In the deepening gloom of twilight the seer of Scotland often witnessed the wraiths of those who were about to die, wreathed in the ascending mists of the night, troop in ghostly silence before his horror-stricken vision; and the Bodach Glas crossed the path of the death-laden Mac Ivor; the Bodac au Dun, or Ghost of the Hill, warned the Rothmurchan of approaching calamity; the spectre of the Bloody Hand scared the Kincardines; the Bodach Gartin glided in significant horror through the gloomy passages of Gartnibeg House; and the Girl with the Hairy Left Hand—Manch Monlach—pointed to the death-bolt about to carry weeping and wailing into the halls of Tulloch Gorus.
The spectral fetch shadowed forth in the sister isle the dark course of death; while the Banshee mourned with the frightful accents of the dead over the dying scions of the ancient families. Hovering near the sorrow-laden mansion, her robe flowing wide in the night air, and her tangled tresses borne upon the wind, she cried the keen of another world adown the vaulted passages, and sobbed in ghastly agony her bitter lamentations.
The Gwrâch y Rhibyn—Hag of the Dribble—when the night had covered the earth, spread out her leathern-like wings, and flitting before the house of the death-stricken Cambrians, shrieked in harsh, broken, and prolonged tones their names.
In our own land the spectres of all those who would die in the parish during the year might be seen walking in ghostly procession to the church, or entering its portals, by him who would watch, three years consecutively, during the last hour of the night and the first hour of the morning, in the porch, on the Eve of St. Mark, or would kneel and look through the keyhole of the door of the sanctuary at midnight on the Eve of St. John the Baptist.
The White Lady, who haunts the ancient castle of the celebrated Bohemian family of Rosenberg-Neuhaus, and who also appears from time to time in the castles of the allied families of Brandenburg, Baden, and Darmstadt,—Trzebon, Islubocka, Bechin, and Tretzen, and even has been seen in Berlin, Bayreuth, and at Carlsrhue is of historical notoriety. Tall of stature, attired in white, and wearing a white widow's veil adorned with ribbons, through the folds of which, and from within her, a faint light has been seen to glimmer, she glides with a modest air through the corridors and apartments of those castles and palaces in which the death of one of her family is about to occur; and she has been seen at other times, and oft, with the aspect and air as though the spirit had a melancholy pleasure in visiting and hovering about her descendants. It is said to be the ghost of one Perchta Von Rosenberg, who was born between A.D. 1420 and 1430, and subsequently married to John Von Lichtenstein, a rich and profligate baron, who so embittered her life that she was obliged to seek relief from her relatives, and she died borne down with the insults and indescribable distress she endured. Among the old paintings of the family of Rosenberg was found a portrait of this lady, attired after the fashion of the times, and bearing an exact resemblance to the "White Lady." In December, 1628, she appeared in Berlin, and was heard to exclaim, "Veni, judica vivos et mortuos: judicium mihi adhuc superest!"—"Come, judge the living and the dead; my fate is not yet decided."
The Klage-weib (Mourning Woman) when the storm is driving the rift before it, and the moon shines fitfully and faintly on the earth, may be seen stalking along, her gigantic and shadowy form enveloped in dark flowing grave-clothes, her deathlike countenance and deep cavernous eyes freezing the unhappy spectator with horror, while, extending her vast arm, she sweeps it above the cottage marked out by death.
In the Tyrol also, the phantom of a white woman looks in at the window of a house where a person must die.
These are examples of spectral apparitions foreboding death and misfortune, which the lapse of ages and the influence of superstition have invested with a semblance of reality, approximating them in apparent truthfulness to historical facts.
It is a needless, and would be a thankless task, to show how these notions were the legitimate result of the ideas of the supernatural entertained at the period when they were developed; and how when the superstitions once assumed a definite form, the slightest illusion during the period of sickness or calamity, whether observed in the castellated mansion, pregnant generally with deeds of darkness or blood, or in the twilight or the storm of a moon-lit night, were converted into these phantoms;[68] or the imperfectly remembered dream, or its vivid depiction of the superstition, shadowed forth the same.
Scant of romance, and that wild and thrilling medium through which many of our old legends are seen, we have handed to us numerous business-like stories, some of very recent date, in which the same principles are involved as in the legends we have detailed, and which demand grave attention, from the honest truthfulness with which they are evidently detailed, and the events which they appear to have foreshadowed.