FOLLY OF BELIEF IN GHOSTS.--WHY GHOSTS ARE ALWAYS WHITE.--A TRUE STORY.--THE GHOST OF THE CAMP.--A GHOSTLY SENTRY-BOX.--A MYSTERY.--THE NAGLES FAMILY.--RAISING THE DEAD.--A LIVELY STAMPEDE.--HOLY WATER.--CÆSAR'S GHOST AT PHILIPPI.--LORD BYRON AND DR. JOHNSON.--GHOST OF A GUILTY CONSCIENCE.--"JOCKEYING A GHOST."--THE WOUNDED BIRD.--A BISHOP SEES A GHOST.--MUSICAL GHOSTS.--A HAUNTED HOUSE.--ABOUT WITCHES.--"WITCHES IN THE CREAM."--HORSE-SHOES.--WOMAN OF ENDOR NOT A WITCH.--WEIGHING FLESH AGAINST THE BIBLE.--THERE ARE NO GHOSTS, OR WITCHES. Is it not quite time--I appeal to the sensible reader--that such folly was expunged from our literature? What is a ghost? Who ever saw, heard, felt, tasted, or smelled one? Must a person possess some miraculous quality of perception beyond the five senses commonly allotted to man in order to become cognizant of a ghostly presence? [Illustration: BELIEVERS IN GHOSTS.] What stupid folly is ghost belief! Yet there are very many individuals in this enlightened day and generation, who, from perverted spirituality, or great credulousness, will accept a ghost story, or a "spiritual revelation," without wincing. It would seem that many great men of the past, as Calvin, Bacon, Milton, Dante, Lords Byron and Nelson, Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, and others, believed in the existence of ghosts and spirits on this mundane sphere. There are but two classes who believe in ghosts, viz., the ignorant as one class, and persons with large or perverted spirituality--phrenologically speaking--as the other. These are the believers in dreams, in ghosts, in spirits, and fortune-telling. These, too, are the religious (?) fanatics, etc. THE ORIGIN OF THE WORD GHOST is curious. "The first significance of the word, as well as 'spirit,' is breath, or wind." It is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and is from _gust_, the wind. Hence, a _gust_ of _wind_. The Irish word _goath_, wind, comes nearer to the modern English pronunciation, and shows how easily it could have been corrupted to _ghost_. It is easy to imagine the good old Saxon ladies, sitting around the evening fireside, and just as one of them has finished some marvellous story of that superstitious age, they are startled by a sudden blast of wind, sweeping around the gabled cottage, and her listeners exclaim, in suppressed breath,-- "Hark! There's a fearful gust!" The transit from _gust_ to _ghost_ is easily done. The clothes spread upon the bushes without, or pinned to the lines, flapping in the night air, are seen through the shutterless windows, and they become the object of attraction. The _effect_ supersedes the _cause_, and the clothes become the gust, goath, or ghost! The clothes, necessarily, must be white, or they _could not be seen in the night time_! Hence a ghost is always clothed in white. Therefore the wind (gust) is no longer the ghost, but any white object seen moving in the night air.