FEW

EW men under thirty would dare to believe in a ghost story, even were it attested by every judge on the Bench. Aiblins, my grandmither was an awfu' leear,' was the undutiful suggestion of the gentleman who had been telling a story of certain strange occurrences, wholly inconsistent with the laws of the universe, which had befallen a revered relative of his own. Most of us, however, have once or twice in our lives heard such stories advanced upon authority it ill became us to impeach; but though silenced, we have been unconvinced. Now this incredulity is a little remarkable, forming, as it does, a striking contrast to the ready faith with which new discoveries in other branches of science are observed and accepted. Of course, everybody knows this was not always the case: there was a time when those who told of new things in chemistry, natural history, or social science, were obliged to stand with moral halters round their necks; and if the new invention failed to win immediate approval, the over-bold discoverer was strangled, at least in metaphor, and compelled, for the rest of his natural life, to mutter 'pur si muove' to a limited circle of freethinking suspects; whereas if he announced a communication from the spiritworld, he told his hearers what they were all very ready to believe; and to sift over-narrowly the proofs of his tale argued a degree of scepticism closely bordering upon impiety. Now human belief has not thus veered round to the opposite point of the compass merely in consequence of the growth of a habit of mind which demands severely logical proof in support of every startling occurrence, although no doubt the belief in goblins has been much shaken by the deplorable

ven.

break-down of the evidence by which many have been attempted to be established; a deeper change has taken place than the mere rise of a belief that ghosts are not proThe teller of a ghost story now-a-days makes a far more startling demand upon our faith than did his predecessor in the days when spiritual manifestations, in one form or another, were so common as to be scarcely regarded as supernatural; and the tale has altogether a different signification, although the outward accidents of the story may be identical with goblin tales of the good old days; for the ghost himself is not the ghost of yore, but is a wholly different being, moved by other principles, and bound by other laws.

What we mean is this; when we of the present day talk of a ghost our idea is something of this sort; that the man himself, whose ghost we allege we were aware of, has been released from the earthly body through which he previously held communication with us, and by some means, of which we can give no explanation, has come back from his appointed place, and has manifested himself to us. Now, it is so violently improbable that man, who for weal or woe has passed away to other work, should, except in some tremendous exigency, be able or willing to leave his higher duties for the purpose of completing his unfinished earthly task--that is to say, that the shadow upon the sundial of life should turn back, and the full-grown man once more become a child-that as soon as people came to hold the belief that a ghost was the man himself, they began to doubt the reality of apparitions, and to be very ready to listen to the sceptics who cavilled at the evidence on which these stories were based. But in the old times, when every

homestead had its haunted chamber, and when every benighted traveller brought home his tale of horror, or came back, frenzied and tonguetied, for ever unable to reveal what he had been permitted to behold, no one imagined that the spectral form which menaced him with madness or death was the real self of the departed; and in this dreadful parody lay, as we shall presently show, the chief awfulness of the apparition.

We are not going to lose ourselves in a general discussion of the theories of ghost seers at all times; for spectres have usually been most common and most formidable among people who have left us very scanty materials for ascertaining their opinions upon any point: but we propose to show what was thought on the subject by a race whose blood flows in our veins, and who have bequeathed us a literature in which the feelings of our own forefathers can still be discerned. We are speaking of the old North

men

who believed devoutly in ghosts, and were sorely disquieted by them; and who, moreover, have left us a mass of learning on this head, in which we can see very accurately what a ghost was in the opinion of men who regarded him as one of the ordinary disagreeables of a very imperfectly constructed world; what he could do, and how he was to be got rid of; and as we go on we shall be able to illustrate and enliven our theories with some very horrible stories, most of which, we think, will be new even to the students of the night side of Nature.

We shall not be able to form a clear notion of the Northman's ghost unless we understand what he thought about the spiritual constitution of the living man. We ourselves -- when thinking and speaking as ordinary, common

place people-divide man into two parts: the soul, by which we mean all that thinks, fears, hopes, and sins, and the body, which is the machinery through which the real man now happens to be working. But the Northman's view differed considerably from this. Besides the soul, Odin's handiwork, which after this life should receive the all but infinite recompense for its deeds, should mingle with the gods above and share their doom, man had within him another something, for which our language gives no name, because the idea is now unfamiliar to us, and which we will call Fetch; warning our readers against imagining that it had all the qualities of the Scottish phantasm of that name. It was not the Father of gods and men who placed the Fetch within the bosom of his creature: it is likely that its separate creation is hinted at in these dark lines from the Edda :—

Then went there forth three Asir,
Full of might and full of love;
Came to this our dwelling-place,
Found on the shore the feeble ones,
Ask and Embla, as yet unshaped by doom.
Soul they had not, Wit they had not,
Blood nor Bearing, nor lovely Features:
Soul gave Odin, Wit gave Hoenir,
Lodur gave Blood and lovely Features.

Now this Fetch is no part of the soul, but is its coarse and earthstained comrade, and is closely allied to the blind instinct of the brute: it contains within it all those thoughts and feelings which concern objects only of immediate and passing interest, and when these shall have ceased to be, the Fetch shall die. It is not absolutely bad, but knows little of right or wrong, or of remote consequences, and is the slave of headlong impulse: it is as the reckless spirit which animated Undine, before her marriage to a mortal grafted a human soul upon

a fairy changeling, and which still remained active for mischief in her uncle, the soulless water sprite, who was ever meddling in matters too high for him to understand.

The properly constituted man keeps these lower clements in subjection, and never suffers the body or blind passion to act otherwise than in obedience to his will; but if he is abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed,' or if he has unduly indulged the lower parts of his nature, he may lose the control of himself and fall into a state which resembles 'possession.' He is, in fact, possessed by his own Fetch, which can make him act like the brute to whose level he has degraded himself; it can make him in blind fury tear his own children to pieces, or rush, foaming and naked, into battle. This was to be a Baresark. Or he might fall lower still in some evil hour he might be constrained to assume the very form, and more or less of the nature, of the beast of prey which he resembled, and this was to be a werewolf, a horrible degradation, the real, literal occurrence of which was doubted by no one; but for the benefit of those moderns who love to run every old legend to some mythic earth, we may as well mention that this bodily transformation often seems to be referred to when the narrator intends nothing of the kind. Men frequently used to say, 'So-and-so turned into a boar,' meaning that he let the savage element get the better of him, and behaved like one; nor is it always quite clear whether the expression is used literally or metaphorically.

Few men are liable to be thus overmastered; but in times of excitement, fear, or distress, when the body is weary and the will relaxed, the Fetch of every man is apt to break away and leave him for a time, and, unable to endure the torture of suspense, will travel away to the spot upon which the thoughts

of the whole man are fixed. While the Fetch is thus absent, the ordinary man goes about his occupations as usual, and is not aware, either at the time or afterwards, that he is not all there,' to use an idiom once in high repute, but now fallen and discredited. But with some men it is otherwise: the man in whom this gross shadow of himself has by nature unusual power, or who by dark arts has strengthened his Fetch at the expense of his soul, feels himself borne forth with this lower part of himself to distant scenes, and on his return is with difficulty roused from a lethargic sleep; waking, he retains a vivid recollection of what he sometimes takes for a dream, but which in fact is real truth. This is second sight, and may come upon a man without his own consent, and then it is at best a doubtful blessing, or may be brought on by artificial means, and then it is a crime.

Now the Fetches of them whose thoughts are deeply fixed on us are constantly in our presence, although they whose baser thoughts they represent seldom know it. Nor are we ourselves aware how terribly our solitude is peopled; but should one come in, gifted himself with the power of second sight, he can hear the curses and see the threatening gestures of our foe, can see the warning finger of a distant friend, or can behold monstrous forms of wild beasts, whom, by the eye which cannot change, he discerns to be human Fetches. Thus in that grim story of the Edda, which tells of the doom which awaited each successive possessor of the fatal ring, when Hogni had accepted the treacherous invitation of Atli, and was about to start upon the illomened journey from which he never returned, his second-sighted wife told him her warning dream.

'Methought an eagle came rushing hither; he passed along our hall from end to end, and from him blood rained down upon us: 'tis a

token which cannot lie; well do I know by his terrible threats, 'twas Atli wore the form of that bird.'

Her infatuated husband does not doubt that his gifted wife has really seen all she describes, but his hour is come, and 'no man can be more wise than destiny,' so he suggests she must have seen Atli slaughtering oxen for the banquet at which the visitors are to be entertained. Such visions, however, were not always thrown away, and the following story from a historical saga shows more clearly what a Fetch was, and how it became visible by second-sight. One Thorgrim, with eighteen followers, had made a forced march by night to surprise an

enemy.

'Early in the morning they drew near the homestead of Atli, in Ottersdale, but before they were within sight Thorgrim bade them alight from their horses, for he was SO heavy with sleep he could not sit upright. They did so, and let their horses graze, but Thorgrim wrapt his head in a mantle, and fell into a heavy and troubled sleep.

'Meanwhile, this is what they were about in Ottersdale within the homestead. They had gone to sleep, as usual, in the outhouse; and in the morning they were awakened by Atli, whose slumber was so troubled that no one else could sleep: he moved and groaned, and beat with his hands and feet, until Turf jumped up and woke him, and told him nobody could sleep while he went on so. . . . Then they asked had he seen anything? He replied, he had, indeed. "Methought I was going out of this building, when I saw eighteen wolves running hither from the south; and before them came a she-fox; so crafty a beast have I never seen: its eyes were everywhere at once; it was fierce and dangerous, as were they all. Just as they were come to the house, Turf woke me: sure I am these

There are hosts of similar stories, in which men, either sleeping or waking, have discovered the thoughts of distant enemies, and so have become aware of impending danger. There were men who had acquired the art of sending forth their Fetch at pleasure, and who made a trade of the exercise of it: but there was always something uncanny and disreputable about the practice, which was associated with the forbidden arts of magic: but the essence of the thing, by whatever devices it might be brought about, consisted in the migration of the lower parts of the spirit of man. The following is one instance of many :

'Ingimund was a Norwegian noble, who, for his good service in the fight at Hafur's Firth, had received from Harold the Fairhaired a costly jewel, stamped with the image of Frey, the god of battles: this was to be a perpetual token of the king's favour. One winter night, during a high festival, a wise woman was brought in to tell every man's fortune; and when the turn of Ingimund came, she told him he was doomed to leave the land of his fathers, and to raise up a family in distant Iceland. When he scoffed at her prophetic skill, she gave him this sign: the jewel which he valued so highly that he always carried it about with him, he should find, had escaped from his keeping, and he should see it no more until he made for himself a home in his new country. Next morning the jewel was indeed missing. Some years afterwards the prediction so disturbed him, that he sent for three Finns, and required them to

:

tell him where the jewel lay hid: all Finns were wizards, more or less. "They answered, "Tis a long journey to Iceland, whither ye would have us go; but we are willing to do you a pleasure. Let beds be made ready for us in a building apart, and let no man call us for three days:" and it was done so. The third day Ingimund came to them, and then they arose, and sighed heavily, and said: "A weary journey have we had; but now we are able to describe the place so clearly that you shall know it when you come there but great has been the power of that wise woman's spell; for we have had some trouble to find the jewel. We came ashore where three creeks run up into the land from the north, and beyond one of them lies a great water. Then we came into a deep valley, in the midst of which was a wooded hill, fit to build a house upon; and hard by was another hill, where lay the jewel: and when we would have taken it up, it rolled away to another hill; some hidden power seemed to keep it from us: it is your weird to go yourself." prediction was, of course, accomplished, and Ingimund found his lost treasure when he dug the foundations of his house in Waterdale.

The

But, although the Fetches of ordinary mortals did but flit bodilessly around the persons or things in which they took an interest, it was otherwise with men of gross and violent character, and with those who had some familiarity with witchcraft. When the Fetches of such persons had escaped from the body, they could gather round them all those elements of mischief which in ages long past had peopled the world with monsters and fiends, and which the gods had not been able altogether to expel; and out of this floating mass of evil they could construct for themselves another and a mightier body; and

when they thus again took a substantial form, they were more formidable than the distant enemy in whose likeness they appeared. For they were unrestrained by the shackles of the frail human flesh, or by conscience and the nobler powers of the soul, but were mere embodiments of unfettered malice. Sometimes it happened that men who were thus beset by Fetches did not know the hidden cause of the evil from which they suffered and it was only the eye of a seer which could discern the working of the secret enemy.

Thus, when God

mund and Sigurd would not allow their friend Odd to accompany them upon a voyage, they were detained for a fortnight by what they deemed to be bad weather.

'But one night Godmund was restless in his sleep, and men said he ought to be awakened, but Sigurd said he must sleep his dream out. When he awoke they asked what he had dreamed to make him so troubled. He answered, "Methought we lay here with our two ships off the island, and I beheld a white bear coiled round it, and his head and tail. joined close to the ships. Never did I see so terrible a beast, for his hair stood on end, and he seemed about to leap upon the ships and to sink them.' Then said Sigurd, "It is plain that what thou hast seen is Odd's Fetch, even the wolfish passion with which he hates us: sure I am we shall never escape hence unless he go with us.)

Often, on the other hand, the Fetch was visible in his own shape, uttering threats and inflicting a punishment, which, in the instance at least which we are about to give, was heartily deserved. Thormod, a celebrated Skald, who afterwards fell at Stiklastad by the side of St. Olaf, was in his young days an admirer of two ladies at the same time: to one of whom, known from