The explanation that Bezuel was ill (as he certainly was), that he had heard of the death of his friend just before his hallucination, and had forgotten an impressive piece of news, which, however, caused the apparition, is given by the narrator of 1708. The kind of illusion in which a man is seen and heard to converse with empty air, is common to the cases of Bezuel and of Briggs, and the writer is acquainted, at first hand, with a modern example.
Mrs. Crowe cites, on the authority of the late Mr. Maurice Lothian, solicitor for the plaintiff, a suit which arose out of ‘hauntings,’ and was heard in the sheriff’s court, at Edinburgh, in 1835-37. But we are unable to discover the official records, or extracts of evidence from them. This is to be regretted, but, by way of consolation, we have the pleadings on both sides in an ancient French case of a haunted house. These are preserved in his Discours des Spectres, a closely printed quarto of nearly 1000 pages, by Pierre le Loyer, Conseiller du Roy au Siège Présidial d’Angers. [{269}] Le Loyer says, ‘De gayétè de coeur semble m’estre voulu engager au combat contre ceux qui impugnent les spectres!’ As Le Loyer observes, ghosts seldom come into court in civil cases, except when indicted as nuisances, namely, when they make a hired house uninhabitable by their frolics. Then the tenant often wants to quit the house, and to have his contract annulled. The landlord resists, an action is brought, and is generally settled in accordance with the suggestion of Alphenus, in his Digests, book ii. Alphenus says, in brief, that the fear must be a genuine fear, and that reason for no ordinary dread must be proved. Hence Arnault Ferton, in his Customal of Burgundy, advises that ‘legitimate dread of phantasms which trouble men’s rest and make night hideous’ is reason good for leaving a house, and declining to pay rent after the day of departure. Covarruvias, a Spanish legist, already quoted, agrees with Arnault Ferton. The Parliament of Grenada, in one or two cases, decided in favour of the tenant, and against the landlord of houses where spectres racketed. Le Loyer now reports the pleadings in a famous case, of which he does not give the date. Incidentally, however, we learn that it can hardly have been earlier than 1550. The cause was heard, on appeal, before the Parlement de Paris.
Pierre Piquet, guardian of Nicolas Macquereau (a minor), let to Giles Bolacre a house in the suburbs of Tours. Poor Bolacre was promptly disturbed by a noise and routing of invisible spirits, which suffered neither himself nor his family to sleep o’ nights. He then cited Piquet, also Daniel Macquereau, who was concerned in the letting of the house, before the local seat of Themis. The case was heard, and the judge at Tours broke the lease, the hauntings being insupportable nuisances. But this he did without letters royal. The lessors then appealed, and the case came before the Cour de Parlement in Paris. Maître Chopin was for the lessors, Nau appeared for the tenant. Chopin first took the formal point, the Tours judge was formally wrong in breaking a covenant without letters royal, a thing particularly bad in the case of a minor, Nicolas Macquereau.
So much for the point of form; as to the matter, Maître Chopin laughed at the bare idea of noisy spirits. This is notable because, in an age when witches were burned frequently, the idea of a haunted house could be treated by the learned counsel as a mere waggery. Yet the belief in haunted houses has survived the legal prosecution of witches. ‘The judge in Tours has merely and mischievously encouraged superstition.’ All ghosts, brownies, lutins, are mere bugbears of children; here Maître Chopin quotes Plato, and Philo Judæus in the original, also Empedocles, Marcus Aurelius, Tertullian, Quintilian, Dioscorides. Perhaps Bolacre and his family suffer from nightmare. If so, a physician, not a solicitor, is their man. Or again, granting that their house is haunted, they should appeal to the clergy, not to the law.
Manifestly this is a point to be argued. Do the expenses of exorcism fall on landlord or tenant? This, we think, can hardly be decided by a quotation from Epictetus. Alexis Comnenus bids us seek a bishop in the case of psychical phenomena (τα ψυχικα απαντα). So Maître Chopin argues, but he evades the point. Is it not the business of the owner of the house to ‘whustle on his ain parten,’ to have his own bogie exorcised? Of course Piquet and Macquereau may argue that the bogie is Bolacre’s bogie, that it flitted to the house with Bolacre; but that is a question of fact and evidence.
Chopin concludes that a lease is only voidable in case of material defect, or nuisance, as of pestilential air, not in a case which, after all, is a mere vice d’esprit. Here Maître Chopin sits down, with a wink at the court, and Nau pleads for the tenant. First, why abuse the judge at Tours? The lessors argued the case before him, and cannot blame him for credulity. The Romans, far from rejecting such ideas (as Chopin had maintained), used a ritual service for ejecting spooks, so Ovid testifies. Greek and Roman hauntings are cited from Pliny, Plutarch, Suetonius; in the last case (ghost of Caligula), the house had to be destroyed, like the house at Wolflee where the ghost, resenting Presbyterian exorcism, killed the Rev. Mr. Thomson of Southdean, father of the author of The Castle of Indolence. ‘As to Plato, cited by my learned brother, Plato believed in hauntings, as we read in the Phaedo,’ Nau has him here. In brief, ‘the defendants have let a house as habitable, well knowing the same to be infested by spirits’. The Fathers are then cited as witnesses for ghosts. The learned counsel’s argument about a vice d’esprit is a pitiable pun.
The decision of the court, unluckily, is not preserved by Le Loyer. The counsel for Bolacre told Le Loyer that the case was adjourned on the formal point, but, that, having obtained letters royal for his client, he succeeded in getting the remainder of the lease declared void. Comparing, however, Bouchel, s. v. Louage, in his Bibliothèque du droit François, one finds that the higher court reversed the decision of the judge at Tours. In the Edinburgh case, 1835, the tenant, Captain Molesworth, did not try to have his lease quashed, but he did tear up floors, pull down wainscots, and bore a hole into the next house, that of his landlord, Mr. Webster, in search of the cause of the noises. Mr. Webster, therefore, brought an action to restrain him from these experiments.
Le Loyer gives two cases of ghosts appearing to denounce murderers in criminal cases. He possessed the speech of the President Brisson (at that time an advocate), in which he cited the testimony of the spectre of Madame de Colommiers, mysteriously murdered in full day, with her children and their nurse. Her ghost appeared to her husband, when wide awake, and denounced her own cousins. As there was no other evidence, beyond the existence of motive, the accused were discharged. In another well-known case, before the Parlement de Bretagne, the ghost of a man who had mysteriously vanished, guided his brother to the spot where his wife and her paramour had buried him, after murdering him. Le Loyer does not give the date of this trial. The wife was strangled, and her body was burned.
Modern times have known dream-evidence in cases of murder, as in the Assynt murder, and the famous Red Barns affair. But Thomas Harris’s is probably the last ghost cited in a court of law. On the whole, the ghosts have gained little by these legally attested appearances, but the trials do throw a curious light on the juridical procedure of our ancestors. The famous action against the ghosts in the Eyrbyggja Saga was not before a Christian court, and is too well known for quotation. [{273}]