When this witch died she knew she could never lie in safety in her grave;
but there was a very safe churchyard in Aberdeenshire, a hundred and
fifty miles away, and if she could get into that she would be at rest.
And she rose out of her grave, and off she went, and the Devil after her,
on a black horse; but, praise to the swiftness of her feet, she won the
churchyard before him. Her first grave swelled up, oh, as high as that
green hillock!
Witches are still in active practice. There was an old woman very
miserly. She would alway be taking one of her neighbours' sheep from the
hills, and they stood it for long; they did not like to meddle with her.
At last it grew so bad that they brought her before the sheriff, and she
got eighteen months in prison. When she came out she was very angry, and
set about making an image of the woman whose sheep she had taken. When
the image was made she burned it and put the ashes in a burn. And it is
a very curious thing, but the woman she made it on fell into a decline,
and took to her bed.
The witch and her family went to America. They kept a little inn, in a
country place, and people who slept in it did not come out again. They
were discovered, and the eldest son was hanged; he confessed that he had
committed nineteen murders before he left Scotland.
"They were not a nice family."
"The father was a very respectable old man."
The boatman gave me the name of this wicked household, but it is perhaps
better forgotten.
The extraordinary thing is that this appears to be the Highland
introduction to, or part first of, a gloomy and sanguinary story of a
murder hole--an inn of assassins in a lonely district of the United
States, which Mr. Louis Stevenson heard in his travels there, and told to
me some years ago. The details have escaped my memory, but, as Mr.
Stevenson narrated them, they rivalled De Quincey's awful story of
Williams's murders in the Ratcliffe Highway.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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