The event has proved the vision to be real. The woman was housemaid in a gentleman’s house. Seers also said they saw their own future wives sitting opposite to them at the fireside.
A native of Coll, Hugh, son of Donald the Red (Eoghan MacDhòmhnuill Ruaidh), while serving with his regiment in Africa, said he saw, almost every evening, for a period of five years, glimpses of the woman whom he afterwards married, and whom he never saw in reality till his return from the wars. Wherever he sat, after the day’s march, the figure of a woman came beside him, and sometimes seemed to him to touch him lightly on the shoulders. On each occasion he merely caught a glimpse of her. When he left the army, and was on his way home, he came to the village at Dervaig, in Mull, from the neighbourhood of which the ferry across to Coll lay. He entered by chance a house in the village, and his attention was unexpectedly attracted by the sound of a weaver’s loom at work in the house. On looking up he saw sitting at the loom the identical woman whose figure had for five years haunted him in Africa. He married her.
COMING MISFORTUNE.
A taïsher in Caolas, Tiree, was observed to have great objections to going home to take his meals. Being questioned on the subject, he said that at home he saw a horrible-looking black woman, with her head “as black as a pot,” and if he chanced to catch a glimpse of her at meal-times, her hideous appearance made him rise from his food. He said he did not recognise the woman, and was unable to say who or what she was. This was continued for three months, when the place was visited with smallpox, and the seer’s own sister took the disease very badly. Her head became hideous, and literally “as black as a pot,” and the people understood the meaning of the vision.
A celebrated seer in the same village, Donald Black (Domhnull Mac an dui), was married for the fourth time. In his day lucifer matches were unknown, and when corn was kiln-dried a person had to sit up all night to keep the fire alive. As Donald sat at this work in a solitary hut—such as small kilns are still kept in—the figure of his first wife appeared, and told him to beware, for “the terror” (an t-eagal) was coming, it was at the Horse-shoe (crudh an eich), a spot on the public road leading to Caolis, about a mile and a half distant, deriving its name from the plain likeness of a horse-shoe indented in the rock. He, however, was dozing over into sleep again when his second wife, in more distressed tones, warned him the “terror” was nearer hand—at the Gateway of the Fuel enclosure (Cachlaidh na Cuil Connaidh). He neglected this warning also, and was dozing again when his third wife warned him the “terror” was at the upper village (Bail’ uachdrach). He immediately went home, and had hardly got into bed when a sound like the rushing of a violent blast of wind passed, and the whole house was shaken, so that the walls were like to fall. If this was not “the terror” of which he had been so strangely warned, Donald could give no other explanation.
EVENTS AT A DISTANCE.
Some sixty years ago a seer in Ruaig, Tiree, the neighbouring village to the preceding, was one day employed in the harvest-field, tying sheaves after the reapers, a work assigned to old people. One of his sons was away in the Ross of Mull for a cargo of peats. All of a sudden the old man cried out “Alas! alas! my loss!” (och! och! mo chreach!) His children gathered round him in great anxiety as to the cause of his distress. He told them to wait a minute and in a short time said it was all right, his son was safe. It turned out that at the very time of his exclamation, the boat in which his son was on its way from the Ross of Mull, was run into by another boat at the Dutchman’s Cap (Am Bac Mòr), a peculiarly shaped island on the way, and his son was thrown overboard, but was rescued in time. The view of this incident which his mystic gift gave the seer was the cause of his exclamation.
DEATH.
Visionary delusions are so frequently to be traced to a brooding, gloomy disposition, that it is no wonder sorrowful sights were those usually seen by persons having the Second Sight, or that death was an event of which taïshers had particular cognisance. The doctrine is, that the whole ceremony connected with a funeral is gone through in rehearsal by spectres which are the shades, phantoms, appearances, taïshs, doubles, swarths, or whatever else we choose to call them, of living men, not merely by the shade of the person who is to die, but by the shades of all who are to be concerned in the ceremony. The phantoms go for the wood that is to make the coffin, the nails, the dead clothes, and whatever else may be required on the occasion; the sounds of the coffin being made are heard, of presses being opened, of glasses rattling; and the melancholy procession has been met in the dead of night wending its way to the churchyard. These weird sights and sounds have been seen and heard by others as well as taïshers. The only difference is, that he who has the Second Sight is more apt to see them.