The Ghost World

Mrs. Murray, a lady born and brought up in the borders, writes Mr. Henderson,85 tells me of ‘a cauld lad,’ of whom she heard in her childhood during a visit to Gilsland, in Cumberland. He perished from cold, at the behest of some cruel uncle or stepdame, and ever after his ghost haunted the family, coming shivering to their bedsides before anyone was stricken by illness, his teeth audibly chattering; and if it were to be fatal, he laid his icy hand upon the part which would be the seat of the disease, saying:

Cauld, cauld, aye cauld!An’ ye see he cauld for evermair.

St. Donart’s Castle, on the southern coast of Glamorganshire, has its favourite ghost, that of Lady Stradling, who is said to have been murdered by one of her family. ‘It appears,’ writes the late Mr. Wirt Sikes,86 ‘when any mishap is about to befall a member of the house of Stradling, the direct line, however, of which is extinct. She wears high-heeled shoes, and a long trailing gown of the finest silk.’ While she wanders, the castle hounds refuse to rest, but with their howling raise all the dogs in the neighbourhood. The Little Shelsey people long preserved a tradition that the court-house in that parish was haunted by the spirit of a Lady Lightfoot, who was said to have been imprisoned and murdered;87 and Cumnor Hall has acquired a romantic interest from the poetic glamour flung over it by Mickle in his ballad of Cumnor Hall, and by Sir Walter Scott in his ‘Kenilworth.’ Both refer to it as the scene of Amy Robsart’s murder, and although the jury agreed to accept her death as accidental, the country folk would not forego their idea that it was the result of foul play. Ever since the fatal event it was asserted that ‘Madam Dudley’s ghost did use to walk in Cumnor Park, and that it walked so obstinately, that it took no less than nine parsons from Oxford to lay her.’ According to Mickle —

The village maids, with fearful glance,Avoid the ancient moss-grown wall;Nor ever lead the merry danceAmong the groves of Cumnor Hall.

About half a mile to the east of Maxton, a small rivulet runs across the old turnpike road, at a spot called Bow-brig-syke. Near this bridge is a triangular field, in which for nearly a century it was averred that the forms of two ladies, dressed in white, might be seen pacing up and down, walking over precisely the same spot of ground till morning light. But one day, while some workmen were repairing the road, they took up the large flagstones upon which foot-passengers crossed the burn, and found beneath them the skeletons of two women lying side by side. After this discovery the Bow-brig ladies, as they were called, were never again seen to walk in the three-corner field. The story goes that these two ladies were sisters to a former laird of Littledean, who is said to have killed them in a fit of passion, because they interfered to protect from ill-usage a young lady whom he had met at Bow-brig-syke. Some years later he met with his own death near the same fatal spot.88

Mr. Sullivan, in his ‘Cumberland and Westmoreland,’ relates how, some years ago, a spectre appeared to a man who lived at Henhow Cottage, Martindale. Starting for his work at an early hour one morning, he had not gone two hundred yards from his house when his dog gave signs of alarm, and, on looking round, he saw a woman carrying a child in her arms. On being questioned as to what was troubling her, the ghost replied that she had been seduced, and that her seducer, to conceal his guilt and her frailty, had given her medicine, the effect of which was to kill both mother and child. Her doom was to wander for a hundred years, forty of which had expired. The occurrence is believed to have made a lasting impression on the old man, who, says Sullivan, ‘was until lately a shepherd on the fells. There can be no moral doubt that he both saw and spoke with the apparition; but what share his imagination had therein, or how it had been excited, are mysteries, and so they are likely to remain.’ But as Grose remarks, ghosts do not go about their business like living beings. In cases of murder, ‘a ghost, instead of going to the next justice of the peace and laying its information, or to the nearest relation of the person murdered, it appears to some poor labourer who knows none of the parties, draws the curtains of some decrepit nurse or alms-woman, or hovers about the place where his body is deposited.’ The same circuitous mode, he adds, ‘is pursued with respect to redressing injured orphans or widows, when it seems as if the shorter and more certain would be to go to the person guilty of the injustice, and haunt him continually till he be terrified into a restitution.’

From early days the phantoms of the murdered have occasionally appeared to the living, and made known the guilty person or persons who committed the deed. Thus Cicero relates how ‘two Arcadians came to Megara together; one lodged at a friend’s house, the other at an inn. During the night, the latter appeared to his fellow-traveller, imploring his help, as the innkeeper was plotting his death; the sleeper sprang up in alarm, but thinking the vision of no importance, he went to sleep again. A second time his companion appeared to him, to entreat that, though he had failed to help, he would at least avenge, for the innkeeper had killed him, and hidden his body in a dung-cart, wherefore he charged his fellow-traveller to be early next morning at the city gate before the cart passed out. The traveller went as bidden, and there found the cart; the body of the murdered man was in it, and the innkeeper was brought to justice.’89

Of the many curious cases recorded of a murder being discovered through the ghost of the murdered person, may be quoted one told in Aubrey’s ‘Miscellanies.’ It appears that on Monday, April 14, 1690, William Barwick was walking with his wife close to Cawood Castle, when, from motives not divulged at the trial, he determined to murder her, and finding a pond conveniently at hand, threw her in. But on the following Tuesday, as his brother-in-law, Thomas Lofthouse, ‘about half an hour after twelve of the clock in the daytime, was watering quickwood, as he was going for the second pail, there appeared walking before him an apparition in the shape of a woman, “her visage being like his wife’s sister’s.” Soon after, she sat down over against the pond, on a green hill. He walked by her as he went to the pond, and, on his return, he observed that she was dangling “something like a white bag” on her lap, evidently suggestive of her unborn baby that was slain with her. The circumstance made such an impression on him, that he immediately suspected Barwick, especially as he had made false statements as to the whereabouts of his wife, and obtained a warrant for his arrest. The culprit when arrested confessed his crime, and the body of the murdered woman being recovered, was found dressed in clothing similar, apparently, to that worn by the apparition. Ultimately Barwick was hanged for his crime.’90

A similar case, which occurred in the county of Durham in 1631, and is the subject of a critical historical inquiry in Surtees’s ‘History of Durham,’ may be briefly summed up.91 ‘One Walker, a yeoman of good estate, a widower, living at Chester-le-Street, had in his service a young female relative named Anne Walker. The results of an amour which took place between them caused Walker to send away the girl under the care of one Mark Sharp, a collier, professedly that she might be taken care of as befitted her condition, but in reality that she might no more be troublesome to her lover. Nothing was heard of her till, one night in the ensuing winter, one James Graham, coming down from the upper to the lower floor of his mill, found a woman standing there with her hair hanging about her head, in which were five bloody wounds. According to the man’s evidence, she gave an account of her fate; having been killed by Sharp on the moor in their journey, and thrown into a coal pit close by, while the instrument of her death, a pick, had been hid under a bank along with his clothes, which were stained with her blood. She demanded of Graham that he should expose her murder, which he hesitated to do, until she had twice reappeared to him, the last time with a threatening aspect.

‘The body, the pick, and the clothes having been found as Graham had described, Walter and Sharp were tried at Durham, before Judge Davenport, in August 1631. The men were found guilty, condemned, and executed.’

In ‘Ackerman’s Repository’ for November 1820, there is an account of a person being tried on the pretended evidence of a ghost. A farmer, on his return from the market at Southam, co. Warwick, was murdered. The next morning a man called upon the farmer’s wife, and related how on the previous night her husband’s ghost had appeared to him, and, after showing him several stabs on his body, had told him that he was murdered by a certain person, and his corpse thrown into a marl-pit. A search was instituted, the body found in the pit, and the wounds on the body of the deceased were exactly in the parts described by the pretended dreamer; the person who was mentioned was committed for trial on the charge of murder, and the trial came on at Warwick before Lord Chief Justice Raymond. The jury would have convicted the prisoner as rashly as the magistrate had committed him, but for the interposition of the judge, who told them he did not put any credence in the pretended ghost story, since the prisoner was a man of unblemished reputation, and no ill-feeling had ever existed between himself and the deceased. He added that he knew of no law which admitted of the evidence of a ghost, and, if any did, the ghost had not appeared. The crier was then ordered to summon the ghost, which he did three times, and the judge then acquitted the prisoner, and caused the accuser to be detained and his house searched, when such strong proofs of guilt were discovered, that the man confessed the crime, and was executed for murder at the following assizes.

CHAPTER VII

PHANTOM BIRDS

One of the forms which the soul is said occasionally to assume at death is that of a bird – a pretty belief which, under one form or another, exists all over the world. An early legend tells how, when St. Polycarp was burnt alive, there arose from his ashes a white dove which flew towards heaven; and a similar story is told of Joan of Arc. The Russian peasantry affirm that the souls of the departed haunt their old homes in the shape of birds for six weeks, and watch the grief of the bereft, after which time they fly away to the other world. In certain districts bread-crumbs are placed on a piece of white linen at a window during those six weeks, when the soul is believed to come and feed upon them in the form of a bird. It is generally into pigeons or crows that the dead are transformed. Thus, when the Deacon Theodore and his three schismatic brethren were burnt in the year 1682, writes Mr. Ralston,92 ‘the souls of the martyrs appeared in the air as pigeons.’ In Volhynia dead children are believed to come back in the spring to their native village under the semblance of swallows and other small birds, endeavouring, by soft twittering or song, to console their sorrowing parents. The Bulgarians say that after death the soul assumes the form of a bird; and according to an old Bohemian fancy the soul flies out of the dying in a similar shape. In the ‘Chronicles of the Beatified Anthony’93 we find described fetid and black pools ‘in regione Puteolorum in Apulia,’ whence the souls arise in the form of monstrous birds in the evening hours of the Sabbath, which neither eat nor let themselves be caught, but wander till in the morning an enormous lion compels them to submerge themselves in the water.

It is a German belief that the soul of one who has died on shipboard passes into a bird, and when seen at any time it is supposed to announce the death of another person. The ghost of the murdered mother comes swimming in the form of a duck, or the soul sits in the likeness of a bird on the grave. This piece of folk-lore has been introduced into many of the popular folk-tales, as in the well-known story of the juniper tree. A little boy is killed by his step-mother, who serves him up as a dish of meat to his father. The father eats in ignorance, and throws away the bones, which are gathered up by the half-sister, who puts them into a silk handkerchief and buries them under a juniper tree. But presently a bird of gay plumage perches on the tree, and whistles as it flits from branch to branch:

Min moder de mi slach’t,Min fader de mi att,Min swester de Marleenken,Söcht alle mine Beeniken,Und bindt sie in een syden Dodk,Legst unner den Machandelboom;Ky witt! ky witt! Ach watt en schön vogel bin ich!

– a rhyme which Goethe puts into the mouth of Gretchen in prison.94 In Grimm’s story of ‘The White and the Black Bride,’ the mother and sister push the true bride into the stream. At the same moment a snow-white swan is discovered swimming down the stream.

Swedish folk-lore tells us that the ravens which scream by night in forest swamps and wild moors are the ghosts of murdered men whose bodies have been hidden by their undetected murderers, and not had Christian burial. In Denmark the night-raven is considered an exorcised spirit, and there is said to be a hole in its left wing caused by the stake driven into the earth. Where a spirit has been exorcised, it is only through the most frightful swamps and morasses that it ascends, first beginning under the earth with the cry of ‘Rok! rok!’ then ‘Rok op! rok op!’ and when it has thus come forth, it flies away screaming ‘Hei! hei! he! – i!’ When it has flown up it describes a cross, but one must take care, it is said, not to look up when the bird is flying overhead, for he who sees through the hole in its wing will become a night-raven himself, and the night-raven will be released. This ominous bird is ever flying towards the east, in the hope of reaching the Holy Sepulchre, for when it arrives there it will find rest.95 Then there is the romantic Breton ballad of ‘Lord Nann and the Korrigan,’ wherein it is related how —

It was a marvel to see, men say,The night that followed the day,The lady in earth by her lord lay,To see two oak trees themselves rear,From the new made grave into the air;And on their branches two doves white,Who there were hopping, gay and light,Which sang when rose the morning ray,And then towards heaven sped away.

In Mexico it is a popular belief that after death the souls of nobles animate beautiful singing birds, and certain North American Indian tribes maintain that the souls of their chiefs take the form of small woodbirds.96 Among the Abipones of Paraguay we are told of a peculiar kind of little ducks which fly in flocks at night-time, uttering a mournful tone, and which the popular imagination associates with the souls of those who have died. Darwin mentions a South American Indian who would not eat land-birds because they were dead men; and the Californian tribes abstain from large game, believing that the souls of past generations have passed into their bodies. The Içannas of Brazil thought the souls of brave warriors passed into lovely birds that fed on pleasant fruits; and the Tapuyas think the souls of the good and the brave enter birds, while the cowardly become reptiles. Indeed, the primitive psychology of such rude tribes reminds us how the spirit freed at death —

Fills with fresh energy another form,And towers an elephant, or glides a worm;Swims as an eagle in the eye of noon,Or wails a screech-owl to the deaf cold moon.

It was also a belief of the Aztecs that all good people, as a reward of merit, were metamorphosed at the close of life into feathered songsters of the grove, and in this form passed a certain term in the umbrageous bowers of Paradise; while certain African tribes think that the souls of wicked men become jackals. The Brazilians imagined that the souls of the bad animated those birds that inhabited the cavern of Guacharo and made a mournful cry, which birds were religiously feared.

Tracing similar beliefs in our own country, may be compared the Lancashire dread of the so-called ‘Seven Whistlers,’ which are occasionally heard at night, and are supposed to contain the souls of those Jews who assisted at the Crucifixion, and in consequence of their wickedness were doomed to float for ever in the air. Numerous stories have been told, from time to time, of the appearance of these ‘Seven Whistlers,’ and of their being heard before some terrible catastrophe, such as a colliery explosion. A correspondent of ‘Notes and Queries’ relates how during a thunderstorm which passed over Kettering, in Yorkshire, on the evening of September 6, 1871, ‘on which occasion the lightning was very vivid, an unusual spectacle was witnessed. Immense flocks of birds were flying about, uttering doleful affrighted cries as they passed over the locality, and for hours they kept up a continual whistling like that made by sea-birds. There must have been great numbers of them, as they were also observed at the same time in the counties of Northampton, Leicester, and Lincoln. The next day, as my servant was driving me to a neighbouring village, this phenomenon of the flight of birds became the subject of conversation, and on asking him what birds he thought they were, he told me they were what were called the “Seven Whistlers,” and that whenever they were heard it was considered a sign of some great calamity, and that the last time he heard them was the night before the great Hartley Colliery explosion. He had also been told by soldiers, that if they heard them they always expected a great slaughter would take place soon. Curiously enough, on taking up the newspaper the following morning, I saw headed in large letters, “Terrible Colliery Explosion at Wigan,” &c.’ Wordsworth speaks of the ‘Seven Whistlers’ in connection with the spectral hounds of the wild huntsman:

He the seven birds hath seen that never part —Seen the seven whistlers on their nightly rounds,And counted them. And oftentimes will start,For overhead are sweeping Gabriel’s hounds,Doomed, with their impious lord, the flying hartTo chase for ever on ærial grounds.

A similar tradition prevails on the Bosphorus with reference to certain flocks of birds, about the size of a thrush, which fly up and down the Channel, and are never seen to rest on the land or water. These are supposed to be the souls of the damned, and condemned to perpetual motion. Among further instances of the same belief may be mentioned one current among the Manx herring fishermen, who, from time immemorial, have been afraid of going to sea without a dead wren, for fear of disasters and storms. The story goes that once upon a time ‘a sea spirit hunted the herring track, always attended by storms, but at last assumed the form of a wren, and flew away.’ Accordingly they believe that so long as they have a dead wren with them all is snug and safe. Similarly, in the English Channel a rustling, rushing sound is occasionally heard on the dark still nights of winter, and is called the herring spear, or herring piece, by the fishermen of Dover and Folkestone. But this strange sound is really caused by the flight of the little redwings as they cross the Channel on their way to warmer regions.

Stories of disembodied souls appearing as birds are very numerous. An old well-known Cornish legend tells how, in days of old, King Arthur was transformed into a chough, ‘its talons and beak all red with blood,’ denoting the violent end to which the celebrated chieftain came. In the same way a curious legend in Poland affirms that every member of the Herburt family assumes the form of an eagle after death, and that the eldest daughters of the Pileck line take the shape of doves if they die unmarried, of owls if they die married, and that they give previous notice of their death to every member of their race by pecking a finger of each. A wild song sung by the boatmen of the Molo, Venice, declares that the spirit of Daniel Manin, the patriot, is flying about the lagunes to this day in the shape of a beautiful white dove.97 There is the ancient Irish tradition that the first father and mother of mankind exist as eagles in the island of Innis Bofin, at the mouth of Killery Bay, in Galway; indeed, survivals of this old belief occur under all manner of forms. There is the popular legend of the owl and the baker’s daughter which Shakespeare has immortalised in ‘Hamlet’ (iv. 5), where Ophelia exclaims, ‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter; Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.’98 Gervase of Tilbury tells how the stork was formerly regarded as both bird and man, on account of which superstition it is carefully protected in Prussia from any kind of injury. The stork, too, is still held in superstitious dread by the Chinese, who, on the twenty-first day of the period of mourning for the dead, place three large paper birds resembling storks on high poles in front of the house of mourning. The birds are supposed to carry the soul of the deceased person to Elysium, and during the next three days the Buddhist prays to the ten kings of the Buddhist Hades, calling on them to hasten the flight of the departed soul to the Western Paradise.99 The Virginian Indians had great reverence for a small bird called Pawcorance, that flies in the woods, and in its note continually sounds that name. This bird flies alone, and is heard only in twilight. It is said to be the son of one of their priests, and on this account they would not hurt it; but there was once a profane Indian who was hired to shoot one of them, but report says he paid dearly for his act of presumption, for a few days afterwards he disappeared, and was never heard of again.100 The Indians dwelling about the Falls of St. Anthony supposed that the spirits of their dead warriors animated the eagles which frequented the place, and these eagles were objects of their worship. In the ‘Sæmund Edda’ it is said that in the nether world souls as singed birds fly about like swarms of flies —

Of that is to be toldWhat I just observed,When I had come into the land of torment:Singed birds,That had been souls,Flew as many as gnats.

The Finns and the Lithuanians speak of the ‘Milky Way’ as the Bird’s Way – the way of souls. According to Kuhn, the notion of the soul assuming the form of a bird is closely allied with the primitive tradition of birds as soul-bringers. Thus, as it has been suggested, ‘the soul and the bird that brought it down to earth may have been supposed to become one, and to enter and quit the body together.’ In the Egyptian hieroglyphics a bird signified the soul of man; and the German name for stork, writes Grimm, is literally child, or soul-bringer. Hence the belief that the advent of infants is presided over by this bird, which obtains so wide a credence in Denmark and Germany.101

The idea of the bird as a ‘soul bringer’ probably gave rise to the popular belief that it is unlucky when a bird hovers near the window of a sick-room, a superstition to which Mrs. Hemans has prettily alluded:

Say not ’tis vain! I tell thee someAre warned by a meteor’s light,Or a pale bird flitting calls them home,Or a voice on the winds by night.

There are various stories told of mysterious birds appearing at such a time in different localities. In Devonshire the appearance of a white breasted bird has long been considered a presage of death, a notion which is said to have originated in a tragic occurrence that happened to one of the Oxenham family. A local ballad tells how on the bridal eve of Margaret, heiress of Sir James Oxenham, a silver-breasted bird flew over the wedding guests just as Sir James stood up to thank them for good wishes. The next day she was slain by a discarded lover, and the ballad records how —

Round her hovering flies,The phantom-bird, for her last breath,To bear it to the skies.

In Yorkshire, Berry Well was supposed to be haunted by a bogie in the form of a white goose, and the Rev. S. Baring-Gould informs us how Lew Trenchard House is haunted by a white lady who goes by the name of Madame Gould, and is supposed to be the spirit of a lady who died there, April 10, 1795. ‘A stone is shown on the “ramps” of Lew Slate Quarry, where seven parsons met to lay the old madame, and some say that the white owl, which nightly flits to and fro in front of Lew House, is the spirit of the lady conjured by the parsons into a bird.’102

Similarly, whenever the white owls are seen perched on the family mansion of the noble family of Arundel of Wardour, it is regarded as a certain indication that one of its members will shortly be summoned out of the world. In Count Montalembert’s ‘Vie de Ste. Elizabeth’ it is related how ‘Duke Louis of Thuringia, the husband of Ste. Elizabeth of Hungary, being on the point of expiring, said to those around him, “Do you see those doves more white than snow?” His attendants supposed him to be a prey to visions; but a little while afterwards he said to them, “I must fly away with those brilliant doves.” Having said this he fell asleep in peace. Then his almoner, Berthold, perceived doves flying away to the east, and followed them along with his eyes.’ We may compare a similar story told of the most beautiful woman of the Knistenaux, named ‘Foot of the Fawn,’ who died in her childbirth, and her babe with her. Soon afterwards two doves appeared, one full grown, and the other a little one. They were the spirits of the mother and child, and the Indians would gather about the tree on which they were perched with reverential love, and worship them as the spirit of the woman and child.103 There is Lord Lyttelton’s well-known ghost story, and the belief of the Duchess of Kendal that George I. flew into her window in the shape of a raven. Another well-known case was that of the Duchess of St. Albans, who, on her death-bed, remarked to her step-daughter, Lady Guilford, ‘I am so happy to day because your father’s spirit is breathing upon me; he has taken the shape of a little bird singing at my window.’ Kelly relates an anecdote of a credulous individual who believed that the departing soul of his brother-in-law, in the form of a bird, tapped at his window at the time of his death;104 and in FitzPatrick’s ‘Life of Bishop Doyle’ it is related, in allusion to his death, that, ‘considering the season was midsummer, and not winter, the visit of two robin redbreasts to the sick-room may be noticed as interesting. They remained fluttering round, and sometimes perching on the uncurtained bed. The priests, struck by the novelty of the circumstance, made no effort to expel the little visitors, and the robins hung lovingly over the bishop’s head until death released him.’ A singular instance of this belief was the extraordinary whim of a Worcester lady, who, imagining her daughter to exist in the shape of a singing-bird, literally furnished her pew in the Cathedral with cages full of the kind; and we are told in Lord Oxford’s letters that, as she was rich, and a benefactress in beautifying the church, no objection was made to her harmless folly.