Moffat says that a tribe of Caffres formerly employed the word Morino to designate the Supreme Being; but as they sank into savagery, losing the idea of God, it came to mean only a fabulous ghost, of which they had great terror.
Having briefly shown the folly of the existence of the word in our vocabulary, I will proceed to explode a few of the best authenticated—so called—“ghost stories;” and if I leave anything unexplained in ghostology, let the reader attribute it to either my want of space in which to write so much, or the neglect of my early education in the dead languages.
The Ghost of the Camp.
I obtained the following story from one of the sentries:—
At Portsmouth, R. I., there was a camp established during the late war, 186-. There was a graveyard in one corner of the enclosed grounds, where several soldier-boys had been buried from the hospital, and here a guard was nightly stationed.
Of course there were many stories told around the campfires, of ghosts and spirits that flitted about the mounds at the dead hours of the night, circulated particularly to frighten those stationed at that point on picket duty.
The body of a soldier had recently been exhumed and placed in a new and more respectable coffin than the pine box coffin furnished by Uncle Sam, in which he had been buried, and the old one was left on the ground.
Partly to protect himself from the inclemency of the weather, and quite as much to show his utter disregard of all ghostly visitors, my informant secured the old pine coffin, “washed it out, though it was impossible to remove all the stains,” and, driving a stake firmly into the ground, he stood the coffin on one end, and, removing the lid, used to stand therein on rainy nights.
“When it did not rain, I turned it down, and my companion and myself used to sit on the bottom.
“One day a soldier-boy had died in the hospital, and his friends came to take the body home for Christian burial. It was necessary to remove him in a sheet to the place where they had an elegant casket, bought by his wealthy friends, to receive the remains.