I will not be long at peace with you.”
TO GET RID OF THE SECOND SIGHT.
It was a belief in the island of Coll that a person afflicted with the second sight might get rid of his unhappy gift, and, as it were, bind it away (nasg) from himself, by giving alms (déirc) and praying the gift may depart. A seer living near Arinagour in that island had two sons in the army, then engaged in foreign wars, and in his visions saw what was happening to them. The visions preyed so much on his mind that, to rid himself of them, he gave half-a-crown to an old woman, and prayed his second sight might be taken away. After this he saw nothing of his sons, and, anxious to know their fate, he went to Tiree for a celebrated taïsher, and brought him to Coll with him. He placed him beside the fire, which was on the middle of the floor. It was held by the best seers that visions are best seen through the fire (roi’ n teine). Before long the Tiree seer began to sweat, and the other, who knew that this was caused by a painful vision, begged him to tell what he saw, and hide nothing. He told that both the sons were killed—the one by a bullet through the head, the other shot through the heart and through the neck. Soon after a letter came to the Laird of Coll corroborating the seer’s vision.
CHAPTER V.
HOBGOBLINS.
The term Bòchdan (pron. Baucan) is a general name for terrifying objects seen at night, and taken to be supernatural, bugbears, ghosts, apparitions, goblins, etc., in all their variety. The word conveys as much the idea of fright in the observer as of anything hurtful or violent in the object itself. It is derived from bòchd, to come in a swelling and resistless flood, not an unapt description of the manner in which fear takes possession of its victims. Any object, indistinctly seen, may prove a hobgoblin of this kind. It may be merely a neighbour playing pranks by going about in a white sheet, a stray dog, a bush waving and sighing in the night wind, or even a peat-stack looming large in the imperfect light. There is a story of a man on Loch Rannoch-side who fought a bush, in mistake for a ghost, in a hollow, which had an evil name for being haunted. The conflict continued till dawn, when he was found exhausted, scratched, and bleeding.
Sometimes the Baucan, or terrifying object, causes fright by its mere appearance, sometimes by the noises it makes, and sometimes by its silence. In appearance it is commonly a man or woman moving silently past, and not speaking till spoken to, if even then; but it has also been encountered as a black dog, that accompanies the traveller part of his way, as a headless body (a particularly dangerous form of ghost), as a he-goat, or simply a dark moving object. At other times it is terrific from having a chain clanking after it, from its whistling with unearthly loudness, by horrible and blood-freezing cries and sounds of throttling, and sometimes it makes its presence known only by faint and hardly audible sounds. In fact, the number and variety of things by which superstitious terror may be awakened at night are countless.
In most cases the Baucan is deemed the precursor of a sudden or violent death to occur at the place where it is seen or heard. It is remembered after the event that an unaccountable light was seen there at night, or a horse had become uneasy and could not be induced by its rider to pass, or something extraordinary had been observed, which the popular imagination connects with the subsequent event. At other times the Baucan is the spirit of the dead revisiting the earth, that it may be spoken to, and unburden itself of some secret that disturbs its rest. Sometimes it is an evil spirit on some message of darkness and sometimes merely a sound or indistinct object by which the wayfarer is frightened, but of which he is unable to give any lucid description. Fright is destructive of curiosity, and a person ready to faint with terror cannot be expected to be critical in his observations, nor afterwards coherent in his statements. Besides, vagueness or indistinctness as to the cause—an element to which the obscurity of night lends a ready aid—tends to render fear more frantic. If the observer had a distinct view of the object of his alarm, and knew exactly what it was, even though it were a spirit of darkness, his terror would be less. Omne ignotum pro magnifico is an axiom that holds especially true in such cases, and it is ignorance of its own cause that gives terror its wildest forms. A ghost or apparition seen in the day time, if that were possible, would not be at all so dreadful.