OTHER INSTANCES OF SPECTRES WHICH HAUNT CERTAIN HOUSES.
Father Pierre Thyree,[316] a Jesuit, relates an infinite number of
anecdotes of houses haunted by ghosts, spirits, and demons; for
instance, that of a tribune, named Hesperius, whose house was infested
by a demon who tormented the domestics and animals, and who was driven
away, says St. Augustin,[317] by a good priest of Hippo, who offered
therein the divine sacrifice of the body of our Lord.
St. Germain,[318] Bishop of Capua, taking a bath in one particular
quarter of the town, found there Paschaus, a deacon of the Roman
Church, who had been dead some time, and who began to wait upon him,
telling him that he underwent his purgatory in that place for having
favored the party of Laurentius the anti-pope, against Pope Symachus.
St. Gregory of Nicea, in the life of St. Gregory of Neocaesarea, says
that a deacon of this holy bishop, having gone into a bath where no
one dared go after a certain hour in the evening, because all those
who had entered there had been put to death, beheld spectres of all
kinds, which threatened him in a thousand ways, but he got rid of them
by crossing himself and invoking the name of Jesus.
Alexander ab Alexandro,[319] a learned Neapolitan lawyer of the
fifteenth century, says that all the world knows that there are a
number of houses at Rome so much out of repute on account of the
ghosts which appear in them every night that nobody dares to inhabit
them. Nicholas Tuba, his friend, a man well known for his probity and
veracity, who came once with some of his comrades to try if all that
was said of those houses was true, would pass the night in one of them
with Alexander. As they were together, wide awake, and with plenty of
light, they beheld a horrible spectre, which frightened them so much
by its terrific voice and the great noise which it made, that they
hardly knew what they did, nor what they said; "and by degrees, as we
approached," says he, "with the light, the phantom retreated; at last,
after having thrown all the house into confusion, it disappeared
entirely."
I might also relate here the spectre noticed by Father Sinson the
Jesuit, which he saw, and to which he spoke at Pont-a-Mousson, in the
cloister belonging to those fathers; but I shall content myself with
the instance which is reported in the _Causes Celebres_,[320] and
which may serve to undeceive those who too lightly give credit to
stories of this kind.
At the Chateau d' Arsillier, in Picardy, on certain days of the year,
towards November, they saw flames and a horrible smoke proceeding
thence. Cries and frightful howlings were heard. The bailiff, or
farmer of the chateau, had got accustomed to this uproar, because he
himself caused it. All the village talked of it, and everybody told
his own story thereupon. The gentleman to whom the chateau belonged,
mistrusting some contrivance, came there near All-saints' day with two
gentlemen his friends, resolved to pursue the spirit, and fire upon it
with a brace of good pistols. A few days after they arrived, they
heard a great noise above the room where the owner of the chateau
slept; his two friends went up thither, holding a pistol in one hand
and a candle in the other; and a sort of black phantom with horns and
a tail presented itself, and began to gambol about before them.
One of them fired off his pistol; the spectre, instead of falling,
turns and skips before him: the gentleman tries to seize it, but the
spirit escapes by the back staircase; the gentleman follows it, but
loses sight of it, and after several turnings, the spectre throws
itself into a granary, and disappears at the moment its pursuer
reckoned on seizing and stopping it. A light was brought, and it was
remarked that where the spectre had disappeared there was a trapdoor,
which had been bolted after it entered; they forced open the trap,
and found the pretended spirit. He owned all his artifices, and that
what had rendered him proof against the pistol shot was buffalo's hide
tightly fitted to his body.
Cardinal de Retz,[321] in his Memoirs, relates very agreeably the
alarm which seized himself and those with him on meeting a company of
black Augustine friars, who came to bathe in the river by night, and
whom they took for a troop of quite another description.
A physician, in a dissertation which he has given on spirits or
ghosts, says that a maid servant in the Rue St. Victor, who had gone
down into the cellar, came back very much frightened, saying she had
seen a spectre standing upright between two barrels. Some persons who
were bolder went down, and saw the same thing. It was a dead body,
which had fallen from a cart coming from the Hotel-Dieu. It had slid
down by the cellar window (or grating), and had remained standing
between two casks. All these collective facts, instead of confirming
one another, and establishing the reality of those ghosts which appear
in certain houses, and keep away those who would willingly dwell in
them, are only calculated, on the contrary, to render such stories in
general very doubtful; for on what account should those people who
have been buried and turned to dust for a long time find themselves
able to walk about with their chains? How do they drag them? How do
they speak? What do they want? Is it sepulture? Are they not interred?
If they are heathens and reprobates, they have nothing to do with
prayers. If they are good people, who died in a state of grace, they
may require prayers to take them out of purgatory; but can that be
said of the spectres spoken of by Pliny and Lucian? It is the devil,
who sports with the simplicity of men? Is it not ascribing to him most
excessive power, by making him the author of all these apparitions,
which we conceive he cannot cause without the permission of God? And
we can still less imagine that God will concur in the deceptions and
illusions of the demon. There is then reason to believe that all the
apparitions of this kind, and all these stories, are false, and must
be absolutely rejected, as more fit to keep up the superstition and
idle credulity of the people than to edify and instruct them.
Footnotes:
[316] Thyraei Demoniaci cum locis infestis.
[317] S. Aug. de Civ. lib. xxii. 8.
[318] S. Greg. Mag. Dial. cap. 39.
[319] Alexander ab Alexandro, lib. v. 23.
[320] Causes Celebres, tom. xi. p. 374.
[321] Mem. de Cardinal de Retz, tom. i. pp. 43, 44