was again subjected to the dead man’s assaults; and the magician could only protect her by setting on her lap a woman holding upright a naked blade of steel. At length the ghost attacked the magician himself, and, blowing in his mouth, caused him a frightful ulcer in the neck; so that he was compelled to leave the place, declaring that he could not cope with all the devils that followed Ivar’s ghost. Herdis sought refuge in a chapel, but in vain. She returned home, therefore; and shortly after, on a Sunday morning, a loud crash was heard; her bed had broken down, and two of its timbers had fallen to the ground. That was the culmination of the ghostly persecution. The unhappy woman breathed her last. The magician said, when he heard of it, that the ghost had strangled her. Then he did what, by all the rules of the ghostlayer’s art, he ought to have done before. Venturing back to Sturla’s house, he ordered Ivar’s grave to be opened. Ivar’s body and that of Jon were found undecayed, but right {208} evil to look upon. They were disinterred and burnt, and with that all manifestations came to an end.[208.1] This narrative is not an ordinary saga, located indeed at a specified place, but the events of which are told of an indefinite past, or are clustered in a manner known to all students of folklore round a celebrated name. It is quite distinguishable in character from the Icelandic tale I have mentioned on a previous page. It was soberly reported in the year 1606 by persons of credit, if also of credulity, according to our standard, while most of the actors and a number of persons who had more or less acquaintance with the facts were yet living; it was related as something which had occurred not within their recollections at some distant date, but quite recently. The ghostlayer whose services were called in survived until the year 1647, and was well known in the island. The account therefore discloses the kind of horrors that in that age, as in earlier ages, witness the _Heimskringla_ and various sagas, enlivened the long gloom of an arctic winter. Foremost among those horrors may be reckoned the belief that dead men still, in some circumstances at any rate, retained their sexual instincts, and attempted, not in vain, to gratify those instincts upon living women. Indeed, communities boasting themselves of the culture and progress of the twentieth century have not entirely discarded the terrors born of some such belief. I do not refer to solitary cases of mania,[208.2] such as are probably to be found in all communities from time to time, but to cases in which the belief has been adopted by society {209} at large and stamped with the collective approval, or at least acceptance. This may be said to be done when a court of law, in the course of a judicial investigation, admits evidence of haunting and solemnly gives judgement based upon such evidence.