HORSES AND DOGS.
These animals were deemed to have the gift of seeing spectres in a larger measure than the best seers. They are observed to be frightened, or to have their fury raised, without any visible or intelligible cause; they show signs of terror and distress when human eyes can see no cause, and it is part of the Celtic belief in the second sight that this excitement is caused by seeing the taïsh, or shades of the living, in those circumstances, and engaged in those services in which the persons, whose similitude they are, will afterwards be. Dogs bark at night, and when this occurs on clear moonlight nights, they are said in English to “bay the moon.” The Celtic belief does not deny that they often bark at the moon, but it asserts further their clamour arises, as the event afterwards proves, from their seeing the forms of that world, in which fetches and doubles move, the omens of an impending death. Horses are better spectre-seers than even dogs. At places where a violent or sudden death is to occur, they take fright, and no effort of the rider can get them to pass the spot, till at last he has to dismount and lead them past. This is caused by their seeing the “fetch” of the subsequent event, but ordinary people pass it over merely as an “unaccountable fright.”
“I have heard,” said a Skyeman, “scores of times the dogs howling before a funeral was to take place in Kilmuir churchyard. It was because they saw the wraiths of the living” (tàslaich nan daoine beò). It is a universal Highland belief that certain dogs cry at night when any one in the house is to die.
In Lorn, a woman, going with leather to a neighbouring shoemaker, had on her way to cross a wooden bridge thrown over a mountain stream. She was accompanied by a young child, whom she left, while she herself crossed the bridge to leave the parcel of leather on the other side. As she was crossing a second time, leading the child, the stream came down in flood, as mountain streams do, and carried away the bridge. The woman and child were drowned, and their bodies were found further down the stream, at a place where, for fourteen days previously, a grey tailless bitch (galla chutach ghlas), belonging to a neighbour, used to go and howl piteously.
The fierce growling of a dog at night, when nothing is known to be in the house to excite its fury, is also supposed to arise from its seeing spirits, or the spectres, it is not known which, of the living or of the dead. Stories of this class usually run in the same groove. A shepherd or servant-man has a very good dog, which is in the habit of sleeping in the same room with himself. One night it suddenly gets up growling, and is heard making its way to the other end of the room. It returns howling faintly, springs into bed, and, lying with its forepaws resting on its master, snarls fiercely at something invisible. The occupant of the bed, not seeing anything to account for the dog’s fury, puts his head below the bedclothes and quakes with fear till daylight.
A horse in Vaul, Tiree, ordinarily a quiet beast used, when carting, to be most unaccountably startled especially when passing a certain boat, drawn up on the beach. This same boat has been mentioned already as having, in consequence of being spectre-haunted, been sold by people in the west end of Tiree to some villagers in the east end, who gave the loan of it to Vaul people. Lights began also to be seen about it, and it was ultimately sent back to the lenders, who again sold it to people in the west end. Here a melancholy loss of life occurred in it. A gale off the land suddenly sprang up, when the boat, with its six of a crew, was within a few hundred yards of the shore. The men were seen rowing hard to bring the boat to land, but they had at last to give up the attempt. Some days after, the boat came ashore in Coll, with only one of the crew in it. He was reclining on one of the thwarts dead. It was the horse and cart mentioned that took home his body. After that day the horse was never known to be unaccountably startled or frightened. Its former fits entirely forsook it.