Ghosts Before the Law

Contents:

Sir Walter Scott on rarity of ghostly evidence. His pamphlet for the Bannatyne Club. His other examples. Case of Mirabel. The spectre, the treasure, the deposit repudiated. Trials of Auguier and Mirabel. The case of Clenche's murder. The murder of Sergeant Davies. Acquittal of the prisoners. An example from Aubrey. The murder of Anne Walker. The case of Mr. Booty. An example from Maryland, the story of Briggs and Harris. The Valogne phantasm. Trials in the matter of haunted houses. Cases from Le Loyer. Modern instances of haunted houses before the law. Unsatisfactory results of legal investigations.

'What I do not know is not knowledge,' Sir Walter Scott might have said, with regard to bogles and bar-ghaists. His collection at Abbotsford of such works as the Ephesian converts burned, is extensive and peculiar, while his memory was rich in tradition and legend. But as his Major Bellenden sings,

Was never wight so starkly made,
But time and years will overthrow.

When Sir Walter in 1831, wrote a brief essay on ghosts before the law, his memory was no longer the extraordinary engine, wax to receive, and marble to retain, that it had been. It is an example of his dauntless energy that, even in 1831, he was not only toiling at novels, and histories, and reviews, to wipe out his debts, but that, as a pure labour of love, he edited, for the Bannatyne Club, 'The trial of Duncan Terig alias Clerk, and Alexander Bane Macdonald, for the murder of Arthur Davis, sergeant in General Guise's regiment of foot, June, 1754'.

The trial, as Sir Walter says, in his dedication to the Bannatyne Club, 'involves a curious point of evidence,' a piece of 'spectral evidence' as Cotton Mather calls it. In another dedication (for there are two) Scott addresses Sir Samuel Shepherd, remarking that the tract deals with 'perhaps the only subject of legal inquiry which has escaped being investigated by his skill, and illustrated by his genius'. That point is the amount of credit due to the evidence of a ghost. In his preface Sir Walter cites the familiar objection of a learned judge that 'the ghost must be sworn in usual form, but in case he does not come forward, he cannot be heard, as now proposed, through the medium' (medium indeed!) 'of a third party'. It seems to be a rule of evidence that what a dead man said may be received, on the report of the person with whom he communicated. A ghost is a dead man, and yet he is deprived, according to the learned judge's ruling, of his privilege. Scott does not cite the similar legend in Hibernian Tales, the chap book quoted by Thackeray in his Irish Sketch-book. In that affair, when the judge asked the ghost to give his own evidence: 'Instantly there came a dreadful rumbling noise into the court--"Here am I that was murdered by the prisoner at the bar"'. The Hibernian Tales are of no legal authority, nor can we give chapter and verse for another well-known