ghosts of murderers and their victims are especially restless, everyone who passes their graves is bound to add a stone to the pile.303

In Pekin, six or seven feet away from the front of the doors, small brick walls are built up. These are to keep the spirits out, which fly only in straight lines, and therefore find a baulk in their way. Another mode of keeping spirits away in the case of children is to attire them as priests, and also to dress the boys as girls, who are supposed to be the less susceptible to the evil influence. In fact, most countries have their contrivances for counteracting, in one way or another, the influence of departed spirits – a piece of superstition of which European folk-lore affords abundant illustrations.

Thus, in Norway, bullets, gunpowder, and weapons have no influence on ghosts, but at the sight of a cross, and from exorcisms, they must retire. The same belief prevails in Denmark, where all kinds of checks to ghostly influence are resorted to. It is said, for instance, to be dangerous to shoot at a spectre, as the bullet will return on him who shot it. But if the piece be loaded with a silver button, that will infallibly take effect. A Danish tradition tells how once there was a horrible spectre which caused great fear and disquietude, as everyone who saw it died immediately afterwards. In this predicament, a young fellow offered to encounter the apparition, and to endeavour to drive it away. For this purpose he went at midnight to the church path, through which the spectre was in the habit of passing, having previously provided himself with steel in various shapes. When the apparition approached, he fearlessly threw steel before its feet, so that it was obliged instantly to turn back, and it appeared no more.304 A common superstition, equally popular in England as on the Continent, is that when a horseshoe is nailed over the doorway no spirit can enter. It is also said that ‘if anyone is afraid of spectres, let him strew flax seed before the door; then no spirit can cross the threshold. A preventive equally efficacious is to place one’s slippers by the bedside with the heels towards the bed. Spectres may be driven away by smoking the room with the snuff of a tallow candle; while wax-lights attract them.’ And at the present day various devices are adopted by our English peasantry for warding off from their dwellings ghosts, and other uncanny intruders.305

CHAPTER XXVI

WRAITH-SEEING

Closely allied to ‘second sight’ is the doctrine of ‘wraiths’ or ‘fetches,’ sometimes designated ‘doubles’ – an apparition exactly like a living person, its appearance, whether to that person or to another, being considered an omen of death. The ‘Fetch’ is a well-known superstition in Ireland, and is supposed to be a mere shadow, ‘resembling in stature, features, and dress, a living person, and often mysteriously or suddenly seen by a very particular friend.’ Spiritlike, it flits before the sight, seeming to walk leisurely through the fields, often disappearing through a gap or lane. The person it resembles is usually known at the time to be labouring under some mortal illness, and unable to leave his or her bed. When the ‘fetch’ appears agitated, or eccentric in its motions, a violent or painful death is indicated for the doomed prototype. Such a phantom, too, is said to make its appearance at the same time, and in the same place, to more than one person.306 Should it be seen in the morning, a happy longevity for the original is confidently expected; but if it be seen in the evening, immediate dissolution of the living prototype is anticipated. It is thought, too, that individuals may behold their own ‘fetches.’ Queen Elizabeth is said to have been warned of her death by the apparition of her own double, and Miss Strickland thus describes her last illness: ‘As her mortal illness drew towards a close, the superstitious fears of her simple ladies were excited almost to mania, even to conjuring up a spectral apparition of the Queen while she was yet alive. Lady Guilford, who was then in waiting on the Queen, leaving her in an almost breathless sleep in her privy chamber, went out to take a little air, and met her Majesty, as she thought, three or four chambers off. Alarmed at the thought of being discovered in the act of leaving the royal patient alone, she hurried forward in some trepidation in order to excuse herself, when the apparition vanished away. She returned terrified to the chamber, but there lay the Queen in the same lethargic slumber in which she left her.’

Shelley, shortly before his death, believed he had seen his wraith. ‘On June 23,’ says one of his biographers, ‘he was heard screaming at midnight in the saloon. The Williamses ran in and found him staring on vacancy. He had had a vision of a cloaked figure which came to his bedside and beckoned him to follow. He did so, and when they had reached the sitting-room, the figure lifted the hood of his cloak and disclosed Shelley’s own features, and saying “Siete soddisfatto?” vanished. This vision is accounted for on the ground that Shelley had been reading a drama attributed to Calderon, named ‘El Embozado, ó el Encapotado,’ in which a mysterious personage who had been haunting and thwarting the hero all his life, and is at last about to give him satisfaction in a duel, unmasks and proves to be the hero’s own wraith. He also asks, “Art thou satisfied?” and the haunted man dies of horror.’ Sir Robert Napier is supposed to have seen his double, and Aubrey quaintly relates how ‘the beautiful Lady Diana Rich, daughter to the Earl of Holland, as she was walking in her father’s garden at Kensington to take the air before dinner, about 11 o’clock, being then very well, met her own apparition, habit and everything, as in a looking-glass. About a month after, she died of small-pox. And it is said that her sister, the Lady Isabella Thynne, saw the like of herself also before she died. This account I had from a person of honour. A third sister, Mary, was married to the Earl of Breadalbane, and it has been recorded that she also, not long after her marriage, had some such warning of her approaching dissolution.’

The Irish novelist, John Banim, has written both a novel and a ballad on this subject, one which has also largely entered into many a tradition and folk-tale.307 In Cumberland this apparition is known by the peasantry as a ‘swarth,’ and in Yorkshire by the name of a ‘waff.’ The gift of wraith-seeing still flourishes on the Continent, and examples abound in Silesia and the Tyrol.

‘With regard to bilocation, or double personality,’ writes a Catholic priest,308 ‘there is a great deal of very interesting matter in St. Thomas of Aquin, and also in Cardinal Cajetan’s “Commentaries of St. Thomas.” The substance of the principles is this: Bilocation, properly so called, is defined by the scholastics as the perfect and simultaneous existence of one and the same individual in two distinct places at the same time. This never does and never can happen. But bilocation, improperly so called, and which St. Thomas terms raptus, does occur, and is identical with the double, as you call it, in the cases of St. Gennadius, St. Ignatius, &c.