Folklore examples abound in Silesia and the Tyrol, where the gift of wraith-seeing still flourishes, with the customary details of funerals, churches, four-cross-roads, and headless phantoms, and an especial association with New Year's Eve. The accounts of 'second-sight' from North Britain mostly belong to a somewhat older date. Thus the St. Kilda people used to be haunted by their own spectral doubles, forerunners of impending death, and in 1799 a traveller writes of the peasants of Kirkcudbrightshire, 'It is common among them to fancy that they see the wraiths of persons dying, which will be visible to one and not to others present with him. Within these last twenty years, it was hardly possible to meet with any person who had not seen many wraiths and ghosts in the course of his experience.' Those who discuss the authenticity of the second-sight stories as actual evidence, must bear in mind that they prove a little too much; they vouch not only for human apparitions, but for such phantoms as demon-dogs, and for still more fanciful symbolic omens. Thus a phantom shroud seen in spiritual vision on a living man predicts his death, immediate if it is up to his head, less nearly approaching if it is only up to his waist; and to see in spiritual vision a spark of fire fall upon a person's arm or breast, is a forerunner of a dead child to be seen in his arms.[1] As visionaries often see phantoms of living persons without any remarkable event coinciding with their hallucinations, it is naturally admitted that a man's phantom or 'double' may be seen without portending anything in particular. The spiritualistic theory specially insists on cases of apparition where the person's death corresponds more or less nearly with the time when some friend perceives his phantom.[2] Narratives of this class, which I can here only specify without arguing on them, are
- ↑ Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' pp. 44, 56, 208; Brand, 'Popular Antiquities,' vol. iii. pp. 155, 235; Johnson, 'Journey to the Hebrides;' Martin, 'Western Islands of Scotland,' in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p. 670.
- ↑ See R. D. Owen, 'Footfalls on the Boundary of another World;' Mrs. Crowe, 'Night-Side of Nature;' Howitt's Tr. of Ennemoser's 'Magic,' &c.
