FUNERAL PROCESSION.
A boy in Rannoch was playing with his companions in sight of the public road, when all of a sudden he exclaimed, “Lord! will you not look at my grandmother’s funeral?” (Dhia! nach fhaic sibh tòrradh mo sheanamhair.) His grandmother was ill at the time, but was not thought near her dissolution. In a few days after her funeral took place, as the boy described it, with a red-haired character of the neighbourhood dancing at its head.
The following incident is told by a person whose truthfulness is beyond question. He is a person of talents and education, and a clergyman of the Church of Scotland.
“A young lad, herd-boy in the village in the Western Islands to which I belong, was one day with me on the moors (sliabh), above the cultivated land, when he said he saw two men carrying a coffin between them from a wright’s workshop then in sight to the door of a house, which he mentioned. He called my attention to the vision, but I could see nothing of the kind. He described the dress the two men had on, particularly grey trousers, such as seafaring people of the place then wore. In about ten days after an event exactly corresponding occurred.”
A Tiree taïsher told how he had seen a funeral procession leave a certain house, and persons whom he named acting as coffin-bearers when leaving the house. This was at Beltane, the first day of summer. Next Christmas a death occurred in that house, and one of those to whom the seer had told his vision, took a good look at the funeral, to see if matters would prove as the seer had said. They did so exactly.
“On one occasion,” said a native of Harris, “I was out fishing till twelve or one o’clock in the morning, with several others, of whom one, a man about 35, was reputed to have the Second Sight. As we were coming home, I kept the middle of the road, thinking it was the safest place, and that no evil could come near me there. Suddenly the man, who had the Second Sight, caught me by the shoulder and pulled me to the side of the road. As he laid his hand on my shoulder I saw a funeral procession—a coffin and men carrying it. I was afterwards at that funeral myself, and at the place where I met the taïsh, the men were in the same order in which I had seen them.”
A young man going home at night, along the south side of Loch Rannoch, was joined by a funeral procession. One of the poles of the bier was thrust into his hands, and he had to march in the procession above a mile. He was on the lochside of the coffin, and had great difficulty in keeping on the road. The other bearers of the ghostly coffin were laying the weight to push him off the road.
A woman, near Loch Scavaig (Scathabhaig), in Skye, saw a funeral procession, with the coffins, passing along a hillside, where no road lay, and no one was ever observed to pass. After the woman’s death, and two years after her vision, a boat was lost in Loch Scavaig, and the bodies of three persons lost in her were buried near the shepherd’s house at the loch side. They were afterwards raised and carried along in the direction the woman had pointed out as that taken by her vision.
One of these mystic processions was seen in Strathaird, in the same neighbourhood, carrying something in a grey plaid. A man was drowned in a river there, and his body was not recovered for a week. It was then carried in a grey plaid in the same direction the spectral procession had taken.