It has been a widespread belief from the most remote period that ghosts cannot bear the light, and so disappear at the dawn of day; their signal being the cock-crow.[78] The ghost of Hamlet’s father says (i. 5):
“But, soft! methinks I scent the morning air;
Brief let me be”—
and—
“Fare thee well at once.
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire:
Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.”
Again, in “King Lear” (iii. 4), Edgar says: “This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock.”
The time of night, as the season wherein spirits wander abroad, is further noticed by Gardiner in “Henry VIII.” (v. 1):
“Affairs, that walk,
As they say spirits do, at midnight.”
It was a prevalent notion that a person who crossed the spot on which a spectre was seen became subject to its malignant influence. In “Hamlet” (i. 1), Horatio says, in reference to the ghost:
“But soft, behold! lo, where it comes again!
I’ll cross it, though it blast me.”
Lodge, in his “Illustrations of British History” (iii. 48), tells us that among the reasons for supposing the death of Ferdinand, Earl of Derby (who died young, in 1594), to have been occasioned by witchcraft, was the following: “On Friday there appeared a tall man, who twice crossed him swiftly; and when the earl came to the place where he saw this man, he fell sick.”