Chapter VI: A String of Ghost Stories

A belief in the ghost of vulgar superstition is as much exploded in England now as are the opinions advanced by King James in his "Demonologie." Yet the learned Bacon admitted that such things might be. Luther, Pascal, Guy Patin, Milton, Dr. Johnson, and even Southey, believed in the existence of such mediums with the unseen world. "My serious belief amounts to this," wrote the latter: "that preternatural impressions are sometimes communicated to us for wise purposes; and that departed spirits are sometimes permitted to manifest themselves." And had Pope not entertained some similar idea, he had not written:

"'Tis true, 'tis certain, man, though dead, retains
Part of himself; the immortal mind remains:
The _form_ subsists without the _body's_ aid,
Aerial semblance and an empty shade."

Upon the truth or falsehood, the theories or rather hypotheses, of such alleged appearances, we mean not to dwell; but merely to relate a few little anecdotes connected with them, and drawn--save in Lord Brougham's instance--from sources remote and scarce.

In the memoirs of the celebrated Agrippa d'Aubigné, grandfather of Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV., a man famous for his zeal in Calvinism and disbelief in the spiritual world, and one whose integrity was deemed alike rigid and inflexible, we read the following of a spectre like that of a nursery tale:

"I was," he wrote, "in my bed, and entirely awake, when I heard some one enter my apartment; and perceived at my bedside a woman, remarkably pale, whose clothes rustled against my curtains as she passed. Withdrawing the latter, she stooped towards me, and giving me a kiss that was cold as ice, vanished in a moment!"

D'Aubigné started from bed, and was almost immediately after informed of the sudden death, of his mother, to whom he was tenderly attached.

In a letter of Philip, second Earl of Chesterfield, we find a curious story of a double apparition occurring at the same moment, and which, though it somewhat illustrates Ennemoser's theory of polarity, is beyond the pale of modern philosophy.

In the gray daylight of an early morning in 1652, the earl saw a figure in white, "like a standing sheet," appear within a yard of his bedside. He attempted to grasp it; but, eluding him, the figure slid towards the foot of the bed, and melted away. He felt a strange anxiety; but his thoughts immediately turned to the Countess (Lady Anne Percy), who was then at Networth with her father, the Earl of Northumberland, and thither he immediately repaired. On his arrival a footman met him on the staircase, with a packet directed to him from his lady; whom he found with her sister, the Countess of Essex, and a Mrs. Ramsay. He was asked why he had come so suddenly. He told his motive, his alarm and anxiety; and, on perusing the letter in the sealed packet, he found that the countess had written to him, requesting his return; "as she had seen a thing in white, with a black face, by her bedside." These apparitions were identically the same in appearance, and were seen by the earl and countess _at the same moment_, though they were in two places forty miles apart. No catastrophe followed. The earl, however, survived his lady, and lived till the year 1713.

In the _St. James's Chronicle_ for 1762 we find a strange story of an apparition being the means of revealing a murder, and bringing the guilty parties to the fatal tree at Tyburn. The narrative was said to have been found among the legal papers of a counsellor of the Middle Temple, then recently deceased.

"In the year 1668 a young gentleman of the West Country, named Stobbine, came to London, and soon after, as ill luck would have it, he wedded a wife of Wapping, the youngest daughter of a Mrs. Alceald; and in the space of fifteen months the providence of God sent them a daughter, which (_sic_) was left under the care of the grandmother, the husband and his wife retiring to their house in the country."

In 1676, when the daughter was six years old, Mrs. Alceald died, and the child was sent home, and remained there till 1679, when a Mrs. Myltstre, her maternal aunt, "having greatly increased her means, forsook the canaille and low habitations of Wapping, came into a polite part of the town, took a house among people of quality, and set up for a woman of fashion," and thither did she invite the Stobbines and their daughter to spend the winter with her. Among her visitors were her husband's brother, who had the title or rank of captain, and who seems to have been a bully and gamester--a "blood," in a flowing wig and laced coat--and there was another relation, who practised as an apothecary.

All these five persons dined together on the birthday of the little girl Stobbine, when a terrible catastrophe ensued. In a spirit of play, it was presumed, she took up a sword that was in the room, and pointing it at Mr. Stobbine, cried, "Stick him, stick him!"

"What!" said he, "would you stab your father?"

"You are not my father; but Captain Myltstre is."

Her father, upon this, boxed her ears, and was instantly run through the body by the captain. "Down he dropped," we are told, and then his wife, her sister, the captain, and the apothecary, all trampled upon him till he was quite dead, and interring him secretly, gave out that he had returned to the West Country. Time passed on, and though inquiries were made, and messengers sent after the missing Stobbine, he was heard of no more for a time. His daughter was sent to a distant school, and her mother, "who pretended to go distracted, was sent to a village a few miles out of town, where the captain had a pretty little box for his convenience."

A memory of the terrible scene she had witnessed haunted the daughter, she had nightly horrible dreams and frights, to the terror of a young lady who slept with her; and she always alleged that a spectre haunted her, a spectre visible to her only, and on these occasions she would exclaim, with every manifestation of horror,

"There is a spirit in the room! It is Mr. Stobbine's spirit. Oh, how terrible it looks!"

These appearances and her paroxysms led to an inquiry before a justice of the peace; and without any warning given, the whole of the guilty parties were apprehended and committed to the Gate-house, tried at the Old Bailey, "and condemned, to the entire satisfaction of the county, the court, and all present."

After this, Stobbine's troubled spirit appeared no more. Mrs. Myltstre was hanged, and her body was thrown into the gully-hole near her old house in Wapping; Mrs. Stobbine was strangled and burned. The captain and the apothecary were hanged at Tyburn, and the latter was anatomized; and so ended this tragedy.

Another remarkable detection of murder through the alleged appearance of a ghost, occurred in 1724.

A farmer, returning homeward from Southam market in Warwickshire, disappeared by the way. Next day a man presented himself at the farmhouse, and asked of the wife if her husband had come back.

"No," she replied; "and I am under the utmost anxiety and terror."

"Your terror," said he, "cannot surpass mine; for last night as I lay in bed, quite awake, the apparition of your poor husband appeared to me. He showed me several ghastly stabs in his body, which is now lying in a marl-pit."

The pit was searched, the corpse was found, and the stabs, in number and position, answered in every way to the description given by the ghost-seer, to whom the spectre had named a certain man as the culprit; and this person was committed to prison and brought to trial at Warwick for the crime, before a jury and the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Robert (afterwards Lord) Raymond, who was succeeded in 1733 by Sir Philip Yorke. The jury would speedily have brought in a verdict of guilty; but he checked them by saying,

"Gentlemen, you lay more stress on the allegations of this apparition than they will bear. I cannot give credit to these kind of stories. We are now in a court of law, and must determine according to it; and I know not of any law which will admit of the testimony of an apparition; nor yet if it did, doth the ghost appear to give evidence. Crier," he added, "call the ghost."

The farmer's spirit being thrice summoned in vain, Sir Robert again addressed the jury on the hitherto unblemished character of the man accused, and stoutly asserted a belief in his perfect innocence; adding, "I do strongly suspect that the gentleman who saw the apparition was himself the murderer, and knew all about the stabs and the marl-pit without any supernatural assistance; hence I deem myself justified in committing him to close custody till further inquiries are made."

The result of these was, that on searching his house sufficient proofs of his guilt were found; he confessed his crime, and was executed at the next assize.

In the list of the officers of the 33rd Regiment, when serving under Lord Cornwallis in America, and then called the 1st West York, will be found the names of Captain (afterwards Sir John Coape) Sherbrooke and Lieutenant George Wynward. The former had recently joined the 33rd from the 4th, or King's Own Regiment. These young men, being similar in tastes and very attached friends, spent much of their time in each other's society, and when off duty were seldom apart. One evening Sherbrooke was in Wynward's quarters. The room in which they were seated had two doors, one that led into the common passage of the officers' barrack, the other into Wynward's bedroom, from which there was no other mode of egress.

Both officers were engaged in study, till Sherbrooke, on raising his eyes from a book, suddenly saw a young man about twenty years of age open the entrance door and advance into the room. The lad looked pale, ghastly, and thin, as if in the last stage of a mortal malady. Startled and alarmed, Captain Sherbrooke called Wynward's attention to their noiseless visitor; and the moment the lieutenant saw him he became ashy white and incapable of speech, and, ere he could recover, the figure passed them both and entered the bedroom.

"Good God--my poor brother!" exclaimed Wynward.

"Your brother!" repeated Sherbrooke in great perplexity. "There must be some mistake in all this. Follow me."

They entered the little bedroom--it was tenantless; and Sherbrooke's agitation was certainly not soothed by Wynward expressing his conviction that from the first he believed they had seen a spectre; and they mutually took note of the day and hour at which this inexplicable affair occurred. Wynward at times tried to persuade himself that they might have been duped by the practical joke of some brother officer; yet his mind was evidently so harassed by it, that when he related what had occurred, all had the good taste to withhold comments, and to await with interest the then slow arrival of the English mails. When the latter came, there were missives for every officer in the regiment except Wynward, whose hopes began to rise; but there was one solitary letter for Sherbrooke, which he had no sooner read than he changed colour and left the mess table. Ere long he returned and said,

"Wynward's younger brother is actually no more!" The whole contents of his note were as follows: "Dear John, break to your friend Wynward the death of his favourite brother."

He had died at the very moment the apparition had appeared in that remote Canadian barrack. Strange though the story, the veracity of the witnesses was unimpeachable; and Arch-deacon Wrangham alludes to it in his edition of Plutarch, who, like Pliny the younger, believed in spectres. Of Wynward, we only know that he was out of the regiment soon after his brother's death; and of Sherbrooke, that he lived to see the three days of Waterloo, became Colonel of the 33rd, Commander of the Forces in North America, and died a General and G.C.B.

Prior to accompanying his regiment, the 92nd Highlanders, in the Waterloo campaign, the famous Colonel John Cameron, of Fassifern, a grandson of the Lochiel of the "Forty-five," dined with Lieutenant-colonel Simon Macdonell, of Morar, who had formerly been in the corps when it was embodied at Aberdeen as the old 100th, or Gordon Highlanders. On the occasion of this farewell dinner there were present other officers of the regiment, some of whom died very recently, and it occurred in the house of Morar, at Arasaig, a wild part of Ardnamurchan, on the western coast of Inverness-shire.

As the guests were passing from the drawing-room towards the dining-room, old Colonel Macdonell courteously paused to usher in Cameron before him, and in doing so he was observed to stagger and become pale, while placing his hands before his face, as if to hide something that terrified him. Cameron saw nothing of this, though others did; and all were aware that subsequently, during dinner, their host seemed disconcerted and "out of sorts."

Those unbidden visions known as the _taisch_, or second-sight, were alleged to be hereditary in the family of Morar; and hence when Cameron fell at Quatre Bras a few weeks afterwards, the old Colonel asserted solemnly, that at the moment when Cameron passed before him he saw his figure suddenly become enveloped in a dark shroud, which had blood-gouts upon it about the region of the heart; but no shroud enveloped the gallant Cameron when his foster-brother buried him in the _allée verte_ of Brussels, where his body lay for six months, till it was brought home to Kilmalie, and buried under a monument on which is an inscription penned by Scott.

One of the latest testimonies of the existence of a spiritual world is that given in the _Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham_, written by himself.

In volume first, he tells us that after he left the High School of Edinburgh to attend the University, one of his most intimate friends there was a Mr. G----, with whom, in their solitary walks in the neighbourhood of the city, he frequently discussed and speculated on the immortality of the soul, the possibility of ghosts walking abroad, and of the dead appearing to the living; and they actually committed the folly of drawing up an agreement, written mutually _with their blood_, to the effect, "that whichever died first should appear to the other, and thus solve any doubts entertained of the life after death."

G---- went to India, and after the lapse of a few years Brougham had almost forgotten his existence, when one day in winter--the 19th of December--as he was indulging in the half sleepy luxury of a warm bath, he turned to the chair on which he had deposited his clothes, and thereon sat his old college-chum G----, looking him coolly, quietly, and sadly in the face. Lord Brougham adds that he swooned, and found himself lying on the floor. He noted the circumstance, believing it to be all a dream, and yet, when remembering the compact, he could not discharge from his mind a dread that G---- must have died, and that his appearance even in a dream, was to be received as a proof of a future state. Sixty-three years afterwards the veteran statesman and lawyer appends the following note to this story of the apparition:

"Brougham, Oct. 16, 1862.--I have just been copying out from my journal the account of this strange dream, _certissima mortis imago_. Soon after my return there arrived a letter from India announcing G----'s death, and stating that he died on the 19th of December! Singular coincidence! Yet when one reflects on the vast number of dreams which night after night pass through our brains, the number of coincidences between the vision and the event are perhaps fewer and less remarkable than a fair calculation of chances would warrant us to expect."

THE END.

BILLING, PRINTER, GUILDFORD, SURREY.