Sometimes the Baucan, or terrifying object, causes fright by its mere appearance, sometimes by the noises it makes, and sometimes by its silence. In appearance it is commonly a man or woman moving silently past, and not speaking till spoken to, if even then; but it has also been encountered as a black dog, that accompanies the traveller part of his way, as a headless body (a particularly dangerous form of ghost), as a he-goat, or simply a dark moving object. At other times it is terrific from having a chain clanking after it, from its whistling with unearthly loudness, by horrible and blood-freezing cries and sounds of throttling, and sometimes it makes its presence known only by faint and hardly audible sounds. In fact, the number and variety of things by which superstitious terror may be awakened at night are countless. In most cases the Baucan is deemed the precursor of a sudden or violent death to occur at the place where it is seen or heard. It is remembered after the event that an unaccountable light was seen there at night, or a horse had become uneasy and could not be induced by its rider to pass, or something extraordinary had been observed, which the popular imagination connects with the subsequent event. At other times the Baucan is the spirit of the dead revisiting the earth, that it may be spoken to, and unburden itself of some secret that disturbs its rest. Sometimes it is an evil spirit on some message of darkness and sometimes merely a sound or indistinct object by which the wayfarer is frightened, but of which he is unable to give any lucid description. Fright is destructive of curiosity, and a person ready to faint with terror cannot be expected to be critical in his observations, nor afterwards coherent in his statements. Besides, vagueness or indistinctness as to the cause—an element to which the obscurity of night lends a ready aid—tends to render fear more frantic. If the observer had a distinct view of the object of his alarm, and knew exactly what it was, even though it were a spirit of darkness, his terror would be less. _Omne ignotum pro magnifico_ is an axiom that holds especially true in such cases, and it is ignorance of its own cause that gives terror its wildest forms. A ghost or apparition seen in the day time, if that were possible, would not be at all so dreadful.