Lang Andrew
The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
LORD LYTTELTON’S GHOST
“Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “it is the most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day.” The doctor’s day included the rising of 1745 and of the Wesleyans, the seizure of Canada, the Seven Years’ War, the American Rebellion, the Cock Lane ghost, and other singular occurrences, but “the most extraordinary thing” was – Lord Lyttelton’s ghost! Famous as is that spectre, nobody knows what it was, nor even whether there was any spectre at all.
Thomas, Lord Lyttelton, was born in 1744. In 1768 he entered the House of Commons. In 1769 he was unseated for bribery. He then vanishes from public view, probably he was playing the prodigal at home and abroad, till February, 1772, when he returned to his father’s house, and married. He then went abroad (with a barmaid) till 1773, when his father died. In January, 1774, he took his seat in the House of Lords. In November, 1779, Lyttelton went into Opposition. On Thursday, 25th November, he denounced Government in a magnificent speech. As to a sinecure which he held, he said, “Perhaps I shall not keep it long!”
Something had Happened!
On the night before his speech, that of Wednesday, 24th November, Lyttelton had seen the ghost, and had been told that he would die in three days. He mentioned this to Rowan Hamilton on the Friday. 66 On the same day, or on Friday, he mentioned it to Captain Ascough, who told a lady, who told Mrs. Thrale. 67 On the Friday he went to Epsom with friends, and mentioned the ghost to them, among others to Mr. Fortescue. 68 About midnight on 28th November, Lord Lyttelton died suddenly in bed, his valet having left him for a moment to fetch a spoon for stirring his medicine. The cause of death was not stated; there was no inquest.
This, literally, is all that is known about Lord Lyttelton’s ghost. It is variously described as: (1) “a young woman and a robin” (Horace Walpole); (2) “a spirit” (Captain Ascough); (3) a bird in a dream, “which changed into a woman in white” (Lord Westcote’s narrative of 13th February, 1780, collected from Lord Lyttelton’s guests and servants); (4) “a bird turning into a woman” (Mrs. Delany, 9th December, 1779); (5) a dream of a bird, followed by a woman, Mrs. Amphlett, in white (Pitt Place archives after 1789); (6) “a fluttering noise, as of a bird, followed by the apparition of a woman who had committed suicide after being seduced by Lyttelton” (Lady Lyttelton, 1828); (7) a bird “which vanished when a female spirit in white raiment presented herself” (Scots Magazine, November-December, 1779).
Out of seven versions, a bird, or a fluttering noise as of a bird (a common feature in ghost stories), 69 with a woman following or accompanying, occurs in six. The phenomena are almost equally ascribed to dreaming and to waking hallucination, but the common-sense of the eighteenth century called all ghosts “dreams”. In the Westcote narrative (1780) Lyttelton explains the dream by his having lately been in a room with a lady, Mrs. Dawson, when a robin flew in. Yet, in the same narrative, Lyttelton says on Saturday morning “that he was very well, and believed he should bilk the ghost”. He was certainly in bed at the time of the experience, and probably could not be sure whether he was awake or asleep. 70
Considering the remoteness of time, the story is very well recorded. It is chronicled by Mrs. Thrale before the news of Lyttelton’s death reached her, and by Lady Mary Coke two days later, by Walpole on the day after the peer’s decease, of which he had heard. Lord Lyttelton’s health had for some time been bad; he had made his will a few weeks before, and his nights were horror-haunted. A little boy, his nephew, to whom he was kind, used to find the wicked lord sitting by his bed at night, because he dared not be alone. So Lockhart writes to his daughter, Mrs. Hope Scott. 71 He had strange dreams of being in hell with the cruel murderess, Mrs. Brownrigg, who “whipped three female ’prentices to death and hid them in the coal-hole”. Such a man might have strange fancies, and a belief in approaching death might bring its own fulfilment. The hypothesis of a premeditated suicide, with the story of the ghost as a last practical joke, has no corroboration. It occurred to Horace Walpole at once, but he laid no stress on it.
Such is a plain, dry, statistical account of the most extraordinary event that happened in Dr. Johnson’s day.
However, the story does not end here. On the fatal night, 27th November, 1779, Mr. Andrews, M.P., a friend of Lyttelton’s was awakened by finding Lord Lyttelton drawing his curtains. Suspecting a practical joke, he hunted for his lordship both in his house and in the garden. Of course he never found him. The event was promptly recorded in the next number of the Scots Magazine, December, 1779. 72
CHAPTER VII
More Ghosts With A Purpose
The Slaying of Sergeant Davies in 1749. The Trial. Scott’s Theory. Curious recent Corroboration of Sir Walter’s Hypothesis. Other Trials involving Ghostly Evidence. Their Want of Authenticity. “Fisher’s Ghost” criticised. The Aylesbury Murder. The Dog o’ Mause. The Ghosts of Dogs. Peter’s Ghost.
Much later in time than the ghost of Sir George Villiers is the ghost of Sergeant Davies, of Guise’s regiment. His purpose was, first, to get his body buried; next, to bring his murderers to justice. In this latter desire he totally failed.
THE SLAYING OF SERGEANT DAVIES
We now examine a ghost with a purpose; he wanted to have his bones buried. The Highlands, in spite of Culloden, were not entirely pacified in the year 1749. Broken men, robbers, fellows with wrongs unspeakable to revenge, were out in the heather. The hills that seemed so lonely were not bare of human life. A man was seldom so solitary but that eyes might be on him from cave, corry, wood, or den. The Disarming Act had been obeyed in the usual style: old useless weapons were given up to the military. But the spirit of the clans was not wholly broken. Even the old wife of Donald Ban, when he was “sair hadden down by a Bodach” (ghost) asked the spirit to answer one question, “Will the Prince come again?” The song expressed the feelings of the people: —
The wind has left me bare indeed,
And blawn my bonnet off my heid,
But something’s hid in Hieland brae,
The wind’s no blawn my sword away!
Traffickers came and went from Prince Charles to Cluny, from Charles in the Convent of St. Joseph to Cluny lurking on Ben Alder. Kilt and tartan were worn at the risk of life or liberty, in short, the embers of the rising were not yet extinct.
At this time, in the summer of 1749, Sergeant Arthur Davies, of Guise’s regiment, marched with eight privates from Aberdeen to Dubrach in Braemar, while a corporal’s guard occupied the Spital of Glenshee, some eight miles away. “A more waste tract of mountain and bog, rocks and ravines, without habitations of any kind till you reach Glenclunie, is scarce to be met with in Scotland,” says Sir Walter.
The sergeant’s business was the general surveillance of the country side. He was a kindly prosperous man, liked in the country, fond of children, newly married, and his wife bore witness “that he and she lived together in as great amity and love as any couple could do, and that he never was in use to stay away a night from her”.
The sergeant had saved fifteen guineas and a half; he carried the gold in a green silk purse, and was not averse to displaying it. He wore a silver watch, and two gold rings, one with a peculiar knob on the bezel. He had silver buckles to his brogues, silver knee-buckles, two dozen silver buttons on a striped lute-string waistcoat, and he carried a gun, a present from an officer in his regiment. His dress, on the fatal 28th of September, was “a blue surtout coat, with a striped silk vest, and teiken breeches and brown stockings”. His hair, of “a dark mouse colour,” was worn in a silk ribbon, his hat was silver laced, and bore his initials cut in the felt. Thus attired, “a pretty man,” Sergeant Davies said good-bye to his wife, who never saw him again, and left his lodgings at Michael Farquharson’s early on 28th September. He took four men with him, and went to meet the patrol from Glenshee. On the way he met John Growar in Glenclunie, who spoke with him “about a tartan coat, which the sergeant had observed him to drop, and after strictly enjoining him not to use it again, dismissed him, instead of making him prisoner”.
This encounter was after Davies left his men, before meeting the patrol, it being his intention to cross the hill and try for a shot at a stag.
The sergeant never rejoined his men or met the patrol! He vanished as if the fairies had taken him. His captain searched the hill with a band of men four days after the disappearance, but to no avail. Various rumours ran about the country, among others a clatter that Davies had been killed by Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald. But the body was undiscovered.
In June, one Alexander Macpherson came to Donald Farquharson, son of the man with whom Davies had been used to lodge. Macpherson (who was living in a sheiling or summer hut of shepherds on the hills) said that he “was greatly troubled by the ghost of Sergeant Davies, who insisted that he should bury his bones, and that, he having declined to bury them, the ghost insisted that he should apply to Donald Farquharson”. Farquharson “could not believe this,” till Macpherson invited him to come and see the bones. Then Farquharson went with the other, “as he thought it might possibly be true, and if it was, he did not know but the apparition might trouble himself”.
The bones were found in a peat moss, about half a mile from the road taken by the patrols. There, too, lay the poor sergeant’s mouse-coloured hair, with rags of his blue cloth and his brogues, without the silver buckles, and there did Farquharson and Macpherson bury them all.
Alexander Macpherson, in his evidence at the trial, declared that, late in May, 1750, “when he was in bed, a vision appeared to him as of a man clothed in blue, who said, ‘I am Sergeant Davies!’”. At first Macpherson thought the figure was “a real living man,” a brother of Donald Farquharson’s. He therefore rose and followed his visitor to the door, where the ghost indicated the position of his bones, and said that Donald Farquharson would help to inter them. Macpherson next day found the bones, and spoke to Growar, the man of the tartan coat (as Growar admitted at the trial). Growar said if Macpherson did not hold his tongue, he himself would inform Shaw of Daldownie. Macpherson therefore went straight to Daldownie, who advised him to bury the bones privily, not to give the country a bad name for a rebel district. While Macpherson was in doubt, and had not yet spoken to Farquharson, the ghost revisited him at night and repeated his command. He also denounced his murderers, Clerk and Macdonald, which he had declined to do on his first appearance. He spoke in Gaelic, which, it seems, was a language not known by the sergeant.
Isobel MacHardie, in whose service Macpherson was, deponed that one night in summer, June, 1750, while she lay at one end of the sheiling (a hill hut for shepherds or neatherds) and Macpherson lay at the other, “she saw something naked come in at the door, which frighted her so much that she drew the clothes over her head. That when it appeared it came in in a bowing posture, and that next morning she asked Macpherson what it was that had troubled them in the night before. To which he answered that she might be easy, for it would not trouble them any more.”
All this was in 1750, but Clerk and Macdonald were not arrested till September, 1753. They were then detained in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh on various charges, as of wearing the kilt, till June, 1754, when they were tried, Grant of Prestongrange prosecuting, aided by Haldane, Home and Dundas, while Lockhart and Mackintosh defended. It was proved that Clerk’s wife wore Davies’s ring, that Clerk, after the murder, had suddenly become relatively rich and taken a farm, and that the two men, armed, were on the hill near the scene of the murder on 28th September, 1749. Moreover, Angus Cameron swore that he saw the murder committed. His account of his position was curious. He and another Cameron, since dead, were skulking near sunset in a little hollow on the hill of Galcharn. There he had skulked all day, “waiting for Donald Cameron, who was afterwards hanged, together with some of the said Donald’s companions from Lochaber”. No doubt they were all honest men who had been “out,” and they may well have been on Cluny’s business of conveying gold from the Loch Arkaig hoard to Major Kennedy for the prince.
On seeing Clerk and Macdonald strike and shoot the man in the silver-laced hat, Cameron and his companion ran away, nor did Cameron mention the matter till nine months later, and then only to Donald (not he who was hanged). Donald advised him to hold his tongue. This Donald corroborated at the trial. The case against Clerk and Macdonald looked very black, especially as some witnesses fled and declined to appear. Scott, who knew Macintosh, the counsel for the prisoners, says that their advocates and agent “were convinced of their guilt”. Yet a jury of Edinburgh tradesmen, moved by Macintosh’s banter of the apparition, acquitted the accused solely, as Scott believes, because of the ghost and its newly-learned Gaelic. It is indeed extraordinary that Prestongrange, the patron of David Balfour, allowed his witnesses to say what the ghost said, which certainly “is not evidence”. Sir Walter supposes that Macpherson and Mrs. MacHardie invented the apparition as an excuse for giving evidence. “The ghost’s commands, according to Highland belief, were not to be disobeyed.” Macpherson must have known the facts “by ordinary means”. We have seen that Clerk and Macdonald were at once suspected; there was “a clatter” against them. But Angus Cameron had not yet told his tale of what he saw. Then who did tell? Here comes in a curious piece of evidence of the year 1896. A friend writes (29th December, 1896): —
“DEAR LANG,
“I enclose a tradition connected with the murder of Sergeant Davies, which my brother picked up lately before he had read the story in your Cock Lane. He had heard of the event before, both in Athole and Braemar, and it was this that made him ask the old lady (see next letter) about it.
“He thinks that Glenconie of your version (p. 256) must be Glenclunie, into which Allt Chriostaidh falls. He also suggests that the person who was chased by the murderers may have got up the ghost, in order to shift the odium of tale-bearing to other shoulders. The fact of being mixed up in the affair lends some support to the story here related.”
Here follows my friend’s brother’s narrative, the name of the witness being suppressed.
CONCERNING THE MURDER OF SERGEANT DAVIES
There is at present living in the neighbourhood of – an old lady, about seventy years of age. Her maiden name is – , 73 and she is a native of Braemar, but left that district when about twenty years old, and has never been back to it even for a visit. On being asked whether she had ever heard the story of Sergeant Davies, she at first persisted in denying all knowledge of it. The ordinary version was then related to her, and she listened quietly until it was finished, when she broke out with: —
“That isn’t the way of it at all, for the men were seen, and it was a forbear of my own that saw them. He had gone out to try to get a stag, and had his gun and a deer-hound with him. He saw the men on the hill doing something, and thinking they had got a deer, he went towards them. When he got near them, the hound began to run on in front of him, and at that minute he saw what it was they had. He called to the dog, and turned to run away, but saw at once that he had made a mistake, for he had called their attention to himself, and a shot was fired after him, which wounded the dog. He then ran home as fast as he could, never looking behind him, and did not know how far the men followed him. Some time afterwards the dog came home, and he went to see whether it was much hurt, whereupon it flew at him, and had to be killed. They thought that it was trying to revenge itself on him for having left it behind.”
At this point the old lady became conscious that she was telling the story, and no more could be got out of her. The name of the lady who keeps a secret of 145 years’ standing, is the name of a witness in the trial. The whole affair is thoroughly characteristic of the Highlanders and of Scottish jurisprudence after Culloden, while the verdict of “Not Guilty” (when “Not Proven” would have been stretching a point) is evidence to the “common-sense” of the eighteenth century. 74
There are other cases, in Webster, Aubrey and Glanvil of ghosts who tried more successfully to bring their murderers to justice. But the reports of the trials do not exist, or cannot be found, and Webster lost a letter which he once possessed, which would have been proof that ghostly evidence was given and was received at a trial in Durham (1631 or 1632). Reports of old men present were collected for Glanvil, but are entirely too vague.
The case of Fisher’s Ghost, which led to evidence being given as to a murder in New South Wales, cannot be wholly omitted. Fisher was a convict settler, a man of some wealth. He disappeared from his station, and his manager (also a convict) declared that he had returned to England. Later, a man returning from market saw Fisher sitting on a rail; at his approach Fisher vanished. Black trackers were laid on, found human blood on the rail, and finally discovered Fisher’s body. The manager was tried, was condemned, acknowledged his guilt and was hanged.
The story is told in Household Words, where Sir Frederick Forbes is said to have acted as judge. No date is given. In Botany Bay, 75 the legend is narrated by Mr. John Lang, who was in Sydney in 1842. He gives no date of the occurrence, and clearly embellishes the tale. In 1835, however, the story is told by Mr. Montgomery Martin in volume iv. of his History of the British Colonies. He gives the story as a proof of the acuteness of black trackers. Beyond saying that he himself was in the colony when the events and the trial occurred, he gives no date. I have conscientiously investigated the facts, by aid of the Sydney newspapers, and the notes of the judge, Sir Frederick Forbes. Fisher disappeared at the end of June, 1826, from Campbeltown. Suspicion fell on his manager, Worral. A reward was offered late in September. Late in October the constable’s attention was drawn to blood-stains on a rail. Starting thence, the black trackers found Fisher’s body. Worral was condemned and hanged, after confession, in February, 1827. Not a word is said about why the constable went to, and examined, the rail. But Mr. Rusden, author of a History of Australia, knew the medical attendant D. Farley (who saw Fisher’s ghost, and pointed out the bloody rail), and often discussed it with Farley. Mr. Souttar, in a work on Colonial traditions, proves the point that Farley told his ghost story before the body of Fisher was found. But, for fear of prejudicing the jury, the ghost was kept out of the trial, exactly as in the following case.
THE GARDENER’S GHOST
Perhaps the latest ghost in a court of justice (except in cases about the letting of haunted houses) “appeared” at the Aylesbury Petty Session on 22nd August, 1829. On 25th October, 1828, William Edden, a market gardener, was found dead, with his ribs broken, in the road between Aylesbury and Thame. One Sewell, in August, 1829, accused a man named Tyler, and both were examined at the Aylesbury Petty Sessions. Mrs. Edden gave evidence that she sent five or six times for Tyler “to come and see the corpse… I had some particular reasons for sending for him which I never did divulge… I will tell you my reasons, gentlemen, if you ask me, in the face of Tyler, even if my life should be in danger for it.” The reasons were that on the night of her husband’s murder, “something rushed over me, and I thought my husband came by me. I looked up, and I thought I heard the voice of my husband come from near my mahogany table… I thought I saw my husband’s apparition, and the man that had done it, and that man was Tyler… I ran out and said, ‘O dear God! my husband is murdered, and his ribs are broken’.”
Lord Nugent– “What made you think your husband’s ribs were broken?”
“He held up his hands like this, and I saw a hammer, or something like a hammer, and it came into my mind that his ribs were broken.” Sewell stated that the murder was accomplished by means of a hammer.
The prisoners were discharged on 13th September. On 5th March, 1830, they were tried at the Buckingham Lent Assizes, were found guilty and were hanged, protesting their innocence, on 8th March, 1830.
“In the report of Mrs. Edden’s evidence (at the Assizes) no mention is made of the vision.” 76
Here end our ghosts in courts of justice; the following ghost gave evidence of a murder, or rather, confessed to one, but was beyond the reach of human laws.
This tale of 1730 is still current in Highland tradition. It has, however, been improved and made infinitely more picturesque by several generations of narrators. As we try to be faithful to the best sources, the contemporary manuscript version is here reprinted from The Scottish Standard-Bearer, an organ of the Scotch Episcopalians (October and November, 1894).
