In Finistère, as purely Breton as the Morbihan, I found the Legend of
the Dead just as widespread, and the belief in spirits and the
apparitional return of the dead quite as profound; but nothing worth
recording concerning fairies. The stories which follow were told to me
by M. Pierre Vichon, a pure Breton Celt, born at Lescoff, near the
Pointe du Raz, Finistère, in 1842. Peter is a genuine old 'sea-dog',
having made the tour of the globe, and yet he has not lost the innate
faith of his ancient ancestors in a world invisible; for though he says
he cannot believe all that the people in his part of Finistère tell
about spirits and ghosts, he must have a belief that the dead as spirits
exist and influence the living, because of his own personal
experience--one of the most remarkable of its kind. Peter speaks Breton,
French, and English fluently, and since he had an opportunity for the
first time in seventeen months of using English, he told me the stories
in my own native language:--
_Pierre Vichon's Strange Experience._--'Some forty years ago a strange
thing happened in my life. A relative of mine had taken service in the
Austrian army, for by profession he was a soldier, though at first he
had begun to study for the priesthood. During the progress of the war I
had no news from him; and, then one day while I was on the deck of a
Norwegian ship just off Dover (England), my fellow sailors heard a noise
as though of a gun being discharged, and the whirr of a shot. At the
same moment I fell down on the deck as though mortally wounded, and lay
in an unconscious state for two hours. When the news came, it was
ascertained that at the very moment I fell and the gun-report was heard,
my relative in Austria had been shot in the head and fell down dead. And
he had been seen to throw his hands up to his head to grasp it just as I
did.'
_An Apparition of the Dead._--'I had another relative who died in a
hospital near Christiania, Norway; and on the day he died a sister of
mine, then a little girl, saw his spirit appear here in Lescoff, and she
easily recognized it; but none of her girl companions with her at the
time saw the spirit. After a few days we had the news of the death, and
the time of it and the time of my sister's seeing the spirit coincided
exactly.'
In all the peninsula of which the famous and dangerous Pointe du Raz is
the terminus, similar stories are current. And among the fisher-folk
with whom I lived on the strange and historic Île de Sein, the Legend of
the Dead is even more common.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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