“Unquiet souls
Risen from the grave, to ease the heavy guilt
Of deeds in life concealed.”
—Akenside.
THE CHURCHYARD GHOST.
Of all the wilder beliefs of our forefathers, there is none which so truly continues to exist as the belief in the churchyard spectre. Treat it as we may, it has assuredly a fast hold of our nature. We may conceal, but we cannot smother it;—we may deny it as pointedly as the lackey does his master when the visitor is an unwelcome one, but it is not from that circumstance a whit the less at home. True or false, too, it seems to act no unimportant part in the moral economy of the world. For without a deeper sense of religion to set in its place than most people entertain, men would be greatly the worse for wanting it. There are superstitions which perform, in some measure, the work of the devotional sentiment, when the latter is either undeveloped or misdirected; and the superstition of the churchyard ghost is unquestionably one of the number.
MY WRITING-ROOM.
I am fortunate, so far as the sympathy of place can have any influence on the mind, in the little antique room in which I have set myself to illustrate the belief. Just look round you for one brief minute, and see how the little narrow windows rise into the thatch, and how very profoundly one requires to stoop ere one can enter by the door. The ceiling rises far into the roof. There is a deep recess in the wall occupied by a few pieces of old china, and a set of shelves laden with old books; and only see how abruptly the hearth-stone rises over the sanded floor, and how well the fashion of yonder old oaken table agrees with that of the old oaken scrutoire in the opposite corner. Humble as my apartment may seem, it is a place of some little experience in the affairs of both this world and the other. It has seen three entire generations come into being and pass away, and it now shelters the scion of a fourth. It has been a frequent scene of christenings, bridals, and lykewakes—of the joys and sorrows, the cares and solicitudes of humble life. Nor were these all. There is the identical door at which it is said a great-grand-aunt of the writer saw a sheeted spectre looking in upon her as she lay a-bed; and there the window at which another and nearer relative was sitting in a stormy winter evening, thinking of her husband far at sea, when, after a dismal gust had howled over the roof, the flapping of a sail and the cry of distress were heard, and she wrung her hands in anguish, convinced that her sailor had perished. And so indeed it was. Strange voices have echoed from the adjoining apartment; the sounds of an unknown foot have been heard traversing its floor; and I have only to descend the stair ere I stand on the place where a shadowy dissevered hand was once seen beckoning on one of the inmates. How incalculably numerous must such stories have once been, when the history of one little domicile furnishes so many?
THE BROKEN PROMISE.
About sixteen years ago, I accompanied an elderly relative—now, alas! no more—on a journey through the parishes of Nigg, Fearn, and Tarbat. He was a shrewd, clear-headed man, of great warmth of heart, who continued to bear a balmy atmosphere of the enthusiasm of early youth about him, despite of the hard-earned experience of fifty-five. There could not be a more delightful companion even to a boy. I never knew one half so well acquainted with the traditionary history of the country. Every hamlet we passed, almost every green mound, had its story; and there was that happy mixture of point and simplicity in his style of narrative, which almost every one knows how to admire, and scarcely one of a thousand how to imitate. He had, I suspect, a good deal of the sceptic in his composition, and regarded his ghost stories rather as the machinery of a sort of domestic poetry than as pieces of real history; but then, no one could value them more as curious illustrations of human belief, or show less of the coldness of infidelity in his mode of telling them. “Yonder lofty ridge,” said he, as we passed along, “is the hill of Nigg, so famous, you know, as a hunting-place of the Fions. Were we on the other side, where it overhangs the sea, I could point out to you the remains of a cottage that has an old ghost story connected with it—a story that dates, I believe, some time in the early days of your grandmother. Two young girls, who had grown up together from the days of their childhood, and were mutually attached, had gone to the lykewake of a female acquaintance, a poor orphan, and found some women employed in dressing the body. There was an indifference and even light-heartedness shown on the occasion that shocked the two friends; and they solemnly agreed before parting, that should one of them outlive the other, the survivor, and no one besides, should lay out the corpse of the departed for the grave. The feeling, however, passed with the occasion out of which it arose, and the mutual promise was forgotten, until several years after, when one of the girls, then the mistress of a solitary farmhouse on the hill of Nigg, was informed one morning, by a chance passenger, that her old companion, who had become the wife of a farmer in the neighbouring parish of Fearn, had died in childbed during the previous night. She called to mind her promise, but it was only to reflect how impossible it was for her to fulfill it. She had her infant to tend, and no one to intrust it to—her maid having left her scarcely an hour before for a neighbouring fair, to which her husband and his ploughman had also gone. She spent an anxious day, and it was with no ordinary solicitude, as she saw the evening gradually darkening, and thought of her promise and her deceased companion, that she went out to a little hillock beside the house, which commanded a view of the moor over which her husband and the servants had to pass on their way from the fair, to ascertain whether any of them were yet returning. At length she could discern through the deepening twilight, a female figure in white coming along the moor, and supposing it to be the maid, and unwilling to appear so anxious for her return, she went into the house. The outer apartment, as was customary at the period, was occupied as a cow-house; some of the animals were in their stalls, and on their beginning to snort and stamp as if disturbed by some one passing, the woman half turned her to the door. What, however, was her astonishment to see, instead of the maid, a tall figure wrapped up from head to foot in a winding-sheet! It passed round to the opposite side of the fire, where there was a chair drawn in for the farmer, and seating itself, raised its thin chalky arms and uncovered its face. The features, as shown by the flame, were those of the deceased woman; and it was with an expression of anger, which added to the horror of the appearance, that the dead and glassy eyes were turned to her old companion, who, shrinking with a terror that seemed to annihilate every feeling and faculty except the anxious solicitude of the mother, strained her child to her bosom, and gazed as if fascinated on the terrible apparition before her. She could see every fold of the sheet; the black hair seemed to droop carelessly over the forehead; the livid, unbreathing lips were drawn apart, as if no friendly hand had closed them after the last agony; and the reflection of the flame seemed to rise and fall within the eyes—varying by its ceaseless flicker the statue-like fixedness of the features. As the fire began to decay, the woman recovered enough of her self-possession to stretch her hand behind her, and draw from time to time out of the child’s cradle a handful of straw, which she flung on the embers; but she had lost all reckoning of time, and could only guess at the duration of the visit by finding the straw nearly expended. She was looking forward with a still deepening horror to being left in darkness with the spectre, when voices were heard in the yard without. The apparition glided towards the door; the cattle began to snort and stamp, as on its entrance; and one of them struck at it with its feet in the passing; when it uttered a faint shriek and disappeared. The farmer entered the cottage a moment after, barely in time to see his wife fall over in a swoon on the floor, and to receive the child. Next morning, says the story, the woman attended the lykewake, to fulfil all of her engagement that she yet could; and on examining the body, discovered that, by a strange sympathy, the mark of a cow’s hoof was distinctly impressed on its left side.”