The ancient Romans listening to the inexplicable sounds which assailed the ear in solitary and wooded places, fabled that they were the voices of the wood deities, or as Lucretius beautifully expresses it:—
"The neighbouring swains believe, or fondly vaunt,
Satyrs and nymphs the rural regions haunt;
That fauns with wanton revel and delight
Disturb the sober silence of the night:
That music's blended notes are heard around,
The plaintive voice, and harp's according sound:
And well they know when Pan, the sylvan god,
(While o'er his brows the piny honours nod,)
With bending lip awakes the vocal reeds,
And the charmed ears of listening satyrs feeds.
With joy these tales they tell, or tales like these,
And fill the woods with fabled deities."[51]
As the winds swept over the wild heaths of the north, or roared amid the mountain passes, bearing upon their bosom the heavy mantling clouds which enwreathed the ghosts of the heroes of old, often in their varied tones did the ancient Celt conceive that he heard the voices of the dead; and he who was stricken with misery deemed that his forefathers called upon him to hasten to the land of shadows. "The ghosts of fathers," they say, "call away the souls of their race while they behold them lonely in the midst of woe." Or when an eddy of wind sweeping into the hall awoke a cadence of music as it played over the strings of the harps suspended there, the hearers shrunk as the notes thrilled through them, and fearfully whispered that the ghosts of the dead touched the strings, and asked whose death of all the mighty the ghostly music portended. "The harps of the bards, untouched, sound mournful over the hill."[52]
The supernatural framework of many legends depends upon illusions of the hearing of a similar character.
At Crosmere, near Ellesmere, in Shropshire, there is a tradition that a chapel once stood on the borders of the lake, and it was long believed that when the waters were ruffled by the wind the sound of the bells might be heard beneath the surface; and an old story records that, long ago, a church and village were entombed by an earthquake, near the spot where Raleigh, in Nottinghamshire, now stands; and that at Christmas, even now, the bells may be heard solemnly tolling deep in the bosom of the earth.
Among the Cornish miners a very singular superstition prevails, which is due to the sounds occurring in old and deserted workings, from the dropping of water and other causes. These noises are supposed to be produced by certain spirits, which are termed "Knockers," and, according to the author of "Yeast; a Problem," the miners hold that "they are the ghosts of the old Jews that crucified our Lord, and were sent for slaves by the Roman Emperors to work the mines; and we find their old smelting-houses, which we call Jews' houses, and their blocks, at the bottom of the great bogs, which we call Jews' tin; and there is a town among us, too, which we call Market Jew, but the old name was Marazion, that means the Bitterness of Zion, they tell me; and bitter work it was for them, no doubt, poor souls! We used to break into the old shafts and adits which they had made, and find old stags'-horn pickaxes that crumbled to pieces when we brought them to grass. And they say that, if a man will listen of a still night about those old shafts, he may hear the ghosts of them at working, knocking, and picking, as clear as if there was a man at work in the next level."[53]
But the most common cause of illusion from sound arises from the difficulty which all more or less experience, of tracing the direction of a sound, particularly if it be indistinct. The ascertainment of the direction of a sound, and the distance of the sonorous body, is an act of judgment, and it is the result of experience. The power may be cultivated to a great extent, and many savage tribes possess it in a very high degree; but among civilized nations, where the sounds requisite to be attended to are principally of a point-blank character, and where the necessity for the cultivation of that nicety of hearing which is required in forest life does not exist, the power of distinguishing the direction and distance of sounds is very imperfect.
The intensity of the sound, and the position of the ears, contribute to the formation of a correct judgment; but if the two ears have precisely the same relation to the point from which the sound issues, as when it occurs directly before or behind, it is impossible to distinguish by the sensation alone whether the sound arises in the front or the rear.
The most familiar and striking illustration of the difficulty experienced in determining the direction of sound, is ventriloquism. By a cultivation of the power of speaking without the aid of the lips, and by keeping the muscles of the face in a state of passiveness, the ventriloquist, on giving the mind of the listener a certain leading idea, will induce him to think that he hears voices issuing from the floor, from the ceiling, from within him, or from any position but the correct one; and by a modification of the intensity of the sound, it may be made to appear as if it arose at different distances, as when voices are heard in the distance, which gradually approach the listener, come close to him, pass by, and are again lost in the distance. Although perfectly aware of the deception, there are few who can correct the impressions received, and trace them to their legitimate source.
This uncertainty of distinguishing the direction and the nature of sounds has been a prolific source of belief in supernatural occurrences, and the majority, if not all, of those mysterious noises which are so common in old houses, and which it was customary, from inability to discover their origin, to attribute to spiritual agency, have been due to this cause. The yielding of wood-work, the scouring of vermin, the sighing of the wind in chinks and crannies, have been transformed by excited and superstitious imaginations into the sighing, or whispering, or knocking of wandering ghosts, and there is, perhaps, not a town or village in England which has not at one time or other had one or more houses reputed to be haunted by incorporeal visitants who have thus announced their presence.