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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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