From the _Border Minstrelsy_. That corpses _might_ begin to “thraw,” if
carelessly watched, was a prevalent superstition. Scott gives an
example: the following may be added, as less well known. The watchers
had left the corpse alone, and were dining in the adjoining room, when a
terrible noise was heard in the chamber of death. None dared enter; the
minister was sent for, and passed into the room. He emerged, asked for a
pair of tongs, and returned, bearing in the tongs _a bloody glove_, and
the noise ceased. He always declined to say what he had witnessed.
Ministers were exorcists in the last century, and the father of James
Thomson, the poet, died suddenly in an interview with a guest, in a
haunted house. The house was pulled down, as being uninhabitable.