WIZARD RISING AFTER DEATH.
People who practised forbidden arts, as may readily be supposed, did not rest after death. When buried they remained quiet like other people, but till then might be troublesome.
Among the hills of Ross-shire, an old man, who in his time was not ‘canny,’ died in his son’s house, a lonely hut in the hills remote from other houses. He was stretched and adjusted (air a ruidheadh ’s air a chàradh) on a board in a closet, and the shepherd, leaving his wife and children in the house, went to the strath for people to come to the wake and funeral. At midnight, one of the children, playing through the house, peeped in at the keyhole of the closet and cried out, “Mother, mother! my grandfather is rising.”[15] The door of the closet was fast locked, and the dead man, finding he could not open it, began to scrape and dig the earth below it, to make a passage for himself. The children gathered round their mother, and in extremity of terror all listened to the scraping of the unhallowed corpse. At last the head appeared below the door, the corpse increased its exertions, and the terror of the mother and children became intense. The body was halfway through below the door when the cock crew and it fell powerless in the pit it had dug. That pit could never afterwards be kept filled up to the level of the rest of the floor.
In Tiree, a head-stone, placed at the grave of a man whom report accused of dabbling in the dark science, would not remain in its place till secured by a chain. It fell every now and then out of its position, but after the chain was fastened to it, it remained firm, and is so now without the chain.