The Ghost World

In Fiji the soul is regarded quite as a material object, subject to the same laws as the living body, and having to struggle hard to gain the paradisaical Bolotu. Some idea, too, of the hardships it has to undergo in its material state may be gathered from the following passage in Dr. Letourneau’s ‘Sociology’ (p. 251): ‘After death the soul of the Fijian goes first of all to the eastern extremity of Vanna Levou, and during this voyage it is most important that it should hold in its hand the soul of the tooth of a spermaceti whale, for this tooth ought to grow into a tree, and the soul of the poor human creature climbs up to the top of this tree. When it is perched up there it is obliged to await the arrival of the souls of his wives, who have been religiously strangled to serve as escort to their master. Unless all these and many other precautions are taken, the soul of the deceased Fijian remains mournfully seated upon the fatal bough until the arrival of the good Ravuyalo, who kills him once and for all, and leaves him without means of escape.’

According to another popular and widely accepted doctrine, the soul was supposed to be composed of a peculiar subtle substance, a kind of vaporous materiality. The Choctaws have their ghosts or wandering spirits which can speak and are visible, but not tangible.35 The Tongans conceived it as the aeriform part of the body, related to it as the perfume and essence of a flower; and the Greenlanders speak of it as pale and soft, without flesh and bone, so that he who tries to grasp it feels nothing he can take hold of. The Siamese describe the soul as consisting of some strange matter, invisible and untouchable. While Dr. Tylor quotes a curious passage from Hampole,36 in which the soul, owing to the thinness of its substance, suffers all the more intense suffering in purgatory:

The soul is more tendre and nesche (soft)Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde,Than eni bodi that evere on live was.

Then there is the idea of the soul as a shadow, a form of superstition which has given rise to many quaint beliefs among uncultured tribes. The Basutos, when walking by a river, take care not to let their shadow fall on the water, lest a crocodile seize it, and draw the owner in. The Zulu affirms that at death the shadow of a man in some mysterious way leaves the body, and hence, it is said, a corpse cannot cast a shadow. Certain African tribes consider that ‘as he dies, man leaves a shadow behind him, but only for a short time. The shade, or the mind, of the deceased remains, they think, close to the grave where the corpse has been buried. This shadow is generally evil-minded, and they often fly away from it in changing their place of abode.’37 The Ojibways tell how one of their chiefs died,38 but while they were watching the body on the third night, his shadow came back into it. He sat up, and told them how he had travelled to the River of Death, but was stopped there, and sent back to his people.

Speaking of the human shadow in relation to foundation sacrifices, we are reminded39 how, according to many ancient Roumenian legends, ‘every new church or otherwise important building became a human grave, as it was thought indispensable to its stability to wall in a living man or woman, whose spirit henceforward haunts the place. In later times this custom underwent some modifications, and it became usual, in place of a living man, to wall in his shadow. This is done by measuring the shadow of a person with a long piece of cord, or a ribbon made of strips of reed, and interring this measure instead of the person himself, who, unconscious victim of the spell thrown upon him, will pine away and die within forty days. It is an indispensable condition to the success of this proceeding that the chosen victim be ignorant of the part he is playing, therefore careless passers by near a building may often hear the cry, warning, “Beware, lest they take thy shadow!” So deeply engrained is this superstition, that not long ago there were professional shadow-traders, who made it their business to provide architects with the necessary victims for securing their walls.’ ‘Of course, the man whose shadow is thus interred must die,’ argues the Roumenian, ‘but as he is unaware of his doom, he does not feel any pain or anxiety, and so it is less cruel than walling in a living man.’

At the present day in Russia, as elsewhere, a shadow is a common metaphor for the soul,40 whence it arises that there are persons there who object to having their silhouettes taken, fearing that if they do, they will die before the year is out. In the same way, a man’s reflected image is supposed to be in communion with his inner self, and, therefore, children are often forbidden to look at themselves in a glass, lest their sleep should be disturbed at night. It may be added, too, as Mr. Clodd points out, that in the barbaric belief of the loss of the shadow being baleful, ‘we have the germ of the mediæval legends of shadowless men, and of tales of which Chamisso’s “Story of Peter Schlemihl” is a type.’41 Hence the dead in purgatory recognised that Dante was alive when they saw that, unlike theirs, his figure cast a shadow on the ground. But, as Mr. Fiske observes,42 ‘the theory which identifies the soul with the shadow, and supposes the shadow to depart with the sickness and death of the body, would seem liable to be attended with some difficulties in the way of verification, even to the dim intelligence of the savage.’

Again, another doctrine promulgated under various forms in Animistic philosophy is, that the existence and condition of the soul depend upon the manner of death. The Australian, for instance, not content with slaying his enemy, cuts off the right thumb of the corpse, so that the departed soul may be incapacitated from throwing a spear; and even the half-civilised Chinese prefer the punishment of crucifixion to that of decapitation, that their souls may not wander headless about the spirit world. Similarly the Indians of Brazil ‘believe that the dead arrive in the other world wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact, just as they left this.’ European folk-lore has preserved, more or less, the same idea, and the ghost of the murdered person often appears displaying the wounds which were the cause of the death of the body. Many a weird and ghastly ghost tale still current in different parts of the country gives the most blood-curdling details of such apparitions; and although, in certain cases, a century or so is said to have elapsed since they first made their appearance, they still bear the marks of violence and cruelty which were done to them by a murderous hand when in the flesh. An old story tells how, when the Earl of Cornwall met the fetch of William Rufus carried on a very large black goat, all black and naked, across the Bodmin moors, he saw that it was wounded through the breast. Robert adjured the goat, in the name of the Holy Trinity, to tell what it was he carried so strangely. He answered, ‘I am carrying your king to judgment; yea, that tyrant, William Rufus, for I am an evil spirit, and the revenger of his malice which he bore to the Church of God. It was I that did cause this slaughter.’ Having spoken, the spectre vanished. Soon afterwards Robert heard that at that very hour the king had been slain in the New Forest by the arrow of William Tirell.43 This idea corresponds with what was believed in early times, for Ovid44 tells us how

Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto.

Again, some modes of death are supposed to kill not only the body but also the soul. ‘Among all primitive peoples,’ writes Mr. Dorman,45 ‘where a belief in the renewal of life, or the resurrection, exists, the peace and happiness of the spirit, which remains in or about the body, depend upon success in preventing the body, or any part of it, from being devoured or destroyed in any manner.’ The New Zealanders believed that the man who was eaten was annihilated, both body and soul; and one day a bushman, who was a magician, having put to death a woman, dashed the head of the corpse to pieces with large stones, buried her, and made a large fire over the grave, for fear, as he explained, lest she should rise again and trouble him. The same idea, remarks Sir John Lubbock,46 evidently influenced the Californian, who did not dispute the immortality of the whites, who buried their dead, but could not believe the same of his own people, because they were in the habit of burning them, maintaining that when they were burnt they became annihilated.

It may be added, too, that the belief underlying the burial customs of most American tribes was to preserve the bones of the dead, the opinion being that the soul, or a part of it, dwelt in the bones. These, indeed, were the seeds which, planted in the earth, or preserved unbroken in safe places, would in time put on once again a garb of flesh, and germinate into living human beings.47 This Animistic belief has been amply illustrated by mythology and superstition. In an Aztec legend, after one of the destructions of the world, Zoloti descended to the realm of the dead, and brought thence a bone of the perished race. This, sprinkled with blood, grew on the fourth day into a youth, the father of the present race. The practice of pulverising the bones of the dead, practised by some tribes, and of mixing them with the food, was defended by asserting that the souls of the dead remained in the bones, and lived again in the living.48 The Peruvians were so careful lest any of the body should be lost, that they preserved even the parings of the nails and clippings of the hair – expecting the mummified body to be inhabited by its soul; while the Choctaws maintain that the spirits of the dead will return to the bones in the bone mounds, and flesh will knit together their loose joints. Even the lower animals were supposed to follow the same law. ‘Hardly any of the American hunting-tribes,’ writes Mr. Brinton, ‘before their original manners were vitiated by foreign influence, permitted the bones of game slain in the chase to be broken, or left carelessly about the encampment; they were collected in heaps, or thrown into the water.’ The Yuricares of Bolivia carried this belief to such an inconvenient extent that they carefully put by even small fish bones, saying that unless this was done the fish and game would disappear from the country. The traveller on the western prairies often notices the buffalo skulls, countless numbers of which bleach on those vast plains, arranged in circles and symmetrical piles by the careful hands of the native hunters. The explanation for this practice is that these osseous relics of the dead ‘contain the spirits of the slain animals, and that some time in the future they will rise from the earth, re-clothe themselves with flesh, and stock the prairies anew.’

As a curious illustration of how every spiritual conception was materialised in olden times, may be quoted the fanciful conception of the weight of the soul. Thus in mediæval literature the angel in the Last Judgment ‘was constantly represented weighing the souls in a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavoured to disturb the equilibrium.’49 But how seriously such tests of the weight of the soul have been received, may be gathered from the cases now and then forthcoming of this materialistic notion of its nature. These, writes Dr. Tylor,50 range from the ‘conception of a Basuto diviner that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and he never felt such a weight in his wife, to Glanvil’s story of David Hunter, the neatherd, who lifted up the old woman’s ghost, and she felt just like a bag of feathers in his arms; or the pathetic superstition that the dead mother’s coming back in the night to suckle the baby she has left on earth, may be known by the hollow pressed down in the bed where she lay, and at last down to the alleged modern spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from three to four ounces.’ But the heavy tread which occasionally makes the stairs creak and boards resound has been instanced as showing that, whatever may be the real nature of the soul, it is capable of materialising itself at certain times, and of displaying an amount of force and energy in no way dissimilar to that which is possessed when living in the flesh.

Just, too, as souls are possessed of visible forms, so they are generally supposed to have voices. According to Dr. Tylor,51 ‘men who perceive evidently that souls do talk when they present themselves in dream or vision, naturally take for granted at once the objective reality of the ghostly voice, and of the ghostly form from which it proceeds;’ and this principle, he adds, ‘is involved in the series of narratives of spiritual communications with living men, from savagery onward to civilisation.’ European folk-lore represents ghostly voices as resembling their material form during life, although less audible. With savage races the spirit voice is described ‘as a low murmur, chirp, or whistle.’ Thus, when the ghosts of the New Zealanders address the living, they speak in whistling tones. The sorcerer among the Zulus ‘hears the spirits who speak by whistlings speaking to him.’ Whistling is the language of the Caledonians, and the Algonquin Indians of North America ‘could hear the shadow souls of the dead chirp like crickets.’ As far back as the time of Homer, the ghosts make a similar sound, ‘and even as bats flit gibbering in the secret place of a wonderful cavern, even so the souls gibbered as they fared together.’52

Ghosts, when they make their appearance, are generally supposed, as already noticed, to have a perfect resemblance, in every respect, to the deceased person. Their faces appear the same – except that they are usually paler than when alive – and the ordinary expression is described by writers on the subject as ‘more in sorrow than in anger.’ Thus, when the ghost of Banquo rises and takes a seat at the table, Macbeth says to the apparition —

Never shakeThy gory locks at me.

And Horatio tells Marcellus how the ghost of Hamlet’s father was not only fully armed, but —

So frown’d he once, when in angry parle,He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.

The folk-lore stories from most parts of the world coincide in this idea. It was recorded of the Indians of Brazil by one of the early European visitors that ‘they believe that the dead arrive in the other world, wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact, just as they left this;’53 a statement which reminds us of a ghost described by Mrs. Crowe,54 who, on appearing after death, was seen to have the very small-pox marks which had disfigured its countenance when in the flesh.

As in life, so in death, it would seem that there are different classes of ghosts – the princely, the aristocratic, the genteel, and the common. The vulgar class, it is said, delight to haunt ‘in graveyards, dreary lanes, ruins, and all sorts of dirty dark holes and corners.’ An amusing anecdote illustrative of this belief was related by the daughter of ‘the celebrated Mrs. S.’ [Siddons?] who told Mrs. Crowe that when her parents were travelling in Wales they stayed some days at Oswestry, and lodged in a house which was in a very dirty and neglected state, yet all night long the noise of scrubbing and moving furniture made it impossible to sleep. The servants did little or no work, for they had to sit up with their mistress to allay her fears. The neighbours said that this person had killed an old servant, hence the disturbance and her terror. Mr. and Mrs. S – coming in suddenly one day, heard her cry out, ‘Are you there again? Fiend! go away!’ But numerous tales similar to the above are still current in different parts of the country; and from time to time are duly chronicled in the local press.

CHAPTER IV

THE UNBURIED DEAD

The Greeks believed that such as had not received funeral rites would be excluded from Elysium. The younger Pliny tells the tale of a haunted house at Athens, in which a ghost played all kinds of pranks owing to the funeral rites having been neglected. It is still a deep-rooted belief that when the mortal remains of the soul have not been honoured with proper burial, it will walk. The ghosts of unburied persons not possessing the obolus or fee due to Charon, the ferryman of Styx, and Acheron, were unable to obtain a lodging or place of rest. Hence they were compelled to wander about the banks of the river for a hundred years, when the portitor, or ‘ferryman of hell,’ passed them over in formâ pauperis. The famous tragedy of ‘Antigone’ by Sophocles owes much of its interest to this popular belief on the subject. In most countries all kinds of strange tales are told of ghosts ceaselessly wandering about the earth, owing to their bodies, for some reason or another, having been left unburied.

There is a well known German ghost, the Bleeding Nun. This was a nun who, after committing many crimes and debaucheries, was assassinated by one of her paramours and denied the rites of burial. After this, she used to haunt the castle where she was murdered, with her bleeding wounds. On one occasion, a young lady of the castle, willing to elope with her lover, in order to make her flight easier, personated the bleeding nun. Unfortunately the lover, whilst expecting his lady under this disguise, eloped with the spectre herself, who presented herself to him and haunted him afterwards.55

Comparative folk-lore, too, shows how very widely diffused is this notion. It is believed by the Iroquois of North America, that unless the rites of burial are performed, the spirits of the dead hover for a time upon the earth in great unhappiness. On this account every care is taken to procure the bodies of those slain in battle. Certain Brazilian tribes suppose that the spirits of the dead have no rest till burial, and among the Ottawas, a great famine was thought to have been produced on account of the failure of some of their tribesmen to perform the proper burial rites. After having repaired their fault they were blessed with abundance of provisions. The Australians went so far as to say that the spirits of the unburied dead became dangerous and malignant demons. Similarly, the Siamese dread, as likely to do them some harm, the ghosts of those who have not been buried with proper rites, and the Karens have much the same notion. According to the Polynesians, the spirit of a dead man could not reach the sojourn of his ancestors, and of the gods, unless the sacred funereal rites were performed over his body. If he was buried with no ceremony, or simply thrown into the sea, the spirit always remained in the body.56

Under one form or another, the same belief may be traced in most parts of the world, and, as Dr. Tylor points out,57 ‘in mediæval Europe the classic stories of ghosts that haunt the living till laid by rites of burial pass here and there into new legends where, under a changed dispensation, the doleful wanderer now asks Christian burial in consecrated earth.’ Shakespeare alludes to this old idea, and in ‘Titus Andronicus’ (i. 2) Lucius, speaking of the unburied sons of Titus, says:

Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths,That we may hew his limbs, and on a pileAd manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh,Before this earthly prison of their bones;That so the shadows be not unappeas’d,Nor we disturb’d with prodigies on earth.

Hence the appearance of a spirit, in times past, was often regarded as an indication that some foul deed had been done, on which account Horatio in ‘Hamlet’ (i. 1) says to the ghost:

If there be any good thing to be doneThat may to thee do ease, and grace to me,Speak to me.

In the narrative of the sufferings of Byron and the crew of H.M. ship ‘Wager,’ on the coast of South America, we find a good illustration of the superstitious dread attaching to an unburied corpse. ‘The reader will remember the shameful rioting, mutiny, and recklessness which disgraced the crew of the “Wager,” nor will he forget the approach to cannibalism and murder on one occasion. These men had just returned from a tempestuous navigation, in which their hopes of escape had been crushed, and now what thoughts disturbed their rest – what serious consultations were they which engaged the attention of these sea-beaten men? Long before Cheap’s Bay had been left, the body of a man had been found on a hill named “Mount Misery.” He was supposed to have been murdered by some of the first gang who left the island. The body had never been buried, and to such neglect did the men now ascribe the storms which had lately afflicted them; nor would they rest until the remains of their comrade were placed beneath the earth, when each evidently felt as if some dreadful spell had been removed from his spirit.’ Stories of this kind are common everywhere, and are interesting as showing how widely scattered is this piece of superstition.

In Sweden the ravens, which scream by midnight in forest swamps and wild moors, are held to be the ghosts of murdered men, whose bodies have been hidden in those spots by their undetected murderers, and not had Christian burial.58 In many a Danish legend the spirit of a strand varsler, or coast-guard, appears, walking his beat as when alive. Such ghosts were not always friendly, and it was formerly considered dangerous to pass along ‘such unconsecrated beaches, believed to be haunted by the spectres of unburied corpses of drowned people.’59

The reason, it is asserted, why many of our old castles and country seats have their traditional ghost, is owing to some unfortunate person having been secretly murdered in days past, and to his or her body having been allowed to remain without the rites of burial. So long as such a crime is unavenged, and the bones continue unburied, it is impossible, we are told, for the outraged spirit to keep quiet. Numerous ghost stories are still circulated throughout the country of spirits wandering on this account, some of which, however, are based purely on legendary romance.

But when the unburied body could not be found, and the ghost wandered, the missing man was buried in effigy, for, as it has been observed, ‘according to all the laws of primitive logic, an effigy is every bit as good as its original. Therefore, when a dead man is buried in effigy, with all due formality, that man is dead and buried beyond a doubt, and his ghost is as harmless as it is in the nature of ghosts to be.’ But sometimes such burial by proxy was premature, for the man was not really dead; and if he declined to consider himself as such, the question arose, was he alive, or was he dead? The solution adopted was that he might be born again and take a new lease of life. ‘And so it was, he was put out to nurse, he was dressed in long clothes – in short, he went through all the stages of a second childhood. But before this pleasing experience could take place, he had to overcome the initial difficulty of entering his own house, for the door was ghost-proof. There was no other way but by the chimney, and down the chimney he came.’ We may laugh at such credulity, but many of the ghost-beliefs of the present day are not less absurd.

CHAPTER V

WHY GHOSTS WANDER

A variety of causes have been supposed to prevent the dead resting in the grave, for persons ‘dying with something on their mind,’ to use the popular phrase, cannot enjoy the peace of the grave; oftentimes some trivial anxiety, or some frustrated communication, preventing the uneasy spirit flinging off the bonds that bind it to earth. Wickedness in their lifetime has been commonly thought to cause the souls of the impenitent to revisit the scenes where their evil deeds were done. It has long been a widespread idea that as such ghosts are too bad for a place in either world, they are, therefore, compelled to wander on the face of the earth homeless and forlorn. We have shown in another chapter how, according to a well-known superstition, the ignes fatui, which appear by night in swampy places, are the souls of the dead – men who during life were guilty of fraudulent and other wicked acts. Thus a popular belief reminds us60 how, when an unjust relative has secreted the title-deeds in order to get possession of the estate himself, he finds no rest in the other world till the title-deeds are given back, and the estate is restored to the rightful heir. Come must the spirit of such an unrighteous man to the room where he concealed the title-deeds surreptitiously removed from the custody of the person to whose charge they were entrusted. ‘A dishonest milkwoman at Shrewsbury is condemned,’ writes Miss Jackson in her ‘Shropshire Folk-lore’61 (p. 120), ‘to wander up and down “Lady Studley’s Diche” in the Raven Meadow – now the Smithfield – constantly repeating: