According to Bulgarian belief a ghost against which proper precautions are not taken may cause, especially in the winter, much annoyance. Such ghosts may even have sexual intercourse with women. As lately as the year 1888, at the village of Orzoja, the death of a certain girl was attributed by the people to this cause.[204.1] A Ruthenian story represents a dead husband as haunting his wife every night for a whole year. Whether he actually came to conjugal intercourse does not appear. However that might have been, he gave her no rest from his bodily attacks. Worn out, she sought for help against him, and was advised to take poppy-seed to bed with her, to fasten upon her head a large bowl, and to light a taper. When the dead man came as usual she threw the poppy-seed in his face, as she had been prescribed. He asked in a tone of surprise who had given her this advice. By way of answer she threw more. In a fury the dead man flung himself upon her, by main force tore the bowl from her and took to flight, apparently convinced that he had torn off her head. The door banged after him so violently as to split from top to bottom; and in the morning the bowl was found some distance away, smashed to pieces. But the woman was delivered from her tormentor from that hour.[204.2] Sir Walter Scott’s novel, _The Pirate_, was based on the deeds and capture of one John Gow. This man was taken prisoner in the Orkney Islands and afterwards tried before the High Court of Admiralty in London, condemned for piracy and executed. Before his capture he had become affianced to an Orcadian girl. “It is {205} said,” writes Sir Walter in the advertisement prefixed to the book, “that the lady whose affections Gow had engaged went up to London to see him before his death, and that, arriving too late, she had the courage to request a sight of his dead body; and then, touching the hand of the corpse, she formally resumed the troth-plight which she had bestowed. Without going through this ceremony she could not, according to the superstition of the country, have escaped a visit from the ghost of her departed lover, in the event of her bestowing upon any living suitor the faith which she had plighted to the dead.”[205.1] In the Orkney Islands these superstitions were then vivid. If we may judge by a phrase in the record of a witch-trial at Kirkwall, it was the belief in the early part of the seventeenth century that a man slain at the going down of the sun remained neither living nor dead, but was capable of sexual intercourse with any woman who would yield herself to him; in return for which he gave “a guidly fe,” in the shape of second sight and power of divining the future.[205.2] A circumstantial and horrible account of a series of occurrences of the same period in Iceland is given by contemporary authorities. A man of position named Ivar Eyjulfsson was wedded to Herdis, daughter of Sera Magnus Jonsson of Ottrardal. They lived at Reykjarfjörd on