GHOSTS OF THE MURDERED
It is commonly supposed that the spirits of those who have suffered
a violent or untimely death are baneful and malicious beings; for,
as Meiners conjectures in his 'History of Religions,' they were
driven unwillingly from their bodies, and have carried into their new
existence an angry longing for revenge. Hence, in most countries,
there is a dread of such harmful spirits; and, among the Sioux Indians
the fear of the ghost's vengeance has been known to act as a check to
murder. The avenging ghost often comes back to convict the guilty, and
appears in all kinds of strange and uncanny ways. Thus the ghost of
Hamlet's father (i. 5) says:
I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain time to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes, done in my days of nature,
Are burnt and purged away.
Till the crime has been duly expiated, not only is the spirit supposed
to be kept from its desired rest, but it flits about the haunts of the
living, that, by its unearthly molestation, it may compel them to make
every possible reparation for the cruel wrong done. Any attempt to
lay such a ghost is ineffectual, and no exorcist's art can induce it
to discontinue its unwelcome visits. Comparative folk-lore proves how
universal is this belief, for one of the most popular ghost stories
in folk-tales is that which treats of the murdered person whose ghost
hovers about the earth with no gratification but to terrify the living.
The Chinese have a dread of the wandering spirits of persons who
have come to an unfortunate end. At Canton, in 1817, the wife of an
officer of Government had occasioned the death of two female domestic
slaves, from some jealous suspicion it was supposed of her husband's
conduct towards the girls; and, in order to screen herself from the
consequences, she suspended the bodies by the neck, with a view to its
being construed into an act of suicide. But the conscience of the woman
tormented her to such a degree that she became insane, and at times
personated the victims of her cruelty; or, as the Chinese supposed, the
spirits of the murdered girls possessed her, and utilised her mouth to
declare her own guilt. In her ravings she tore her clothes, and beat
her own person with all the fury of madness; after which she would
recover her senses for a time, when it was supposed the demons quitted
her, but only to return with greater frenzy, which took place a short
time previous to her death.[73] According to Mr. Dennys,[74] the most
common form of Chinese ghost story is that wherein the ghost seeks to
bring to justice the murderer who shuffled off its mortal coil.
The following tale is told of a haunted hill in the country of the
Assiniboins. Many summers ago a party of Assiniboins pounced on a
small band of Crees in the neighbourhood of Wolverine Knoll. Among the
victors was the former wife of one of the vanquished, who had been
previously captured by her present husband. This woman directed every
effort in the fight to take the life of her first husband, but he
escaped, and concealed himself on this knoll. Wolverine--for this was
his name--fell asleep, and was discovered by this virago, who killed
him, and presented his scalp to her Assiniboin husband. The knoll was
afterwards called after him. The Indians assert that the ghosts of
the murderess and her victim are often to be seen from a considerable
distance struggling together on the very summit of the height.[75]
The Siamese 'fear as unkindly spirits the souls of such as died a
violent death, or were not buried with the proper rites, and who,
desiring expiation, invisibly terrify their descendants.'[76] In the
same way, the Karens say that the ghosts of those who wander on the
earth are the spirits of such as died by violence; and in Australia we
hear of the souls of departed natives walking about because their death
has not been expiated by the avenger of blood.
The Hurons of America, lest the spirits of the victims of their torture
should remain around the huts of their murderers from a thirst of
vengeance, strike every place with a staff in order to oblige them to
depart. An old traveller mentions the same custom among the Iroquois:
'At night we heard a great noise, as if the houses had all fallen; but
it was only the inhabitants driving away the ghosts of the murdered;'
with which we may compare the belief of the Ottawas: On one occasion,
when noises of the loudest and most inharmonious kind were heard in
a certain village, it was ascertained that a battle had been lately
fought between the Ottawas and Kickapoos, and that the object of all
this noise was to prevent the ghosts of the dead combatants from
entering the village.[77]
European folk-lore still clings to this old belief, and, according
to the current opinion in Norway,[78] the soul of a murdered person
willingly hovers around the spot where his body is buried, and makes
its appearance for the purpose of calling forth vengeance on the
murderer.
The idea that, in cases of hidden murder, the buried dead cannot rest
in their graves is often spoken in our old ballad folk-lore. Thus, in
the ballad of the 'Jew's Daughter,' in Motherwell's collection, a youth
was murdered, and his body thrown into a draw-well, and he speaks to
his mother from the well:
She ran away to the deep draw-well,
And she fell down on her knee,
Saying, 'Bonnie Sir Hugh, oh, pretty Sir Hugh,
I pray ye, speak to me!'
'Oh! the lead it is wondrous heavy, mother,
The well, it is wondrous deep,
The little penknife sticks in my throat,
And I downa to ye speak.
But lift me out of this deep draw-well,
And bury me in yon churchyard;
Put a Bible at my head,' he says,
'And a Testament at my feet,
And pen and ink at every side,
And I will lay still and sleep.
And go to the back of Maitland town,
Bring me my winding sheet;
For it's at the back of Maitland town
That you and I shall meet.'
The eye of superstition, we are told, sees such ghosts sometimes as
white spectres in the churchyard, where they stop horses, terrify
people, and make a disturbance; and occasionally as executed criminals,
who, in the moonlight, wander round the place of execution, with their
heads under their arms. At times they are said to pinch persons while
asleep both black and blue, such spots being designated ghost-spots, or
ghost-pinches. It is also supposed in some parts of Norway that certain
spirits cry like children, and entice people to them, such being
thought to derive their origin from murdered infants. A similar belief
exists in Sweden, where the spirits of little children that have been
murdered are said to wander about wailing, within an assigned time, so
long as their lives would have lasted on earth, had they been allowed
to live. As a terror for unnatural mothers who destroy their offspring,
their sad cry is said to be 'Mama! Mama!' If travellers at night pass
by them, they will hang on the vehicle, when the most spirited horses
will sweat as if they were dragging too heavy a load, and at length
come to a dead stop. The peasant then knows that a ghost or pysling has
attached itself to his vehicle.[79]
The nautical ghost is often a malevolent spirit, as in Shelley's
'Revolt of Islam'; and Captain Marryat tells a sailor story of a
murdered man's ghost appearing every night, and calling hands to
witness a piratical scene of murder, formerly committed on board
the ship in which he appeared. A celebrated ghost is that of the
'Shrieking Woman,' long supposed to haunt the shores of Oakum Bay,
near Marblehead. She was a Spanish lady murdered by pirates in the
eighteenth century, and the apparition is thus described by Whittier in
his 'Legends of New England':
'Tis said that often when the moon,
Is struggling with the gloomy even,
And over moon and star is drawn
The curtain of a clouded heaven,
Strange sounds swell up the narrow glen,
As if that robber crew was there;
The hellish laugh, the shouts of men
And woman's dying prayer.
Many West Indian quays were thought to be the haunts of ghosts
of murdered men; and Sir Walter Scott tells how the Buccaneers
occasionally killed a Spaniard or a slave, and buried him with their
spirits, under the impression that his ghost would haunt the spot, and
keep away treasure hunters. He quotes another incident of a captain
who killed a man in a fit of anger, and, on his threatening to haunt
him, he cooked his body in the stove kettle. The crew believed that
the murdered man took his place at the wheel, and on the yards. The
captain, troubled by his conscience and the man's ghost, finally jumped
overboard, when, as he sank, he threw up his arms and exclaimed, 'Bill
is with me now!'
In most parts of the world similar tales are recorded, and are as
readily believed as when they were first told centuries ago. A certain
island on the Japanese coast is traditionally haunted by the ghosts
of Japanese slain in a naval battle. Even 'to-day the Chousen peasant
fancies he sees the ghostly armies baling out the sea with bottomless
dippers, condemned thus to cleanse the ocean of the slain of centuries
ago.'[80] According to an old Chinese legend the ghost of a captain of
a man-of-war junk, who had been murdered, reappeared and directed how
the ship was to be steered to avoid a nest of pirates.[81]
In this country, many an old mansion has its haunted room, in which
the unhappy spirit of the murdered person is supposed, on certain
occasions, to appear. Generation after generation do such troubled
spirits return to the scene of their life, and persistently wait
till some one is bold enough to stay in the haunted room, and to
question them as to the cause of their making such periodical visits.
Accordingly, when a murder has been committed and not discovered,
often, it is said, has the spirit of the murdered one continued to
come back and torment the neighbourhood till a confession of the crime
has been made, and justice satisfied. Mr. Walter Gregor,[82] detailing
instances in Scotland of haunted houses, tells how 'in one room a lady
had been murdered, and her body buried in a vault below it. Her spirit
could find no rest till she had told who the murderer was, and pointed
out where the body lay. In another, a baby heir had its little life
stifled by the hand of an assassin hired by the next heir. The estate
was obtained, but the deed followed the villain beyond the grave, and
his spirit could find no peace. Night by night the ghost had to return
at the hour of midnight to the room in which the murder was committed,
and in agony spend in it the hours till cock-crowing, when everything
of the supernatural had to disappear.'
The ghost of Lady Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, who always appears in
white, carrying her child in her arms, has long been, as Mr. Ingram
says,[83] 'an enduring monument of the bloodthirsty spirit of the age
in which she lived.' Whilst her husband was away from home, a favourite
of the Regent, Murray seized his house, turned his wife, on a cold
night, naked, into the open fields, where, before morning, she was
found raving mad; her infant perishing either by cold or murder. The
ruins of the mansion of Woodhouslee, 'whence Lady Bothwell was expelled
in the brutal manner which occasioned her insanity and death,' have
long been tenanted with the unfortunate lady's ghost; 'and so tenacious
is this spectre of its rights, that a part of the stones belonging to
the ancient edifice having been employed in building or repairing the
new Woodhouslee, the apparition has deemed it one of her privileges to
haunt that house also.'
Samlesbury Hall, Lancashire, has its ghosts; and it is said that 'on
certain clear still evenings a lady in white can be seen passing along
the gallery and the corridors, and then from the hall into the grounds;
then she meets a handsome knight who receives her on bended knees, and
he then accompanies her along the walks. On arriving at a certain spot,
most probably the lover's grave, both the phantoms stand still, and, as
they seem to utter lost wailings of despair, they embrace each other,
and then melt away into the clear blue of the surrounding sky.' The
story goes that one of the daughters of Sir John Southworth, a former
owner, formed an attachment with the heir of a neighbouring house; but
when Sir John said 'no daughter of his should ever be united to the son
of a family which had deserted its ancestral faith,' an elopement was
arranged. The day and place were overheard by the lady's brother, and,
on the evening agreed upon, he rushed from his hiding-place and slew
her lover. But soon afterwards her mind gave way, and she died a raving
maniac.[84]
Mrs. Murray, a lady born and brought up in the borders, writes Mr.
Henderson,[85] tells me of 'a cauld lad,' of whom she heard in her
childhood during a visit to Gilsland, in Cumberland. He perished from
cold, at the behest of some cruel uncle or stepdame, and ever after his
ghost haunted the family, coming shivering to their bedsides before
anyone was stricken by illness, his teeth audibly chattering; and if it
were to be fatal, he laid his icy hand upon the part which would be the
seat of the disease, saying:
Cauld, cauld, aye cauld!
An' ye see he cauld for evermair.
St. Donart's Castle, on the southern coast of Glamorganshire, has its
favourite ghost, that of Lady Stradling, who is said to have been
murdered by one of her family. 'It appears,' writes the late Mr. Wirt
Sikes,[86] 'when any mishap is about to befall a member of the house
of Stradling, the direct line, however, of which is extinct. She wears
high-heeled shoes, and a long trailing gown of the finest silk.' While
she wanders, the castle hounds refuse to rest, but with their howling
raise all the dogs in the neighbourhood. The Little Shelsey people long
preserved a tradition that the court-house in that parish was haunted
by the spirit of a Lady Lightfoot, who was said to have been imprisoned
and murdered;[87] and Cumnor Hall has acquired a romantic interest from
the poetic glamour flung over it by Mickle in his ballad of Cumnor
Hall, and by Sir Walter Scott in his 'Kenilworth.' Both refer to it
as the scene of Amy Robsart's murder, and although the jury agreed to
accept her death as accidental, the country folk would not forego their
idea that it was the result of foul play. Ever since the fatal event
it was asserted that 'Madam Dudley's ghost did use to walk in Cumnor
Park, and that it walked so obstinately, that it took no less than nine
parsons from Oxford to lay her.' According to Mickle--
The village maids, with fearful glance,
Avoid the ancient moss-grown wall;
Nor ever lead the merry dance
Among the groves of Cumnor Hall.
About half a mile to the east of Maxton, a small rivulet runs across
the old turnpike road, at a spot called Bow-brig-syke. Near this bridge
is a triangular field, in which for nearly a century it was averred
that the forms of two ladies, dressed in white, might be seen pacing up
and down, walking over precisely the same spot of ground till morning
light. But one day, while some workmen were repairing the road, they
took up the large flagstones upon which foot-passengers crossed the
burn, and found beneath them the skeletons of two women lying side by
side. After this discovery the Bow-brig ladies, as they were called,
were never again seen to walk in the three-corner field. The story goes
that these two ladies were sisters to a former laird of Littledean,
who is said to have killed them in a fit of passion, because they
interfered to protect from ill-usage a young lady whom he had met at
Bow-brig-syke. Some years later he met with his own death near the same
fatal spot.[88]
Mr. Sullivan, in his 'Cumberland and Westmoreland,' relates how, some
years ago, a spectre appeared to a man who lived at Henhow Cottage,
Martindale. Starting for his work at an early hour one morning, he
had not gone two hundred yards from his house when his dog gave signs
of alarm, and, on looking round, he saw a woman carrying a child in
her arms. On being questioned as to what was troubling her, the ghost
replied that she had been seduced, and that her seducer, to conceal
his guilt and her frailty, had given her medicine, the effect of
which was to kill both mother and child. Her doom was to wander for a
hundred years, forty of which had expired. The occurrence is believed
to have made a lasting impression on the old man, who, says Sullivan,
'was until lately a shepherd on the fells. There can be no moral doubt
that he both saw and spoke with the apparition; but what share his
imagination had therein, or how it had been excited, are mysteries,
and so they are likely to remain.' But as Grose remarks, ghosts do not
go about their business like living beings. In cases of murder, 'a
ghost, instead of going to the next justice of the peace and laying
its information, or to the nearest relation of the person murdered,
it appears to some poor labourer who knows none of the parties, draws
the curtains of some decrepit nurse or alms-woman, or hovers about the
place where his body is deposited.' The same circuitous mode, he adds,
'is pursued with respect to redressing injured orphans or widows,
when it seems as if the shorter and more certain would be to go to the
person guilty of the injustice, and haunt him continually till he be
terrified into a restitution.'
From early days the phantoms of the murdered have occasionally
appeared to the living, and made known the guilty person or persons
who committed the deed. Thus Cicero relates how 'two Arcadians came
to Megara together; one lodged at a friend's house, the other at an
inn. During the night, the latter appeared to his fellow-traveller,
imploring his help, as the innkeeper was plotting his death; the
sleeper sprang up in alarm, but thinking the vision of no importance,
he went to sleep again. A second time his companion appeared to him, to
entreat that, though he had failed to help, he would at least avenge,
for the innkeeper had killed him, and hidden his body in a dung-cart,
wherefore he charged his fellow-traveller to be early next morning at
the city gate before the cart passed out. The traveller went as bidden,
and there found the cart; the body of the murdered man was in it, and
the innkeeper was brought to justice.'[89]
Of the many curious cases recorded of a murder being discovered through
the ghost of the murdered person, may be quoted one told in Aubrey's
'Miscellanies.' It appears that on Monday, April 14, 1690, William
Barwick was walking with his wife close to Cawood Castle, when, from
motives not divulged at the trial, he determined to murder her, and
finding a pond conveniently at hand, threw her in. But on the following
Tuesday, as his brother-in-law, Thomas Lofthouse, 'about half an hour
after twelve of the clock in the daytime, was watering quickwood, as
he was going for the second pail, there appeared walking before him an
apparition in the shape of a woman, "her visage being like his wife's
sister's." Soon after, she sat down over against the pond, on a green
hill. He walked by her as he went to the pond, and, on his return, he
observed that she was dangling "something like a white bag" on her
lap, evidently suggestive of her unborn baby that was slain with her.
The circumstance made such an impression on him, that he immediately
suspected Barwick, especially as he had made false statements as to
the whereabouts of his wife, and obtained a warrant for his arrest.
The culprit when arrested confessed his crime, and the body of the
murdered woman being recovered, was found dressed in clothing similar,
apparently, to that worn by the apparition. Ultimately Barwick was
hanged for his crime.'[90]
A similar case, which occurred in the county of Durham in 1631, and is
the subject of a critical historical inquiry in Surtees's 'History of
Durham,' may be briefly summed up.[91] 'One Walker, a yeoman of good
estate, a widower, living at Chester-le-Street, had in his service a
young female relative named Anne Walker. The results of an amour which
took place between them caused Walker to send away the girl under
the care of one Mark Sharp, a collier, professedly that she might
be taken care of as befitted her condition, but in reality that she
might no more be troublesome to her lover. Nothing was heard of her
till, one night in the ensuing winter, one James Graham, coming down
from the upper to the lower floor of his mill, found a woman standing
there with her hair hanging about her head, in which were five bloody
wounds. According to the man's evidence, she gave an account of her
fate; having been killed by Sharp on the moor in their journey, and
thrown into a coal pit close by, while the instrument of her death,
a pick, had been hid under a bank along with his clothes, which were
stained with her blood. She demanded of Graham that he should expose
her murder, which he hesitated to do, until she had twice reappeared to
him, the last time with a threatening aspect.
'The body, the pick, and the clothes having been found as Graham
had described, Walter and Sharp were tried at Durham, before Judge
Davenport, in August 1631. The men were found guilty, condemned, and
executed.'
In 'Ackerman's Repository' for November 1820, there is an account of
a person being tried on the pretended evidence of a ghost. A farmer,
on his return from the market at Southam, co. Warwick, was murdered.
The next morning a man called upon the farmer's wife, and related how
on the previous night her husband's ghost had appeared to him, and,
after showing him several stabs on his body, had told him that he was
murdered by a certain person, and his corpse thrown into a marl-pit.
A search was instituted, the body found in the pit, and the wounds on
the body of the deceased were exactly in the parts described by the
pretended dreamer; the person who was mentioned was committed for trial
on the charge of murder, and the trial came on at Warwick before Lord
Chief Justice Raymond. The jury would have convicted the prisoner as
rashly as the magistrate had committed him, but for the interposition
of the judge, who told them he did not put any credence in the
pretended ghost story, since the prisoner was a man of unblemished
reputation, and no ill-feeling had ever existed between himself and
the deceased. He added that he knew of no law which admitted of the
evidence of a ghost, and, if any did, the ghost had not appeared. The
crier was then ordered to summon the ghost, which he did three times,
and the judge then acquitted the prisoner, and caused the accuser to
be detained and his house searched, when such strong proofs of guilt
were discovered, that the man confessed the crime, and was executed for
murder at the following assizes.
FOOTNOTES:
[73] _The Chinese_: J. F. Davis, 1836, ii. pp. 139, 140.
[74] _Folk-lore of China_, p. 73.
[75] See Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 304.
[76] _Primitive Culture_, ii. p. 28.
[77] See Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, 1880, pp. 19, 20.
[78] Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_, ii, p. 19.
[79] Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_, ii. pp. 94, 95.
[80] Griffis, _The Mikado's Kingdom_.
[81] Denny's _Folk-lore of China_; see Bassett's _Legends and
Superstitions of the Sea_, p. 296.
[82] _Folk-lore of North-East of Scotland_, 1881, p. 68.
[83] _Haunted Homes of England_, 1881, p. 286.
[84] _Haunted Homes of England_, 2nd S., pp. 222-225.
[85] _Folk-lore of Northern Counties_, p. 267.
[86] _British Goblins_, pp. 143, 144.
[87] _Gentleman's Magazine_, 1855, part ii. p. 58.
[88] See Henderson's _Folk-lore of Northern Counties_, pp. 324-325.
[89] Quoted in Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 444.
[90] See Ingram's _Haunted Homes_, 1884, pp. 33-36.
[91] See _Book of Days_, ii. p. 287.