This is a rare case of an Italian Banshie. William of Paris, in Bodin (iii. ch. vi.) tells of a stone-throwing fiend, very active in 1447. The bogey of Bingen, a rapping ghost of 856, is duly chronicled; he also threw stones. The dormitory of some nuns was haunted by a spectre who moaned, tramped noisily around, dragged the sisters out of bed by the feet, and even tickled them nearly to death! This annoyance lasted for three years, so Wierus says. {132} Wodrow chronicles a similar affair at Mellantrae, in Annandale. Thyraeus distinguishes three kinds of haunting sprites, devils, damned souls, and souls in purgatory. Some are mites, mild and sportive; some are truculenti ferocious. Brownies, or fauni, may act in either character, as Secutores et joculatores. They rather aim at teasing than at inflicting harm. They throw stones, lift beds, and make a hubbub and crash with the furniture. Suicides, murderers, and spirits of murdered people, are all apt to haunt houses. The sprites occasionally appear in their proper form, but just as often in disguise: a demon, too, can appear in human shape if so disposed: demons being of their nature deceitful and fond of travesty, as Porphyry teaches us and as Law (1680) illustrates. Whether the spirits of the dead quite know what they are about when they take to haunting, is, in the opinion of Thyraeus, a difficult question. Thomas Aquinas, following St. Augustine, inclines to hold that when there is an apparition of a dead man, the dead man is unconscious of the circumstance. A spirit of one kind or another may be acting in his semblance. Thyraeus rather fancies that the dead man is aware of what is going on.