Presbyterian Ghost Hunters - Page 2

S. J., to black dogs haunting Thomas Smeaton, the friend of Andrew Melville (1580). But Father Piatti thinks that the dogs were avenging devils, Smeaton being an apostate (MS. Life of Elphinstone). Again Covenanters would see mysterious floods of light, as the heathen also used, but, like the heathen, they were not certain as to whether the light was produced by good or bad spirits. Like poor bewildered Porphyry, many centuries earlier, they found the spirits 'very deceitful'. You never can depend on them. This is well illustrated by the Rev. Mr. Robert Law, a Covenanting minister, but not a friend of fanaticism and sedition.

In his Memorialls, a work not published till long after his death, he gives this instance of the deceitfulness of sprites. The Rev. Mr. John Shaw, in Ireland, was much troubled by witches, and by 'cats coming into his chamber and bed'. He died, so did his wife, 'and, as was supposed, witched'. Before Mr. Shaw's death his groom, in the stable, saw 'a great heap of hay rolling toward him, and then appeared' (the hay not the groom) 'in the shape and lykness of a bair. He charges it to appear in human shape, which it did.' The appearance made a tryst to meet the groom, but Mr. Shaw forbade this tampering with evil in the lykness of a bair. However a stone was thrown at the groom, which he took for a fresh invitation from the bair, so he went to the place appointed. 'The divill appears in human shape, with his heid running down with blood,' and explains that he is 'the spirit of a murdered man who lay under his bed, and buried in the ground, and who was murdered by such a man, naming him by name'. The groom, very naturally, dug in the spot pointed out by this versatile phantom, 'but finds nothing of bones or anything lyke a grave, and shortly after this man dyes,' having failed to discover that the person accused of murder had ever existed at all.

Many ghosts have a perfect craze for announcing that bodies or treasures, are buried where there is nothing of the sort. Glanvill has a tale of a ghost who accused himself of a murder, and led a man to a place in a wood where the corpse of the slain was to be found. There was no corpse, the ghost was mad. The Psychical Society have published the narratives of a housemaid and a butler who saw a lady ghost. She, later, communicated through a table her intention to appear at eleven p.m. The butler and two ladies saw her, the gentlemen present did not. The ghost insisted that jewels were buried in the cellar; the butler dug, but found none. The writer is acquainted with another ghost, not published, who labours under morbid delusions. For reasons wholly unfounded on fact she gave a great deal of trouble to a positive stranger. Now there was literally no sense in these proceedings. Such is ghostly evidence, ever deceitful!

'It's not good,' says Mr. Law, 'to come in communing terms with Satan, there is a snare in the end of it;' yet people have actually been