Cock Lane and Common-Sense

Surtees, in his History of Durham, published another tale, which Scott’s memory did not retain. In 1630, a girl named Anne Walker was about to have a child by a kinsman, also a Walker, for whom she kept house. Walker took her to Dame Care, in Chester le Street, whence he and Mark Sharp removed her one evening late in November. Fourteen days afterwards, late at night, Graime, a fuller, who lived six miles from Walker’s village, Lumley, saw a woman, dishevelled, blood-stained, and with five wounds in her head, standing in a room in his mill. She said she was Anne Walker, that Mark Sharp had slain her with a collier’s pick, and thrown her body into a coal-pit, hiding the pick under the bank. After several visitations, Graime went with his legend to a magistrate, the body and pick-axe were discovered, Walker and Sharp were arrested, and tried at Durham, in August, 1631. Sharp’s boots, all bloody, were found where the ghost said he had concealed them ‘in a stream’; how they remained bloody, if in water, is hard to explain. Against Walker there was no direct evidence. The prisoners, the judge summing up against them, were found guilty and hanged, protesting their innocence.

It is suggested that Graime himself was the murderer, else, how did he know so much about it? But Walker and Sharp were seen last with the woman, and the respectable Walker was not without a motive, while, at this distance, we can conjecture no motive in the case of Graime. [162 - Hibbert, Philosophy of Apparitions, second edition, p. 224. Hibbert finds Graime guilty, but only because he knew where the body lay.] Cockburn’s Voyage up the Mediterranean is the authority (ii. 35) for a very odd trial in the Court of King’s Bench, London. The logs of three ships, under Captains Barnaby, Bristow and Brown, were put in to prove that, on Friday, 15th May, 1687, these men, with many others, were shooting rabbits on Stromboli: that when beaters and all were collected, about a quarter to four, they all saw a man in grey, and a man in black run towards them, the one in grey leading, that Barnaby exclaimed, ‘The foremost is old Booty, my next door neighbour,’ that the figures vanished into the flames of the volcano. This occurrence, by Barnaby’s desire, they noted in their journals. They were all making merry, on October 6, 1687, at Gravesend, when Mrs. Barnaby remarked to her husband: ‘My dear, old Booty is dead!’ The captain replied: ‘We all saw him run into hell’. Mrs. Booty, hearing of this remark, sued Barnaby for libel, putting her damages at £1000. The case came on, the clothes of old Booty were shown in court: the date and hour of his death were stated, and corresponded, within two minutes, to the moment when the mariners beheld the apparition in Stromboli, ‘so the widow lost her cause’. A mediæval legend has been revived in this example.

All these curious legal cases were, no doubt, familiar to Sir Walter Scott. He probably had no access to an American example which was reprinted four years after his death, by a member of the club which he founded, the Bannatyne Club, [163 - Notices Relative to the Bannatyne Club, 1836, p. 191. Remarkable Trial in Maryland.] in 1836.

The evidence of the ghost-seer was republished by Mrs. Crowe, in her Night Side of Nature. But Mrs. Crowe neither gives the facts of the trial correctly, nor indicates the sources of the narrative. The source was a periodical, The Opera Glass, February 3, 1827, thirty years after the date of the trial. The document, however, had existed ‘for many years,’ in the possession of the anonymous contributor to The Opera Glass. He received it from one of the counsel in the case, Mr. Nicholson, afterwards a judge in Maryland, who compiled it from attested notes made by himself in court.

The suit was that of James, Fanny, Robert, and Thomas Harris, devisees of Thomas Harris, v. Mary Harris, relict and administratrix of James Harris, brother of Thomas, aforesaid (1798-99). Thomas Harris had four illegitimate children. He held, as he supposed, a piece of land in fee, but, in fact, he was only seized in tail. Thus he could not sell or devise it, and his brother James was heir in tail, the children being bastards. These legal facts were unknown both to James and Thomas. Thomas made a will, leaving James his executor, and directing that the land should be sold, and the money divided among his own children. James, when Thomas died, sold the land, and, in drawing the conveyance, it was discovered that he had no right to do so for Thomas, as it was held by Thomas in tail. James then conveyed his right to the purchaser, and kept the money as legal heir. Why James could sell, if Thomas could not, the present writer is unable to explain. In two years, James died intestate, and the children of Thomas brought a suit against James’s widow. Before James’s death, the ghost of Thomas had appeared frequently to one Briggs, an old soldier in the Colonial Revolt, bidding James ‘return the proceeds of the sale to the orphans’ court, and when James heard of this from Briggs he did go to the orphans’ court, and returned himself to the estate of his brother, to the amount of the purchase money of the land’.

Now, before the jury were sworn, the counsel, Wright and Nicholson for the plaintiffs, Scott and Earle for the defendant, privately agreed that the money could not be recovered, for excellent legal reasons. But they kept this to themselves, and let the suit go on, merely for the pleasure of hearing Briggs, ‘a man of character, of firm, undaunted spirit,’ swear to his ghost in a court of law. He had been intimate with Thomas Harris from boyhood. It may be said that he invented the ghost, in the interest of his friend’s children. He certainly mentioned it, however, some time before he had any conversation with it.

Briggs’s evidence may be condensed very much, as the learned Mrs. Crowe quotes it correctly in her Night Side of Nature. In March, 1791, about nine a.m., Briggs was riding a horse that had belonged to Harris. In a lane adjoining the field where Harris was buried, the horse shied, looked into the field where the tomb was, and ‘neighed very loud’. Briggs now saw Harris coming through the field, in his usual dress, a blue coat. Harris vanished, and the horse went on. As Briggs was ploughing, in June, Harris walked by him for two hundred yards. A lad named Bailey, who came up, made no remark, nor did Harris tell him about the hallucination. In August, after dark, Harris came and laid his arms on Briggs’s shoulder. Briggs had already spoken to James Harris, ‘brither to the corp,’ about these and other related phenomena, a groan, a smack on the nose from a viewless hand, and so forth. In October Briggs saw Harris, about twilight in the morning. Later, at eight o’clock in the morning, he was busy in the field with Bailey, aforesaid, when Harris passed and vanished: Bailey saw nothing. At half-past nine, the spectre returned, and leaned on a railing: Briggs vainly tried to make Bailey see him. Briggs now crossed the fence, and walked some hundreds of yards with Harris, telling him that his will was disputed. Harris bade Briggs go to his aforesaid brother James, and remind him of a conversation they had held, ‘on the east side of the wheat-stacks,’ on the day when Harris’s fatal illness began. James remembered the conversation, and said he would fulfil his brother’s desire which he actually did. There was a later interview between Briggs and Harris, the matter then discussed Briggs declined to impart to the court, and the court overruled the question. ‘He had never related to any person the last conversation, and never would.’

Bailey was sworn, and deposed that Briggs had called his attention to Harris, whom he could not see, had climbed the fence, and walked for some distance, ‘apparently in deep conversation with some person. Witness saw no one.’

It is plain that the ghost never really understood the legal question at issue. The dates are difficult to reconcile. Thomas Harris died in 1790. His ghost appeared in 1791. Why was there no trial of the case till ‘about 1798 or 1799’? Perhaps research in the Maryland records would elucidate these and other questions; we do but give the tale, with such authority as it possesses. Possibly it is an elaborate hoax, played off by Nicholson, the plaintiffs’ counsel, on the correspondent of The Opera Glass, or by him on the editor of that periodical.

The hallucinations of Briggs, which were fortunate enough, it is said, to get into a court of justice, singularly resemble those of M. Bezuel, in July and August, 1697, though these were not matter of a sworn deposition. The evidence is in Histoire d’une Apparition Arrivée à Valogne. [164 - Paris, 1708. Reprinted by Lenglet Dufresnoy, in his Dissertations sur les Apparitions. Avignon, 1751, vol. iii. p. 38.] The narrator of 1708, having heard much talk of the affair, was invited to meet Bezuel, a priest, at dinner, January 7, 1708. He told his one story ‘with much simplicity’.

In 1695, when about fifteen, Bezuel was a friend of a younger boy, one of two brothers, Desfontaines. In 1696, when Desfontaines minor was going to study at Caen, he worried Bezuel into signing, in his blood, a covenant that the first who died should appear to the survivor. The lads corresponded frequently, every six weeks. On July 31, 1697, at half-past two, Bezuel, who was hay-making, had a fainting fit. On August 1, at the same hour, he felt faint on a road, and rested under a shady tree. On August 2, at half-past two, he fainted in a hay-loft, and vaguely remembered seeing a half-naked body. He came down the ladder, and seated himself on a block, in the Place des Capucins. Here he lost sight of his companions, but did see Desfontaines, who came up, took his left arm, and led him into an alley. The servant followed, and told Bezuel’s tutor that he was talking to himself. The tutor went to him, and heard him asking and answering questions. Bezuel, for three-quarters of an hour, conversed, as he believed, with Desfontaines, who said that he had been drowned, while bathing, at Caen, about half-past two on July 31. The appearance was naked to the waist, his head bare, showing his beautiful yellow locks. He asked Bezuel to learn a school task that had been set him as a penalty, the seven penitential psalms: he described a tree at Caen, where he had cut some words; two years later Bezuel visited it and them; he gave other pieces of information, which were verified, but not a word would he say of heaven, hell, or purgatory; ‘he seemed not to hear my questions’. There were two or three later interviews, till Bezuel carried out the wishes of the phantasm.

When the spectral Desfontaines went away, on the first occasion, Bezuel told another boy that Desfontaines was drowned. The lad ran to the parents of Desfontaines, who had just received a letter to that effect. By some error, the boy thought that the elder Desfontaines had perished, and said so to Bezuel, who denied it, and, on a second inquiry, Bezuel was found to be right.

The explanation that Bezuel was ill (as he certainly was), that he had heard of the death of his friend just before his hallucination, and had forgotten an impressive piece of news, which, however, caused the apparition, is given by the narrator of 1708. The kind of illusion in which a man is seen and heard to converse with empty air, is common to the cases of Bezuel and of Briggs, and the writer is acquainted, at first hand, with a modern example.

Mrs. Crowe cites, on the authority of the late Mr. Maurice Lothian, solicitor for the plaintiff, a suit which arose out of ‘hauntings,’ and was heard in the sheriff’s court, at Edinburgh, in 1835-37. But we are unable to discover the official records, or extracts of evidence from them. This is to be regretted, but, by way of consolation, we have the pleadings on both sides in an ancient French case of a haunted house. These are preserved in his Discours des Spectres, a closely printed quarto of nearly 1000 pages, by Pierre le Loyer, Conseiller du Roy au Siège Présidial d’Angers. [165 - Second edition, Buon, Paris, 1605. First edition, Angers, 1586.] Le Loyer says, ‘De gayétè de coeur semble m’estre voulu engager au combat contre ceux qui impugnent les spectres!’ As Le Loyer observes, ghosts seldom come into court in civil cases, except when indicted as nuisances, namely, when they make a hired house uninhabitable by their frolics. Then the tenant often wants to quit the house, and to have his contract annulled. The landlord resists, an action is brought, and is generally settled in accordance with the suggestion of Alphenus, in his Digests, book ii. Alphenus says, in brief, that the fear must be a genuine fear, and that reason for no ordinary dread must be proved. Hence Arnault Ferton, in his Customal of Burgundy, advises that ‘legitimate dread of phantasms which trouble men’s rest and make night hideous’ is reason good for leaving a house, and declining to pay rent after the day of departure. Covarruvias, a Spanish legist, already quoted, agrees with Arnault Ferton. The Parliament of Grenada, in one or two cases, decided in favour of the tenant, and against the landlord of houses where spectres racketed. Le Loyer now reports the pleadings in a famous case, of which he does not give the date. Incidentally, however, we learn that it can hardly have been earlier than 1550. The cause was heard, on appeal, before the Parlement de Paris.

Pierre Piquet, guardian of Nicolas Macquereau (a minor), let to Giles Bolacre a house in the suburbs of Tours. Poor Bolacre was promptly disturbed by a noise and routing of invisible spirits, which suffered neither himself nor his family to sleep o’ nights. He then cited Piquet, also Daniel Macquereau, who was concerned in the letting of the house, before the local seat of Themis. The case was heard, and the judge at Tours broke the lease, the hauntings being insupportable nuisances. But this he did without letters royal. The lessors then appealed, and the case came before the Cour de Parlement in Paris. Maître Chopin was for the lessors, Nau appeared for the tenant. Chopin first took the formal point, the Tours judge was formally wrong in breaking a covenant without letters royal, a thing particularly bad in the case of a minor, Nicolas Macquereau.

So much for the point of form; as to the matter, Maître Chopin laughed at the bare idea of noisy spirits. This is notable because, in an age when witches were burned frequently, the idea of a haunted house could be treated by the learned counsel as a mere waggery. Yet the belief in haunted houses has survived the legal prosecution of witches. ‘The judge in Tours has merely and mischievously encouraged superstition.’ All ghosts, brownies, lutins, are mere bugbears of children; here Maître Chopin quotes Plato, and Philo Judæus in the original, also Empedocles, Marcus Aurelius, Tertullian, Quintilian, Dioscorides. Perhaps Bolacre and his family suffer from nightmare. If so, a physician, not a solicitor, is their man. Or again, granting that their house is haunted, they should appeal to the clergy, not to the law.

Manifestly this is a point to be argued. Do the expenses of exorcism fall on landlord or tenant? This, we think, can hardly be decided by a quotation from Epictetus. Alexis Comnenus bids us seek a bishop in the case of psychical phenomena (τα ψυχικα απαντα). So Maître Chopin argues, but he evades the point. Is it not the business of the owner of the house to ‘whustle on his ain parten,’ to have his own bogie exorcised? Of course Piquet and Macquereau may argue that the bogie is Bolacre’s bogie, that it flitted to the house with Bolacre; but that is a question of fact and evidence.

Chopin concludes that a lease is only voidable in case of material defect, or nuisance, as of pestilential air, not in a case which, after all, is a mere vice d’esprit. Here Maître Chopin sits down, with a wink at the court, and Nau pleads for the tenant. First, why abuse the judge at Tours? The lessors argued the case before him, and cannot blame him for credulity. The Romans, far from rejecting such ideas (as Chopin had maintained), used a ritual service for ejecting spooks, so Ovid testifies. Greek and Roman hauntings are cited from Pliny, Plutarch, Suetonius; in the last case (ghost of Caligula), the house had to be destroyed, like the house at Wolflee where the ghost, resenting Presbyterian exorcism, killed the Rev. Mr. Thomson of Southdean, father of the author of The Castle of Indolence. ‘As to Plato, cited by my learned brother, Plato believed in hauntings, as we read in the Phaedo,’ Nau has him here. In brief, ‘the defendants have let a house as habitable, well knowing the same to be infested by spirits’. The Fathers are then cited as witnesses for ghosts. The learned counsel’s argument about a vice d’esprit is a pitiable pun.

The decision of the court, unluckily, is not preserved by Le Loyer. The counsel for Bolacre told Le Loyer that the case was adjourned on the formal point, but, that, having obtained letters royal for his client, he succeeded in getting the remainder of the lease declared void. Comparing, however, Bouchel, s. v. Louage, in his Bibliothèque du droit François, one finds that the higher court reversed the decision of the judge at Tours. In the Edinburgh case, 1835, the tenant, Captain Molesworth, did not try to have his lease quashed, but he did tear up floors, pull down wainscots, and bore a hole into the next house, that of his landlord, Mr. Webster, in search of the cause of the noises. Mr. Webster, therefore, brought an action to restrain him from these experiments.

Le Loyer gives two cases of ghosts appearing to denounce murderers in criminal cases. He possessed the speech of the President Brisson (at that time an advocate), in which he cited the testimony of the spectre of Madame de Colommiers, mysteriously murdered in full day, with her children and their nurse. Her ghost appeared to her husband, when wide awake, and denounced her own cousins. As there was no other evidence, beyond the existence of motive, the accused were discharged. In another well-known case, before the Parlement de Bretagne, the ghost of a man who had mysteriously vanished, guided his brother to the spot where his wife and her paramour had buried him, after murdering him. Le Loyer does not give the date of this trial. The wife was strangled, and her body was burned.

Modern times have known dream-evidence in cases of murder, as in the Assynt murder, and the famous Red Barns affair. But Thomas Harris’s is probably the last ghost cited in a court of law. On the whole, the ghosts have gained little by these legally attested appearances, but the trials do throw a curious light on the juridical procedure of our ancestors. The famous action against the ghosts in the Eyrbyggja Saga was not before a Christian court, and is too well known for quotation. [166 - Dr. Lee, in Sights and Sounds (p. 43), quotes an Irish lawsuit in 1890. The tenants were anxious not to pay rent, but were non-suited. No reference to authorities is given. There was also a case at Dublin in 1885. Waldron’s house was disturbed, ‘stones were thrown at the windows and doors,’ and Waldron accused his neighbour, Kiernan, of these assaults. He lost his case (Evening Standard, February 23, 1885, is cited).]

A MODERN TRIAL FOR WITCHCRAFT

Thorel v. Tinel. Action for libel in 1851. Mr. Dale Owen’s incomplete version of this affair. The suit really a trial for witchcraft. Spectral obsession. Movements of objects. Rappings. Incidental folklore. Old G. Thorel and the cure. The wizard’s revenge. The haunted parlour boarder. Examples of magical tripping up, and provoked hallucinations. Case of Dr. Gibotteau and Berthe the hospital nurse. Similar case in the Salem affair, 1692. Evidence of witnesses to abnormal phenomena. Mr. Robert de Saint Victor. M. de Mirville. Thorel non-suited. Other modern French examples of witchcraft.

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

This curious case has often been cited, as by Mr. Robert Dale Owen, in his Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, [167 - p. 195, London, 1860.] but Mr. Owen, by accident or design, omitted almost all the essential particulars, everything which connects the affair with such transactions as the witch epidemic at Salem, and the trials for sorcery before and during the Restoration. Yet, in the events at Cideville, and the depositions of witnesses, we have all the characteristics of witchcraft. First we have men by habit and repute sorcerers. Then we have cause of offence given to these. Then we have their threats, malum minatum, then we have evil following the threats, damnum secutum. Just as of old, that damnum, that damage, declares itself in the ‘possession’ of young people, who become, more or less, subject to trances and convulsions. One of them is haunted, as in the old witchcraft cases, by the phantasm of the sorcerer. The phantasm (as in Cotton Mather’s examples) is wounded, a parallel wound is found on the suspected warlock. Finally, the house where the obsessed victims live is disturbed by knocks, raps, flight of objects, and inexplicable movements of heavy furniture. Thus all the notes of a bad affair of witchcraft are attested in a modern trial, under the third Empire. Finally, some curious folklore is laid bare, light is cast on rural life and superstition, and a singular corroboration of a singular statement, much more recent than the occurrences at Cideville, is obtained. A more astonishing example of survival cannot be imagined, of survival, or of disconnected and spontaneous revival and recrudescence. [168 - The account followed here is that of the narrator in La Table Parlante, p. 130, who differs in some points from the Marquis de Mirville in his Fragment d’un Ouvrage Inédit, Paris, 1852.]

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

On a farm near the curé’s house in Cideville was another shepherd, named Thorel, a man of forty, described as dull, illiterate, and given to boasting about his powers as a disciple of the venerable G. Popular opinion decided that G. employed Thorel to procure his vengeance; it was necessary that a sorcerer should touch his intended victim, and G. had not the same conveniency for doing so as Thorel. In old witch trials we sometimes find the witch kissing her destined prey. [169 - For bewitching by touch see Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World, p. 150. ‘Library of Old Authors,’ London, 1862.] Thorel, so it was said, succeeded in touching, on Nov. 25, 1850, M. Tinel’s two pupils, in a crowd at a sale of wood. The lads, of fifteen and twelve, were named Lemonier and Bunel. For what had gone before, we have, so far, only public chatter, for what followed we have the sworn evidence in court of the curé’s pupils, in January and February, 1851. According to Lemonier, on Nov. 26, while studying, he heard light blows of a hammer, these recurred daily, about 5. p.m. When M. Tinel, his tutor, said plus fort, the noises were louder. To condense evidence which becomes tedious by its eternal uniformity, popular airs were beaten on demand; the noise grew unbearable, tables moved untouched, a breviary, a knife, a spit, a shoe flew wildly about. Lemonier was buffeted by a black hand, attached to nobody. ‘A kind of human phantasm, clad in a blouse, haunted me for fifteen days wherever I went; none but myself could see it.’ He was dragged by the leg by a mysterious force. On a certain day, when Thorel found a pretext for visiting the house, M. Tinel made him beg Lemonier’s pardon, clearly on the ground that the swain had bewitched the boy. ‘As soon as I saw him I recognised the phantasm which had haunted me for a fortnight, and I said to M. Tinel: “There is the man who follows me”.’ Thorel knelt to the boy, asked his pardon, and pulled violently at his clothes. As defendant, perhaps, the curé could not be asked to corroborate these statements. The evidence of the other boy, Bunel, was that, on Nov. 26, he heard first a rush of wind, then tappings on the wall. He corroborated Lemonier’s testimony to the musical airs knocked out, the volatile furniture, and the recognition in Thorel of the phantom. ‘In the evening,’ said Bunel, ‘Lemonier en eut une crise de nerfs dans laquelle il avait perdu connaissance.’

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

This is in accordance with good precedents in witchcraft. A witch-hare is wounded, the witch, in her natural form, has the same wound. At the trial of Bridget Bishop, in the court of Oyer and Terminer, held at Salem, June 2, 1692, there was testimony brought in that a man striking once at the place where a bewitched person said the shape of Mrs. Bishop stood, the bewitched cried out, that he had tore her coat, in the place then particularly specified, and Bishop’s coat was found to be torn in that very place. [170 - Cotton Mather, op. cit., p. 131.] Next day, after Thorel touched the boy, the windows broke, as he had prophesied. Then followed a curious scene in which Thorel tried, in presence of the maire, to touch the curé, who retreated to the end of the room, and struck the shepherd with his cane. Thereupon Thorel brought his action for libel and assault against the curé. Forty-two witnesses were heard, it was proved that Thorel had, in fact, frequently accused himself, and he was non-suited: his counsel spoke of appealing, but, unluckily, the case was not carried to a higher court. In a few weeks the boys were sent to their homes, when (according to the narrative) there were disturbances at the home of the younger lad. Thus the curé lost his pupils.

A curious piece of traditional folklore came out, but only as hearsay, in court. M. Cheval, Maire of Cideville, deposed that a M. Savoye told him that Thorel had once been shepherd to a M. Tricot. At that time Thorel said to one of two persons in his company: ‘Every time I strike my cabin (a shelter on wheels used by shepherds) you will fall,’ and, at each stroke, the victim felt something seize his throat, and fell! [171 - Table Parlante, p. 151. A somewhat different version is given p. 145. The narrator seems to say that Cheval himself deposed to having witnessed this experiment.] This anecdote is curious, because in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research is a long paper by Dr. Gibotteau, on his experiments with a hospital nurse called Berthe. This woman, according to the doctor, had the power of making him see hallucinations, of a nature more or less horrible, from a distance. She had been taught some traditional feats of rural sorcery, among others that of making a man stumble, or fall, as he walked. The doctor does not make any allusion to the Cideville affair, and it seems probable that this trick is part of the peasant’s magical repertoire, or, rather, that the peasant warlocks boast of being able to perform the trick. But, if we can accept the physician’s evidence, as ‘true for him,’ at least, then a person like Berthe really might affect, from a distance, a boy like Lemonier with a haunting hallucination. To do this is witchcraft, and for crimes of this kind, or on false charges of this kind, poor Mrs. Bishop was burned at Salem in 1692.

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

A land surveyor swore that the raps went on when he had placed the boy in an attitude which made fraud (in his opinion) impossible. A gentleman M. de B. ‘took all possible precautions’ but, nevertheless, was entertained by ‘a noise which performed the tunes demanded’. He could discover no cause of the noise. M. Huet, touching a table with his finger, received responsive raps, which answered questions, ‘at the very place where I struck, and beneath my finger. I cannot explain the fact, which, I am convinced, was not caused by the child, nor by any one in the house.’ M. Cheval saw things fly about, he slept in the boy’s room, and his pillow flew from under his head. He lay down between the children, holding their hands, and placing his feet on theirs, when the coverlet of the bed arose, and floated away. The Marquis de Mirville had a number of answers by raps, which staggered him very much, but the force was quite feeble when he asked for portions of Italian music. Madame de St. Victor felt herself pushed, and her clothes pulled in the curé’s house, when no one was near her. She also saw furniture behave in a fantastic manner, and M. Raoul Robert de St. Victor had many such experiences. M. Paul de St. Victor was not present. A desk sailed along: paused in air, and fell: ‘I had never seen a movement of this kind, and I admit that I was alarmed’. Le Seigneur, a farmer, saw ‘a variety of objects arise and sail about’: he was certain that the boys did not throw them, and when in their company, in the open air, between Cideville and Anzooville, ‘I saw stones come to us, without striking us, hurled by some invisible force’. There was other confirmatory evidence, from men of physic, and of the law.

The juge de paix, as we have seen, pronounced that the clearest point in the case was ‘the absence of known cause for the effects,’ and he non-suited Thorel, the plaintiff.

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

The affair of Cideville by no means stands alone in modern France. In 1853, two doctors and other witnesses signed a deposition as to precisely similar phenomena attending Adelaide Françoise Millet, a girl of twelve, at Songhien, in Champagne. The trouble, as at Cock Lane, began by a sound of scratching on the wood of her bed. The clerk of the juge de la paix, the master of the Douane, two doctors, and others visited her, and tied her hands and feet. The noise continued. Mysterious missiles pursued a girl in Martinique, in 1854. The house, which was stormed by showers of stone, in Paris (1846), entirely baffled the police. [172 - Gazette des Tribunaux, February 2, 1846, quoted in Table Parlante, p. 306.] There is a more singular parallel to the Cideville affair, the account was printed from the letter of a correspondent in the Abeille of Chartres, March 11, 1849. [173 - Table Parlante, p. 174.] At Gaubert, near Guillonville, a man was imprisoned for thefts of hay, the property of a M. Dolléans. Two days after his arrest, namely, on December 31, 1848, the servant of M. Dolléans had things of all sorts thrown at her from all directions. She fell ill, and went into hospital for five days, where she was untroubled. On her return, in the middle of a conversation, ribbons and bits of string would fly at her, and twist themselves round her neck, as in the case of Francis Fey, of Spraiton, given by Aubrey and Bovet. Mademoiselle Dolléans carefully watched the girl for a fortnight, and never let her out of her sight, but could not discover any fraud. After about a month the maid was sent home, where she was not molested. Naturally we see in her the half-insane cunning of hysteria, but that explanation does not apply to little Master Dolléans, a baby of three months old. The curse fell on him: however closely his parents watched him, pots and pans showered into his cradle, the narrator himself saw a miscellaneous collection of household furniture mysteriously amassed there.

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

PRESBYTERIAN GHOST HUNTERS

Religious excitement and hallucination. St. Anthony. Zulu catechumens. Haunted Covenanters. Strange case of Thomas Smeaton. Law’s ‘Memorialls’. A deceitful spirit. Examples of insane and morbidly sensitive ghosts. ‘Le revenant qui s’accuse s’excuse.’ Raising the devil in Irvine. Mode of evocation. Wodrow. His account of Margaret Lang, and Miss Shaw of Bargarran. The unlucky Shaws. Lord Torphichen’s son. Cases from Wodrow. Lord Middleton’s story. Haunted house. Wraiths. Lord Orrery’s ghost no metaphysician. The Bride of Lammermoor. Visions of the saints. Their cautiousness. Ghost appearing to a Jacobite. Ghost of a country tradesman. Case of telepathy known to Wodrow. Avenging spectres. Lack of evidence. Tale of Cotton Mather.

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

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

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

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

Many ghosts have a perfect craze for announcing that bodies or treasures, are buried where there is nothing of the sort. Glanvill has a tale of a ghost who accused himself of a murder, and led a man to a place in a wood where the corpse of the slain was to be found. There was no corpse, the ghost was mad. The Psychical Society have published the narratives of a housemaid and a butler who saw a lady ghost. She, later, communicated through a table her intention to appear at eleven p.m. The butler and two ladies saw her, the gentlemen present did not. The ghost insisted that jewels were buried in the cellar; the butler dug, but found none. The writer is acquainted with another ghost, not published, who labours under morbid delusions. For reasons wholly unfounded on fact she gave a great deal of trouble to a positive stranger. Now there was literally no sense in these proceedings. Such is ghostly evidence, ever deceitful!

‘It’s not good,’ says Mr. Law, ‘to come in communing terms with Satan, there is a snare in the end of it;’ yet people have actually been hanged, in England, on the evidence of a ghost! On the evidence of the devil, some other persons were accused of theft, in 1682. This is a remarkable instance; we often hear of raising the ghostly foe, but we are seldom told how it can be done. This is how it was done in February, 1682, at the house of the Hon. Robert Montgomery, in Irvine. Some objects of silver plate were stolen, a maid was suspected, she said ‘she would raise the devil, but she would know who the thief was’. Taking, therefore, a Bible, she went into a cellar, where she drew a circle round her, and turned a sieve on end twice, from right to left. In her hand she held nine feathers from the tail of a black cock. She next read Psalm li. forwards, and then backwards Revelations ix. 19. ‘He’ then appeared, dressed as a sailor with a blue cap. At each question she threw three feathers at him: finally he showed as a black man with a long tail. Meanwhile all the dogs in Irvine were barking, as in Greece when Hecate stood by the cross-ways. The maid now came and told Mrs. Montgomery (on information received) that the stolen plate was in the box of a certain servant, where, of course, she had probably placed it herself. However the raiser of the devil was imprisoned for the spiritual offence. She had learned the rite ‘at Dr. Colvin’s house in Ireland, who used to practise this’.

The experiment may easily be repeated by the scientific.

Though Mr. Law is strong in witches and magic, he has very few ghost stories; indeed, according to his philosophy, even a common wraith of a living person is really the devil in that disguise. The learned Mr. Wodrow, too, for all his extreme pains, cannot be called a very successful amateur of spectres. A mighty ghost hunter was the Rev. Robert Wodrow of Eastwood, in Renfrewshire, the learned historian of the sufferings of the Kirk of Scotland (1679-1734). Mr. Wodrow was an industrious antiquarian, a student of geology, as it was then beginning to exist, a correspondent for twenty years of Cotton Mather, and a good-hearted kind man, that would hurt nobody but a witch or a Papist. He had no opportunity to injure members of either class, but it is plain, from his four large quarto volumes, called Analecta, that he did not lack the will. In his Analecta Mr. Wodrow noted down all the news that reached him, scandals about ‘The Pretender,’ Court Gossip, Heresies of Ministers, Remarkable Providences, Woful Apparitions, and ‘Strange Steps of Providence’. Ghosts, second sight, dreams, omens, premonitions, visions, did greatly delight him, but it is fair to note that he does not vouch for all his marvels, but merely jots them down, as matters of hearsay. Thus his pages are valuable to the student of superstition, because they contain ‘the clash of the country’ for about forty years, and illustrate the rural or ecclesiastical aberglaube of our ancestors, at the moment when witchcraft was ceasing to be a recognised criminal offence.

A diary of Wodrow’s exists, dating from April 3, 1697, when he was but nineteen years of age. On June 10, 1697, he announces the execution of some witches at Paisley: seven were burned, among them one, Margaret Lang, who accused herself of horrible crimes. The victim of the witches burned in 1697 was a child of eleven, daughter of John Shaw of Bargarran. This family was unlucky in its spiritual accidents. The previous laird, as we learn from the contemporary Law, in his Memorialls, rode his horse into a river at night, and did not arrive at the opposite bank. Every effort was made to find his body in the stream, which was searched as far as the sea. The corpse was at last discovered in a ditch, two miles away, shamefully mutilated. The money of the laird, and other objects of value, were still in his pockets. This was regarded as the work of fiends, but there is a more plausible explanation. Nobody but his groom saw the laird ride into the river; the chances are that he was murdered in revenge, – certain circumstances point to this, – and that the servant was obliged to keep the secret, and invent the story about riding the ford.

The daughter of Bargarran’s successor and heir was probably a hysterical child, who was led, by the prevailing superstition, to believe that witches caused her malady. How keen the apprehensions were among children, we learn from a document preserved by Wodrow. An eminent Christian of his acquaintance thought in boyhood that an old woman looked crossly at him, and he went in dread of being bewitched for a whole summer. The mere terror might have caused fits, he would then have denounced the old woman, and she would probably have been burned. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, in his preface to Law’s Memorialls (p. xcii.), says that Miss Shaw was ‘antient in wickedness,’ and thus accounts for her ‘pretending to be bewitched,’ by way of revenging herself on one of the maid-servants. Twenty people were finally implicated, several were executed, and one killed himself. The child, probably hysterical, and certainly subject to convulsions, was really less to blame than ‘the absurd credulity of various otherwise worthy ministers, and some topping professors in and about Glasgow,’ as Sharpe quotes the MS. ‘Treatise on witchcraft’ of the Rev. Mr. Bell. Strangely enough the great thread manufactories of Renfrewshire owed their origin to this Miss Shaw, aided by a friend who had acquired some technical secrets in Holland. She married a minister in 1718, and probably her share in an abominable crime lay light on her conscience. Her fellow-sufferer from witchcraft, a young Sandilands, son of Lord Torphichen (1720), became a naval officer of distinguished gallantry.

Wodrow does not appear to have witnessed the execution at Paisley, one of the last in Scotland, but he had no doubt that witches should be put to death. In 1720, when the son of Lord Torphichen exhibited some curious phenomena, exaggerated by report into clairvoyance and flying in the air, nobody was punished. In spite of his superstition in regard to witches, Wodrow (September 20, 1697) sensibly explains a death-wraith by the anxiety of the lady who beheld it. He also, still in the diary, records a case of second sight, but that occurred in Argyleshire. It will be found, in fact, that all the second-sighted people except some ministers during the sufferings (and they reckoned as prophets) were Highlanders. Considering his avidity for ghost-stories, it is remarkable that he scarcely ever receives them at even second hand, and that most of them are remote in point of time. On the other side, he secures a few religious visions, as of shining lights comforting devout ladies, from the person concerned. His narratives fall into regular categories, Haunted Houses, Ghosts, Wraiths, Second Sight, Consolatory Divine Visions. Thus Mr. Stewart’s uncle, Harry, ‘ane eminent Christian, and very joviall,’ at a drinking party saw himself in bed, and his coffin at his bed-foot. This may be explained as a case of ‘the horrors,’ a malady incident to the jovial. He died in a week, In vino veritas.

Lord Middleton’s ghost-story Wodrow got from the son of a man who, as Lauderdale’s chaplain, heard Middleton tell it at dinner. He had made a covenant with the Laird of Babigni that the first who died should appear to the survivor. Babigni was slain in battle, Middleton was put in the Tower, where Babigni appeared to him, sat with him for an hour by the clock, and predicted the Restoration. ‘His hand was hote and soft,’ but Middleton, brave in the field, was much alarmed. He had probably drunk a good deal in the Tower. This anecdote was very widely rumoured. Aubrey publishes a version of it in his Miscellanies, and Law gives another in his Memorialls (p. 162). He calls ‘Babigni’ – ‘Barbigno,’ and ‘Balbegno’. According to Law, it was not the laird’s ghost that appeared, but ‘the devil in his lykness’. Law and Aubrey make the spirit depart after uttering a couplet, which they quote variously.