I have been told that an ancestor of mine, then living at Torr in the parish of Widdicombe, was one of the people present in the church, when the Devil came in; but I have no documentary proof. In the old rhymed narrative, inscribed upon a tablet in the church, there is no mention of the Devil, but only a broad hint:—“a crack of thunder suddenly, with lightning, hail and fire ... a sulphureous smell ... or other force, whate’er it was, which at that time befell.”
Once, for about five minutes, I had the strongest possible belief in the personality of the Devil, or rather of his ancestor Great Pan, for I felt the Panic Terror. I was coming down along the side of Yarner Wood in bracken nearly as high as my head. It was beginning to get dark, and I was just thinking I should be very late for dinner; when suddenly I remembered the story of the Devil taking refuge in that wood, and I felt dead certain he was there. I stepped out very briskly till I reached the road.
Strange apparitions may be seen on Dartmoor on a misty day: especially if you have lost your bearings, and come unexpectedly on one of the great groups of rocks with this vapour drifting in and out between them. It is like “seeing faces in the fire,” but on a scale that seems stupendous in the mist.
There is said to be a goblin about a quarter of a mile from here. He sits on Bishop’s Stone—so called because it bears the coat-of-arms of bishop Grandisson of Exeter, 1327 to 1369 A.D. I have never seen the goblin; but I have good evidence that men have been scared by something there at night, and that horses have refused to pass there in the day. I fancy they hear the murmur of water running underground.
They tell this story of a place near here:—The master of the house was dead and buried, yet came home every night, and tramped about. As the family felt this was a parson’s job, the parson came one night, and threw a handful of churchyard mould in the face of his deceased parishioner, who thereupon became a black pony. (In these stories the churchyard mould always turns the ghost into a black creature of some sort, but not always as nice a creature as a Dartmoor pony.) They got a halter, and told a boy to run the pony down the side of the valley as hard as ever he could, and jump it across the Wrey. He did as he was told; but, when he jumped, he found he had the halter only, and no pony.—Ghosts cannot cross water; and this ghost of a pony was run down the hill at such a pace that it could not stop itself. It had to attempt the crossing of the water, and vanished in the attempt.
The story used always to be told of Thorn Park, a house that is marked on Donn’s map of Devon in 1765, but has long since been pulled down. Of late years I have heard it told of East Wrey, which is a little further up the Wrey valley, and on the other side of the Moreton road. On venturing to question this, I have been answered rather tartly that it must have been at East Wrey, as it was in that part of the valley, and there is no other house up there. Thorn Park has been forgotten.
Stories often shift about from place to place in this way. Only a few weeks ago a friend of mine told me a story of Hampton Court and Queen Victoria, which was told him by a man who certainly had means of finding out if it was true. According to Bismarck, Reflections and Reminiscences, vol. i, pages 246, 247, substantially the same story was told at Petersburg in 1859 about the Summer Garden and the Empress Catherine. I fancy I have seen it also in one of the Byzantine historians—I am not sure which—about Blachernæ and an Empress who lived many centuries before Catherine.
After the Nineteenth Dynasty in Egypt many of the royal tombs were pillaged, and the priests removed the royal mummies to safer places in the hills near Thebes. The places have now been discovered, and the mummies have been removed to the museum at Cairo. Maspero was supervising one of these removals, with a gang of natives to do the work. The mummies were brought out one by one, and laid down in the shade below a ledge of rock. In the heat of the day the natives rested, and he went on working at his notes. Suddenly he heard a fearful shriek; and, looking up, saw one of the natives pointing at a mummy—the mummy was slowly raising itself with the gesture that Orientals use in uttering a solemn curse. All the natives fled, and he was left alone to face the mummies; but he soon saw what was happening. This mummy was no longer in the shade, as the sun was coming round the ledge of rock; and the heat was causing a contraction of some glutinous substance in the mummy, and thus producing this movement.—He told me this himself at his house in Paris on 25 March 1896.
I also heard in Paris a story of Colonel Picquart, the amateur detective in the Dreyfus case. I heard it from a man who knew him well.—Picquart took nothing on trust: always looked into everything himself. As there was some talk in Paris of spirit-rapping, table-turning, and such things, he went to a séance to see what he could make of it. He suspected some trickery about a hat that they were using, and made them use his own. “And they not only caused my hat to rotate upon the table, but they imparted to it such an impetus of rotation, that it continued to rotate upon my head all the while that I was walking home.”
An old Oxford don once went with me from Athens to Sunium, 2 April 1888, and others laughed irreverently at some notes he made there:—“view from temple: saw several islands: had lunch: saw more islands.” It was also after lunch that a painter, whom I knew, mistook an only child for twins. But at Sunium it was not the luncheon—only the lifting of a haze upon the sea.