Harriet Martineau, speaking of the English lakes, says that Souter or Soutra Fell is the mountain on which ghosts appeared in myriads at intervals during ten years of the last century. ‘On the Midsummer Eve of the fearful 1745, twenty-six persons, expressly summoned by the family, saw all that had been seen before, and more. Carriages were now interspersed with the troops; and everybody knew that no carriages had been, or could be, on the summit of Souter Fell. The multitude was beyond imagination; for the troops filled a space of half a mile, and marched quickly till night hid them, still marching. There was nothing vaporous or indistinct about the appearance of these spectres. So real did they seem, that some of the people went up the next morning to look for the hoof-marks of the horses; and awful it was to them to find not one footprint on heather or grass.’ This spectral march was similar to that seen at Edge Hill, in Leicestershire, in 1707, and corresponds with the tradition of the tramp of armies over Helvellyn, on the eve of the battle of Marston Moor.

With such phantoms may be compared the mock suns, the various appearances of halos and wandering lights, and such a phenomenon as the ‘Spectre of the Brocken.’ Calmet relates a singular instance at Milan, where some two thousand persons saw, as they supposed, an angel hovering in the air: he cites Cardan as an eye-witness, who says that the populace were only undeceived when it was shown, by a sharp-sighted lawyer, to be a reflection from one of the statues of a neighbouring church, the image of which was caught on the surface of a cloud. The mirage, or water of the desert, owes its appearance to similar laws of refraction. Mountain districts, we know, abound in these illusions, and ‘the splendid enchantment presented in the Straits of Reggio by the Fata Morgana’ has attracted much notice. At such times, ‘minarets, temples, and palaces, have seemed to rise out of the distant waves;’ and spectral huntsmen, soldiers in battle array, and gay but mute cavalcades, have appeared under similar circumstances, pictured on the table of the clouds. It was thus, we are told, that the Duke of Brunswick and Mrs. Graham saw the image of their balloon distinctly exhibited on the face of a cumulous cloud, in 1836; and travellers on Mont Blanc have been startled by their own magnified shadows, floating among the giant peaks.[296] It is difficult to say how many of the apparitions which have been supposed to haunt certain spots might be attributed to similar causes.

CHAPTER XXV
CHECKS AND SPELLS AGAINST GHOSTS

Amongst the qualities ascribed to the cock was the time-honoured belief that by its crow it dispelled all kinds of ghostly beings—a notion alluded to by the poet Prudentius, who flourished at the commencement of the fourth century. There is, also, a hymn said to have been composed by St. Ambrose, and formerly used in the Salisbury Missal, in which allusion is made to this superstition. In Blair’s ‘Grave’ the apparition vanishes at the crowing of the cock, and in ‘Hamlet,’ on the departure of the ghost, Bernardo says:

It was about to speak when the cock crew;

to which Horatio answers:

And then it started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons. I have heard
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day; and, at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
The extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine: and of the truth herein
This present object made probation.

Whereupon Marcellus adds the well-known lines:

It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes,
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.