XI.
GHOSTS AND WITCHES.
“Save and defend us from our ghostly enemies.”—Common Prayer.
FOLLY OF BELIEF IN GHOSTS.—WHY GHOSTS ARE ALWAYS WHITE.—A TRUE STORY.—THE GHOST OF THE CAMP.—A GHOSTLY SENTRY-BOX.—A MYSTERY.—THE NAGLES FAMILY.—RAISING THE DEAD.—A LIVELY STAMPEDE.—HOLY WATER.—CÆSAR’S GHOST AT PHILIPPI.—LORD BYRON AND DR. JOHNSON.—GHOST OF A GUILTY CONSCIENCE.—“JOCKEYING A GHOST.”—THE WOUNDED BIRD.—A BISHOP SEES A GHOST.—MUSICAL GHOSTS.—A HAUNTED HOUSE.—ABOUT WITCHES.—“WITCHES IN THE CREAM.”—HORSE-SHOES.—WOMAN OF ENDOR NOT A WITCH.—WEIGHING FLESH AGAINST THE BIBLE.—THERE ARE NO GHOSTS, OR WITCHES.
Is it not quite time—I appeal to the sensible reader—that such folly was expunged from our literature? What is a ghost? Who ever saw, heard, felt, tasted, or smelled one? Must a person possess some miraculous quality of perception beyond the five senses commonly allotted to man in order to become cognizant of a ghostly presence?
BELIEVERS IN GHOSTS.
What stupid folly is ghost belief! Yet there are very many individuals in this enlightened day and generation, who, from perverted spirituality, or great credulousness, will accept a ghost story, or a “spiritual revelation,” without wincing.
It would seem that many great men of the past, as Calvin, Bacon, Milton, Dante, Lords Byron and Nelson, Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, and others, believed in the existence of ghosts and spirits on this mundane sphere.
There are but two classes who believe in ghosts, viz., the ignorant as one class, and persons with large or perverted spirituality—phrenologically speaking—as the other. These are the believers in dreams, in ghosts, in spirits, and fortune-telling. These, too, are the religious (?) fanatics, etc.