In this article it is my intention to be the biographer of a few ancient and well-born ghosts only, as space will not permit me to condescend to mere one-generation ghosts, pedigreeless spirits.
A. was an Airlie who killed a poor drummer, whose spirit plays a drum at Cortachy Castle, Kirriemuir, Scotland, whenever any member of the Ogilvy family is going to die. The origin of this tradition is that the drummer, for some reason or other, in his lifetime so enraged a former Lord Airlie that he had him thrust into his own drum and flung from the window of a tower of Cortachy Castle, though the drummer threatened to haunt the family ever after if his life were taken.
He has seemingly kept his word, for in 1849, before the decease of a Lord Airlie, and again in 1884, before the death of a Lady Airlie, the beat of the drum was on each occasion distinctly heard by different guests of the family. One of these guests was a lady staying in the castle, who was so ignorant of the tradition that, having heard the beating of a drum while dressing for dinner, she innocently asked her host—Lord Airlie—at the table who his drummer was. The question made the peer turn quite white, for the sound had preceded the loss of his first wife, and it was only a few months after this ominous dinner party that the second wife died.
THE COMBERMERE GHOST—A YOUNG GIRL WHO APPEARS TO FORETELL DEATH.
The Combermere family have two ghosts in their record. In Combermere Abbey there is an old room, once a nursery, and here has been seen the spirit-figure of a little girl fourteen years old, dressed in a very quaint frock with an odd little ruff round its neck. It appeared to a niece of the late Lord Cotton as she was dressing for a very late dinner one evening in this former nursery, now used as a bedroom. She had just risen from her toilet-glass to get some article of dress when she saw the child standing near her bed—a little iron one which stood out in the room away from the wall—and presently the figure began running round the bed in a wild, distressed way, with a look of suffering in its little face, which the lady could see quite plainly as the full light of her candles fell upon it.
On mentioning this apparition, her widowed aunt, Lady Cotton, called to remembrance that the late Lord Cotton had told her of the sudden death years ago of a favourite little sister of his, with whom he had been playing, he being also a child then, by running round and round the bed with her, just the night before—indeed, only a few hours before, her decease.
A stranger story still, and one that has not yet, I believe, appeared in print, is that where quite recently a lady took an amateur photograph of the drawing-room of a house once inhabited by the late Lord Combermere—at Brighton I think it was. The lady in question saw, to her horror and astonishment, visible on the plate, the ghost of the old peer—a tall man with rather stout face and a moustache—reproduced sitting in one of the easy chairs of this drawing-room, though not apparent to the naked eye.
The Drake ghost—the spirit of Sir Francis Drake—might be termed a sporting spirit, as it has been frequently seen in different parts of Devonshire and Cornwall—notably Plymouth—driving a hearse drawn by headless horses and followed by a pack of headless hounds.