BONES OF THE DEAD AND PLACE OF BURIAL.
It was part of the lesson impressed on the young Highlander, to treat that which belonged to the dead with reverence. The unnecessary or contemptuous disturbing of graves, bones, or other relics of humanity was reprobated, and sometimes warmly resented. This praiseworthy feeling towards the dead was strengthened by the pride of race and ancestry, which formed so prominent a feature of the Highland character, and by sundry tales of wide circulation.
The story has been already told of the tailor who irreverently gave a kick to a skull, and was ever after haunted by the man to whom it had belonged. It is told of one who disturbed a grave at night, that, on his taking up a skull in his hand, a feeble voice, that of the disturbed spirit, said, “That’s mine.” He dropped that skull and took up another, when a like voice said, “That’s mine.” The man cried out, “Had you two skulls?”
Tradition says the island of Islay derives its name from Ile, a Scandinavian princess, who went to bathe in a loch there, and sticking in the soft mud, was drowned. The head and footstones of her grave are some distance from each other, and of three persons, who successively attempted to open the grave to see what the bones were like, each died mad! Very likely this was the fate awaiting them at any rate. Their action in opening a grave, to satisfy an idle curiosity, was in keeping with a morbid character, and they only died as they lived.
Stones from a disused burying-ground, called “The Burial-place of the Big Women,” on the farm of Heynish, in Tiree, were used for building one of the farm out-houses. In this house, a servant man from Mull was sent to sleep. Through the night he was disturbed by his dog jumping into bed, between him and the wall, and with its fore feet resting upon his body, snarling fiercely at something he could not see. He heard feeble voices through the house, saying, “This is the stone that was at my head.” Nothing more came of this visit of the spirits, than that the Mull man (who was likely the victim of a hoax) positively refused to sleep in that house again.
The manner in which shades haunt the places where their bodies are, is very clearly shown in the following tale.
The body of a woman was cast ashore by the sea on the North Beach, called the Beach of Fell (Tràigh Feall), in the island of Coll, and was buried in the neighbouring sandbanks. After this, the semblance of a woman was seen in the evenings on the beach, close to the tide. Maclean, the then tenant of Caolas, a farm near hand, ridiculed the belief. One evening, however, when going home across the North Beach, at the White Stream (Sruth Bàn), he thought of the numerous stories he had heard of the apparition, and, looking seaward, saw a woman sitting by the tide, rocking herself (ga turruman fhein), and apparently in the utmost distress. He went where she was, and asked her what she was doing? “Hand of cleverness” (làmh thapaidh), she answered, “I have been long here; I try to go home, but I cannot. I was a poor woman belonging to Uist; I was lost on a rock; my body came ashore here, and I try to go home, but cannot; my body keeps me.” Maclean asked what reward she would give, if he took her body home. She promised to be with him in every quarrel or fight, in which he might be involved. This offer he declined, saying his own hand was strong enough to extricate him in any difficulty of that kind. She then offered him the gift of knowing the thief, if anything should be stolen in Coll. This gift he accepted, and the stones that marked the grave being told him, he sent for the woman’s brothers, the body was taken home, and the spectre was no more seen on the North Beach.