his return met with this spectre, whom he at first accosted civilly, and
paid her the courtesy of handing her over a stile. Observing, however,
that she did not move her lips in speaking, or her eyes in looking
round, he became suspicious of the condition of his companion, and
showed some desire to be rid of her society. Offended at this, the hag
at next stile planted herself upon it, and obstructed his passage. He
got through at length with some difficulty, and not without a sound
kick, and an admonition to pay more attention to the next aged
gentlewoman whom he met. "But this," says John Dunton, "was a petty and
inconsiderable prank to what she played in her son's house and
elsewhere. She would at noonday appear upon the quay of Mynehead, and
cry, 'A boat, a boat, ho! a boat, a boat, ho!' If any boatmen or seamen
were in sight, and did not come, they were sure to be cast away; and if
they did come, 'twas all one, they were cast away. It was equally
dangerous to please and displease her. Her son had several ships sailing
between Ireland and England; no sooner did they make land, and come in
sight of England, but this ghost would appear in the same garb and
likeness as when she was alive, and, standing at the mainmast, would
blow with a whistle, and though it were never so great a calm, yet
immediately there would arise a most dreadful storm, that would break,
wreck, and drown the ship and goods; only the seamen would escape with
their lives--the devil had no permission from God to take them away. Yet
at this rate, by her frequent apparitions and disturbances, she had made
a poor merchant of her son, for his fair estate was all buried in the
sea, and he that was once worth thousands was reduced to a very poor and
low condition in the world; for whether the ship were his own or hired,
or he had but goods on board it to the value of twenty shillings, this
troublesome ghost would come as before, whistle in a calm at the
mainmast at noonday, when they had descried land, and then ship and
goods went all out of hand to wreck; insomuch that he could at last get
no ships wherein to stow his goods, nor any mariner to sail in them; for
knowing what an uncomfortable, fatal, and losing voyage they should make
of it, they did all decline his service. In her son's house she hath her
constant haunts by day and night; but whether he did not, or would not
own if he did, see her, he always professed he never saw her. Sometimes
when in bed with his wife, she would cry out, 'Husband, look, there's
your mother!' And when he would turn to the right side, then was she
gone to the left; and when to the left side of the bed, then was she
gone to the right; only one evening their only child, a girl of about
five or six years old, lying in a ruckle-bed under them, cries out, 'Oh,
help me, father! help me, mother! for grandmother will choke me!' and
before they could get to their child's assistance she had murdered it;
they finding the poor girl dead, her throat having been pinched by two
fingers, which stopped her breath and strangled her. This was the sorest
of all their afflictions; their estate is gone, and now their child is
gone also; you may guess at their grief and great sorrow. One morning
after the child's funeral, her husband being abroad, about eleven in the
forenoon, Mrs. Leckie the younger goes up into her chamber to dress her
head, and as she was looking into the glass she spies her mother-in-law,
the old beldam, looking over her shoulder. This cast her into a great
horror; but recollecting her affrighted spirits, and recovering the
exercise of her reason, faith, and hope, having cast up a short and
silent prayer to God, she turns about, and bespeaks her: 'In the name of
God, mother, why do you trouble me?' 'Peace,' says the spectrum; 'I will
do thee no hurt.' 'What will you have of me?' says the daughter,"
&c.[86] Dunton, the narrator and probably the contriver of the story,
proceeds to inform us at length of a commission which the wife of Mr.
Leckie receives from the ghost to deliver to Atherton, Bishop of
Waterford, a guilty and unfortunate man, who afterwards died by the
hands of the executioner; but that part of the subject is too
disagreeable and tedious to enter upon.
[Footnote 86: "Apparition Evidence."]
So deep was the impression made by the story on the inhabitants of
Mynehead, that it is said the tradition of Mrs. Leckie still remains in
that port, and that mariners belonging to it often, amid tempestuous
weather, conceive they hear the whistle-call of the implacable hag who
was the source of so much mischief to her own family. However, already
too desultory and too long, it would become intolerably tedious were I
to insist farther on the peculiar sort of genius by which stories of
this kind may be embodied and prolonged.
I may, however, add, that the charm of the tale depends much upon the
age of the person to whom it is addressed; and that the vivacity of
fancy which engages us in youth to pass over much that is absurd, in
order to enjoy some single trait of imagination, dies within us when we
obtain the age of manhood, and the sadder and graver regions which lie
beyond it. I am the more conscious of this, because I have been myself
at two periods of my life, distant from each other, engaged in scenes
favourable to that degree of superstitious awe which my countrymen
expressively call being _eerie_.
On the first of these occasions I was only ninteeen or twenty years old,
when I happened to pass a night in the magnificent old baronial castle
of Glammis, the hereditary seat of the Earls of Strathmore. The hoary
pile contains much in its appearance, and in the traditions connected
with it, impressive to the imagination. It was the scene of the murder
of a Scottish king of great antiquity; not indeed the gracious Duncan,
with whom the name naturally associates itself, but Malcolm the Second.
It contains also a curious monument of the peril of feudal times, being
a secret chamber, the entrance of which, by the law or custom of the
family, must only be known to three persons at once, viz., the Earl of
Strathmore, his heir apparent, and any third person whom they may take
into their confidence. The extreme antiquity of the building is vouched
by the immense thickness of the walls, and the wild and straggling
arrangement of the accommodation within doors. As the late Earl of
Strathmore seldom resided in that ancient mansion, it was, when I was
there, but half-furnished, and that with movables of great antiquity,
which, with the pieces of chivalric armour hanging upon the walls,
greatly contributed to the general effect of the whole. After a very
hospitable reception from the late Peter Proctor, Esq., then seneschal
of the castle, in Lord Strathmore's absence, I was conducted to my
apartment in a distant corner of the building. I must own, that as I
heard door after door shut, after my conductor had retired, I began to
consider myself too far from the living and somewhat too near the dead.
We had passed through what is called "The King's Room," a vaulted
apartment, garnished with stags' antlers and similar trophies of the
chase, and said by tradition to be the spot of Malcolm's murder, and I
had an idea of the vicinity of the castle chapel.
In spite of the truth of history, the whole night-scene in Macbeth's
castle rushed at once upon my mind, and struck my imagination more
forcibly than even when I have seen its terrors represented by the late
John Kemble and his inimitable sister. In a word, I experienced
sensations which, though not remarkable either for timidity or
superstition, did not fail to affect me to the point of being
disagreeable, while they were mingled at the same time with a strange
and indescribable kind of pleasure, the recollection of which affords me
gratification at this moment.
In the year 1814 accident placed me, then past middle life, in a
situation somewhat similar to that which I have described.
I had been on a pleasure voyage with some friends around the north coast
of Scotland, and in that course had arrived in the salt-water lake under
the castle of Dunvegan, whose turrets, situated upon a frowning rock,
rise immediately above the waves of the loch. As most of the party, and
I myself in particular, chanced to be well known to the Laird of
Macleod, we were welcomed to the castle with Highland hospitality, and
glad to find ourselves in polished society, after a cruise of some
duration. The most modern part of the castle was founded in the days of
James VI.; the more ancient is referred to a period "whose birth
tradition notes not." Until the present Macleod connected by a
drawbridge the site of the castle with the mainland of Skye, the access
must have been extremely difficult. Indeed, so much greater was the
regard paid to security than to convenience, that in former times the
only access to the mansion arose through a vaulted cavern in a rock, up
which a staircase ascended from the sea-shore, like the buildings we
read of in the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe.
Such a castle, in the extremity of the Highlands, was of course
furnished with many a tale of tradition, and many a superstitious
legend, to fill occasional intervals in the music and song, as proper to
the halls of Dunvegan as when Johnson commemorated them. We reviewed the
arms and ancient valuables of this distinguished family--saw the dirk
and broadsword of Rorie Mhor, and his horn, which would drench three
chiefs of these degenerate days. The solemn drinking-cup of the Kings of
Man must not be forgotten, nor the fairy banner given to Macleod by the
Queen of Fairies; that magic flag which has been victorious in two
pitched fields, and will still float in the third, the bloodiest and the
last, when the Elfin Sovereign shall, after the fight is ended, recall
her banner, and carry off the standard-bearer.
Amid such tales of ancient tradition I had from Macleod and his lady the
courteous offer of the haunted apartment of the castle, about which, as
a stranger, I might be supposed interested. Accordingly, I took
possession of it about the witching hour. Except perhaps some tapestry
hangings, and the extreme thickness of the walls, which argued great
antiquity, nothing could have been more comfortable than the interior of
the apartment; but if you looked from the windows the view was such as
to correspond with the highest tone of superstition. An autumnal blast,
sometimes driving mist before it, swept along the troubled billows of
the lake, which it occasionally concealed, and by fits disclosed. The
waves rushed in wild disorder on the shore, and covered with foam the
steep piles of rock, which, rising from the sea in forms something
resembling the human figure, have obtained the name of Macleod's
Maidens, and in such a night seemed no bad representatives of the
Norwegian goddesses called Choosers of the Slain, or Riders of the
Storm. There was something of the dignity of danger in the scene; for on
a platform beneath the windows lay an ancient battery of cannon, which
had sometimes been used against privateers even of late years. The
distant scene was a view of that part of the Quillan mountains which are
called, from their form, Macleod's Dining-Tables. The voice of an angry
cascade, termed the Nurse of Rorie Mhor, because that chief slept best
'in its vicinity, was heard from time to time mingling its notes with
those of wind and wave. Such was the haunted room at Dunvegan, and as
such it well deserved a less sleepy inhabitant. In the language of Dr.
Johnson, who has stamped his memory on this remote place, "I looked
around me, and wondered that I was not more affected; but the mind is
not at all times equally ready to be moved." In a word, it is necessary
to confess that, of all I heard or saw, the most engaging spectacle was
the comfortable bed, in which I hoped to make amends for some rough
nights on ship-board, and where I slept accordingly without thinking of
ghost or goblin till I was called by my servant in the morning.
From this I am taught to infer that tales of ghosts and demonology are
out of date at forty years and upwards; that it is only in the morning
of life that this feeling of superstition "comes o'er us like a summer
cloud," affecting us with fear which is solemn and awful rather than
painful; and I am tempted to think that, if I were to write on the
subject at all, it should have been during a period of life when I could
have treated it with more interesting vivacity, and might have been at
least amusing if I could not be instructive. Even the present fashion of
the world seems to be ill suited for studies of this fantastic nature;
and the most ordinary mechanic has learning sufficient to laugh at the
figments which in former times were believed by persons far advanced in
the deepest knowledge of the age.
I cannot, however, in conscience carry my opinion of my countrymen's
good sense so far as to exculpate them entirely from the charge of
credulity. Those who are disposed to look for them may, without much
trouble, see such manifest signs, both of superstition and the
disposition to believe in its doctrines, as may render it no useless
occupation to compare the follies of our fathers with our own. The
sailors have a proverb that every man in his lifetime must eat a peck of
impurity; and it seems yet more clear that every generation of the human
race must swallow a certain measure of nonsense. There remains hope,
however, that the grosser faults of our ancestors are now out of date;
and that whatever follies the present race may be guilty of, the sense
of humanity is too universally spread to permit them to think of
tormenting wretches till they confess what is impossible, and then
burning them for their pains.
THE END.
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