On Tuesday, the 25th of January, the same figure met her at the house door, and asked Elizabeth if she "remembered the message," but the woman, instead of replying, exclaimed: "In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, what art thou?" Upon this the figure assumed "a very glorious shape," and saying, "Tell King Charles, from me, not to remove his parliament, but stand to his council," vanished as before. Next evening the veiled figure appeared again, when Elizabeth was with her mother, who, on beholding her daughter's manifest terror, said: "Dost thou see anything?" She was then warned to retire, after which the spectre said, sternly: "Do your message." "I shall, if God enable me," replied Elizabeth. After this the spectre appeared but once again, and remained silent. "This was taken from the maid's own mouth by me, Richard Wilkinson, schoolmaster in the said town of Hatfield."*
* London: Printed for J. B., Anno Domini 1680; and P. Brooksly, Golden Ball, near the Hospital Gate, 1681.
In 1683, as a variety, London was treated to an account of a dreadful earthquake in Oxfordshire, where the houses were rocked like ships or cradles, while tables, stools, and chests "rowled to and fro with the violence of the Shog."*
* Printed for R. Baldwin, at the Old Bailey.
The year 1687 brought "strange and wonderful news from Cornwall, being an account of a miraculous accident which happened near the town of Bodmyn, at a place called Park. Printed by J. Wallis, White Fryars Gate—next Fleet St.—near the Joyners Shop."
From this it would appear that on Sunday, the 8th of May, Jacob Mutton, whose relations were of good repute, and who was servant to William Hicks, rector of Cordingham (at a house he had near the old parish church of Eglashayle, called Park), heard, on going into his chamber about eight o'clock in the evening, a hollow voice cry, "So hoe! so hoe! so hoe!" This drew him to the window of the next room, from whence, to the terror of a lad who shared his bed, he disappeared, and could nowhere be found.
According to his own narrative, he had no sooner laid a hand upon an iron bar of the window, which was seventeen feet from the ground, than the whole grating fell into the yard below, all save the bar which he had grasped. This bar was discovered in his hand next morning, as he lay asleep in a narrow lane beyond the little town of Stratton, among the hills, thirty miles distant from Park. There he was wakened by the earliest goers to Stratton fair, who sent him home, sorely bewildered, by the way of Camelford. "On Tuesday he returned to his master's estate, without any hurt, but very melancholy, saying 'that a tall man bore him company all the journey, over hedges and brakes, yet without weariness.'" What became of this mysterious man he knew not, neither had he any memory of how the iron bar came to be in his hand. "To conclude, the young man who is the occasion of this wonderful relation, was never before this accident accounted any ways inclinable to sadness, but, on the contrary, was esteemed an airy, brisk, and honest young fellow."
But Mutton's adventure was a joke when compared with that of Mr. Jacob Seeley, of Exeter, as he related it to the judges on the western circuit, when, on the 22nd of September, 1690, he was beset by a veritable crowd of dreadful spectres. He took horse for Taunton, in Somersetshire, by the Hinton Cliff road, on which he had to pass a solitary place, known as the Black Down. Prior to this, he halted at a town called Cleston, where the coach and waggons usually tarried, and there he had some roast beef, with a tankard of beer and a noggin of brandy, in company with a stranger, who looked like a farmer, and who rode by his side for three miles, till they reached the Black Down, when he suddenly vanished into the earth or air, to the great perplexity of Mr. Jacob Seeley. This emotion was rather increased when he found himself surrounded by from one to two hundred spectres, attired as judges, magistrates, and peasantry, the latter armed with pikes; but, gathering courage, he hewed at them with his sword, though they threw over his head something like a fishing-net, in which they retained him from nine at night till four next morning. He thrust at the shadows with his rapier, but he felt nothing, till he saw one "was cut and had four of his fingers hanging by the skin," and then he found blood upon his sword. After this, ten spectre funerals passed; then two dead bodies were dragged near him by the hair of the head; and other horrors succeeded, till the spell broke at cock-crow.
It was now remembered that the house wherein Mr. Seeley had his beef, beer, and brandy had been kept by one of Monmouth's men (the spectre farmer, probably), who had been hung on his own sign-post, and the piece of ground where the net confined the traveller, was a place where maay of the hapless duke's adherents had been executed and interred. Hence it was named the Black Down, according to the sheet before us, which was "Printed for T. M., London, 2nd Oct., 1690."
A sheet circulated at the close of the preceding year warns "all hypocrites and atheists to beware in time," as there had been a dreadful tempest of thunder and lightning in Hants, at Alton, where the atmosphere became so obscure that the electric flashes alone lighted the church during the service, in which two balls of fire passed through its eastern wall, another tore the steeple to pieces, broke the clock to shreds, and bore away the weathercock. The narrator adds, that all Friesland was under water, and that a flood in the Tiber had swept away a portion of the Castle of St. Angelo.