There is the well-known anecdote which Lord Byron, says Moore,[201] used sometimes to mention, and which Captain Kidd related to him on the passage. ‘This officer stated that, being asleep one night in his berth, he was awakened by the pressure of something heavy on his limbs, and there being a faint light in the room, could see, as he thought, distinctly the figure of his brother, who was at that time in the same service in the East Indies, dressed in his uniform, and stretched across the bed. Concluding it to be an illusion, he shut his eyes, and made an effort to sleep. But still the same pressure continued; and as often as he ventured to take another look, he saw the figure lying across him in the same position. To add to the wonder, on putting his hand forth to touch this form, he found the uniform in which he appeared dripping wet. On the entrance of one of his brother officers, to whom he called out in alarm, the apparition vanished, but, in a few months afterwards, he received the startling intelligence that on that night his brother had been drowned in the Indian Seas. Of the supernatural character of this appearance, Captain Kidd himself did not appear to have the slightest doubt.’
A strange antipathy has long existed against rescuing a drowning man, one reason being that the person saved would at some time or other do injury to the man who rescued him. In China, however, this reluctance to give help to a drowning man arises from another form of the same superstitious dread, the idea being that the spirit of a person who has been drowned continues to flit along the surface of the water, until it has caused by drowning the death of a fellow creature. A person, therefore, who is bold enough to attempt to rescue another from drowning is believed to incur the hatred of the unquiet spirit, which is supposed to be desirous, even at the expense of a man’s life, of escaping from its unceasing wandering. The Bohemian fisherman shrinks from snatching a drowning man from the water, fearing that the water-demons would take away his luck in fishing, and drown him at the first opportunity. This, as Dr. Tylor points out,[202] is a lingering survival of the ancient significance of this superstition, the explanation being that the water spirit is naturally angry at being despoiled of his victim, and henceforth bears a special grudge against the unlucky person who has dared to frustrate him. Thus, when a person is drowned in Germany the remark is often made, ‘The river spirit claims his yearly sacrifice,’ or ‘The Nix has taken him.’
Similarly the Siamese dreads the Pnük, or water spirit, that seizes unwary bathers, and drags them underneath the water; and the Sioux Indians tell how men have been drowned by Unktahe, the water demon. Speaking of the ghosts of the drowned among savage tribes, Herbert Spenser says:[203] ‘An eddy in the river, where floating sticks are whirled round and engulfed, is not far from the place where one of the tribe was drowned and never seen again. What more manifest, then, than that the double of this drowned man, malicious as the unburied dead ever are, dwells thereabouts, and pulls these things under the surface—nay, in revenge, seizes and drags down persons who venture near? When those who knew the drowned man are all dead, when, after generations, the details of the story, thrust aside by more recent stories, have been lost, there survives only the belief in a water demon haunting the place.’ We may compare the practice of the Kamchadals, who, instead of helping a man out of the water, would drown him by force. If rescued by any chance, no one would receive such a man into his house, or give him food, but he was reckoned as dead.
CHAPTER XV
GHOST SEERS
According to the popular creed, some persons have the peculiar faculty of seeing ghosts, a privilege which, it would seem, is denied to others. It has been urged, however, that under certain conditions of health there are those who are endowed with special powers of perception, whereby they are enabled to see objects not visible at other times. Thus, as Sir William Hamilton has observed, ‘however astonishing, it is now proved, beyond all rational doubt, that in certain abnormal states of the nervous organism, perceptions are possible through other than the ordinary channels of the senses.’ But, without entering into this metaphysical question, folk-lore holds that persons born at a particular time of the day have the power of seeing ghosts. Thus it is said in Lancashire, that children born during twilight are supposed to have this peculiarity, and to know who of their acquaintance will next die. Some say that this property belongs also to those who happen to be born exactly at twelve o’clock at night, or, as the peasantry say in Somersetshire, ‘a child born in chime-hours will have the power to see spirits.’ The same belief prevails in Yorkshire, where it is commonly supposed that children born during the hour after midnight have the privilege through life of seeing the spirits of the departed. Mr. Henderson says[204] that ‘a Yorkshire lady informed him she was very near being thus distinguished, but the clock had not struck twelve when she was born. When a child she mentioned this circumstance to an old servant, adding that mamma was sure her birthday was the 23rd, not the 24th, for she had inquired at the time. “Ay, ay,” said the old woman, turning to the child’s nurse, “mistress would be very anxious about that, for bairns born after midnight see more things than other folk.”’
This superstition prevails on the Continent, and, in Denmark, Sunday children have prerogatives far from enviable. Thorpe[205] tells how ‘in Fyer there was a woman who was born on a Sunday, and, like other Sunday children, had the faculty of seeing much that was hidden from others. But, because of this property, she could not pass by the church at night without seeing a hearse or a spectre. The gift became a perfect burden to her; she therefore sought the advice of a man skilled in such matters, who directed her, whenever she saw a spectre, to say, “Go to Heaven!” but when she met a hearse, “Hang on!” Happening some time after to meet a hearse, she, through lapse of memory, cried out, “Go to Heaven!” and straightway the hearse rose in the air and vanished. Afterwards meeting a spectre, she said to it, “Hang on!” when the spectre clung round her neck, hung on her back, and drove her down into the earth before it. For three days her shrieks were heard before the spectre would put an end to her wretched life.’
It is a popular article of faith in Scotland that those who are born on Christmas Day or Good Friday have the power of seeing spirits, and even of commanding them, a superstition to which Sir Walter Scott alludes in his ‘Marmion’ (stanza xxii.). The Spaniards imputed the haggard and downcast looks of their Philip II. to the disagreeable visions to which this privilege subjected him.
Among uncultured tribes it is supposed that spirits are visible to some persons and not to others. The ‘natives of the Antilles believed that the dead appeared on the roads when one went alone, but not when many went together; and among the Finns the ghosts of the dead were to be seen by the Shamans, but not by men generally unless in dreams.’[206] It is, too, as already noticed,[207] a popular theory with savage races that the soul appears in dreams to visit the sleeper, and hence it has been customary for rude tribes to drink various intoxicating substances, under the impression that when thrown into a state of ecstasy they would have pleasing visions. On this account certain tribes on the Amazon use certain narcotic plants, producing an intoxication lasting twenty-four hours. During this period they are said to be subject to extraordinary visions, in the course of which they acquire information on any subject they may specially require. For a similar reason the inhabitants of North Brazil, when anxious to discover some guilty person, were in the habit of administering narcotic drinks to seers, in whose dreams the criminal made his appearance. The Californian Indians would give children certain intoxicants, in order to gain from the ensuing vision information about their enemies. And the Darien Indians used the seeds of the Datura sanguinea to produce in children prophetic delirium, during which they revealed the whereabouts of hidden treasure.