Donald Farquharson, in Glendee, deposes that, in June, 1750,
Alexander Macpherson sent for him, and said that he was much
troubled by the ghost of the serjeant, who insisted that he should
bury his bones, and should consult Farquharson. Donald did not
believe this quite, but trembled lest the ghost should vex him. He
went with Macpherson, who showed the body in a peat-moss. The body
was much decayed, the dress all in tatters. Donald asked Macpherson
whether the apparition denounced the murderers: he replied that the
ghost said it would have done so, had Macpherson not asked the
question. They buried the body on the spot, Donald attested that he
had seen the Serjeant's rings on the hand of Clerk's wife. For
three years the prisoners had been suspected by the country side.
Macpherson declared that he had seen an apparition of a man in blue,
who said, 'I am Serjeant Davies,' that he at first took this man for
a brother of Donald Farquharson's, that he followed the man, or
phantasm, to the door, where the spectre repeated its assertions,
and pointed out the spot where the bones lay. He found them, and
then went, as already shown, to Donald Farquharson. Between the
first vision and the burying, the ghost came to him naked, and this
led him to inter the remains. On the second appearance, the ghost
denounced the prisoners. Macpherson gave other evidence, not
spectral, which implicated Clerk. But, when asked what language the
ghost spoke in, he answered, 'as good Gaelic as he had ever heard in
Lochaber'. 'Pretty well,' said his counsel, Scott's informant,
McIntosh, 'for the ghost of an English serjeant.' This was probably
conclusive with the jury, for they acquitted the prisoners, in the
face of the other incriminating evidence. This was illogical.
Modern students of ghosts, of course, would not have been staggered
by the ghost's command of Gaelic: they would explain it as a
convenient hallucinatory impression made by the ghost on the mind of
the 'percipient'. The old theologians would have declared that a
good spirit took Davies's form, and talked in the tongue best known
to Macpherson. Scott's remark is, that McIntosh's was 'no sound
jest, for there was nothing more ridiculous in a ghost speaking a
language which he did not understand when in the body, than there
was in his appearing at all'. But jurymen are not logicians.
Macpherson added that he told his tale to none of the people with
him in the sheiling, but that Isobel McHardie assured him she 'saw
such a vision'. Isobel, in whose service Macpherson had been,
deponed that, while she lay at one end of the sheiling and
Macpherson at the other, 'she saw something naked come in at the
door, which frighted her so much that she drew the clothes over her
head'. Next day she asked Macpherson what it was, and he replied
'she might be easy, for that it would not trouble them any more'.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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