Bolt upright,
And ready to fight.

But nothing was out of order, neither can I discover what occasioned the disturbance.’ Mr. Lockhart adds: ‘On the morning that Mr. Terry received the foregoing letter in London, Mr. William Erskine was breakfasting with him, and the chief subject of their conversation was the sudden death of George Bullock, which had occurred on the same night, and nearly as they could ascertain at the very hour when Scott was aroused from his sleep by the “mysterious disturbance” here described. This coincidence, when Scott received Erskine’s minute detail of what had happened in Tenterdon Street (that is, the death of Bullock, who had the charge of furnishing the new rooms at Abbotsford), made a much stronger impression on his mind than might be gathered from the tone of an ensuing communication.’ It seems that Bullock had been at Abbotsford, and made himself a great favourite with old and young. Sir Walter Scott, a week or two afterwards, wrote thus to Terry: ‘Were you not struck with the fantastical coincidence of our nocturnal disturbances at Abbotsford, with the melancholy event that followed? I protest to you the noise resembled half a dozen men at work, putting up boards and furniture, and nothing can be more certain than that there was nobody on the premises at the time. With a few additional touches, the story would figure in Glanville or Aubrey’s collection. In the meantime you may set it down, with poor Dubisson’s warnings, as a remarkable coincidence coming under your own observation.’

In a paper by Mrs. Edwards, in ‘Macmillan’s Magazine,’ entitled ‘The Mystery of Pezazi,’ an account is given of constant disturbing sounds of nocturnal tree-felling heard near a bungalow in Ceylon, where examination proved that no trees had been felled. Mrs. Edwards, her husband, and their servants were on several occasions disturbed by these sounds, which were unmistakable and distinct. The Singhalese attribute these noises to a Pezazi, or spirit. A description of precisely the same disturbances occurs, writes Mr. Andrew Lang,[346] in Sahagun’s account of the superstitions of the Aztecs, and it seems that the Galapagos Islands, ‘suthard of the line,’ were haunted by the midnight axe. ‘De Quincey,’ adds Mr. Lang, ‘who certainly had not heard the Ceylon story, and who probably would have mentioned Sahagun’s had he known it, describes the effect produced by the midnight axe on the nerves of his brother, Pink: “So it was, and attested by generations of sea-vagabonds, that every night, duly as the sun went down and the twilight began to prevail, a sound arose—audible to other islands, and to every ship lying quietly at anchor in that neighbourhood—of a woodcutter’s axe.... The close of the story was that after, I suppose, ten or twelve minutes of hacking and hewing, a horrid crash was heard, announcing that the tree, if tree it were, that never yet was made visible to daylight search, had yielded to the old woodman’s persecution.... The woodcutter’s axe began to intermit about the earliest approach of dawn, and as light strengthened it ceased entirely, after poor Pink’s ghostly panic grew insupportable.”’

Among the American Indians all the sounds that issued from caverns were thought to be produced by their spiritual inhabitants. The Sonora Indians say that departed souls dwell among the caves and nooks of their cliffs, and that echoes often heard there are their voices. Similarly, when explosions were heard, caused by the sulphurous gas from the rocks around the head-waters of Lake Ontario, the superstitious Indians attributed them to the breathing of the Manitous.[347] The modern Dayaks, Siamese, and Singhalese agree with the Esths as to noises being caused by spirits. European folk-lore has long ascribed most of the unexplained noises to the agency of spirits, and to this day Franconian damsels go to a tree on St. Thomas’s Day, knock three times, and listen for the indwelling spirit to inform them from raps within what kind of husbands they are to have. Hence the night is known as ‘Little Knocker’s Night.’ There is the Poltergeist of the German, a mischievous spirit, who wanders about the house at night making all kinds of strange noises.

INDEX

[A][B][C][D][E][F]
[G][H][I][J][K][L]
[M][N][O][P][R][S]
[T][U][V][W][Y][Z]