Vanderkiste[64] relates the story of a convict who had murdered an overseer, and taken to the bush:—
"He lived in the woods, and came armed to the huts to demand provisions for some time, but imagined he was continually haunted by the spirit of the man he had murdered. At last he delivered himself up to the authorities, declaring his life a burden. He was seen for days, dogged, as he conceived, by the spectre of his victim, and escaping from tree to tree."
Sir Walter Scott records the story, that the captain of a slaver, in a fit of anger, shot at, and mortally wounded, one of his sailors. As the man was dying, he fixed his eyes upon the captain, and said, "Sir, you have done for me, but I will never leave you." The captain became grave and moody, and some time after he invited the mate into the cabin, and addressing him, said, "I need not tell you, Jack, what sort of hand we have got on board with us. He told me he would never leave me, and he has kept his word. You only see him now and then, but he is always by my side, and never out of my sight. At this very moment I see him. I am determined to bear it no longer, and I have resolved to leave you." Soon after this, the captain, watching an opportunity when he was unobserved, plunged into the sea: the mate rushed to the side of the ship, and the captain perceiving him, extended his hands upwards, exclaimed; "By ——, Bill is with me now!" and sunk.
One of the most remarkable examples of hallucination arising from the feelings excited by cold-blooded murder is recorded by Boismont:—
"A duellist, who had killed sixteen persons in single combat, was constantly accompanied by their phantoms; they never left him night or day."
The solitary hours of Charles IX were made frightful by the shrieks and cries which had reached him during the massacre of the Eve of St. Bartholomew, and he was haunted for many days subsequent to its occurrence by hideous and bloody faces. Taking Ambrose Paré aside, at one time, he remarked that he wished they had not comprised in the massacre the aged and children.
No cause is, however, so apt to engender hallucinations as religious enthusiasm, or an inordinate or rather fanatical occupation of the mind in the contemplation of religious subjects.
In the saint-visions which are so numerously scattered in the annals of Christian churches and which were so common under the self-denying and ascetic rules of some of the monastic orders, we have examples; and Spenser's "Hermit" furnishes the type of this species of hallucination:—
"Thence forward by that painfull way they pas
Forth to an hill, that was both steepe and hy;
On top whereof a sacred chapel was,
And eke a little hermitage thereby,
Wherein an aged holy man did lie,
That day and night said his devotion,
Ne other worldly busines did apply:
His name was Heavenly Contemplation;
Of God and goodness, was his meditation.
Great grace that old man to him given had;
For God he often saw from heavens hight:
All were his earthly eien both blunt and bad,
And through great age had lost their kindly sight,
Yet wondrous quick and persaunt was his spright,
As eagles eie, that can behold the sunne."