Of that is to be told
What I just observed,
When I had come into the land of torment:
Singed birds,
That had been souls,
Flew as many as gnats.
The Finns and the Lithuanians speak of the ‘Milky Way’ as the Bird’s Way – the way of souls. According to Kuhn, the notion of the soul assuming the form of a bird is closely allied with the primitive tradition of birds as soul-bringers. Thus, as it has been suggested, ‘the soul and the bird that brought it down to earth may have been supposed to become one, and to enter and quit the body together.’ In the Egyptian hieroglyphics a bird signified the soul of man; and the German name for stork, writes Grimm, is literally child, or soul-bringer. Hence the belief that the advent of infants is presided over by this bird, which obtains so wide a credence in Denmark and Germany.101
The idea of the bird as a ‘soul bringer’ probably gave rise to the popular belief that it is unlucky when a bird hovers near the window of a sick-room, a superstition to which Mrs. Hemans has prettily alluded:
Say not ’tis vain! I tell thee some
Are warned by a meteor’s light,
Or a pale bird flitting calls them home,
Or a voice on the winds by night.
There are various stories told of mysterious birds appearing at such a time in different localities. In Devonshire the appearance of a white breasted bird has long been considered a presage of death, a notion which is said to have originated in a tragic occurrence that happened to one of the Oxenham family. A local ballad tells how on the bridal eve of Margaret, heiress of Sir James Oxenham, a silver-breasted bird flew over the wedding guests just as Sir James stood up to thank them for good wishes. The next day she was slain by a discarded lover, and the ballad records how —
Round her hovering flies,
The phantom-bird, for her last breath,
To bear it to the skies.
In Yorkshire, Berry Well was supposed to be haunted by a bogie in the form of a white goose, and the Rev. S. Baring-Gould informs us how Lew Trenchard House is haunted by a white lady who goes by the name of Madame Gould, and is supposed to be the spirit of a lady who died there, April 10, 1795. ‘A stone is shown on the “ramps” of Lew Slate Quarry, where seven parsons met to lay the old madame, and some say that the white owl, which nightly flits to and fro in front of Lew House, is the spirit of the lady conjured by the parsons into a bird.’102
Similarly, whenever the white owls are seen perched on the family mansion of the noble family of Arundel of Wardour, it is regarded as a certain indication that one of its members will shortly be summoned out of the world. In Count Montalembert’s ‘Vie de Ste. Elizabeth’ it is related how ‘Duke Louis of Thuringia, the husband of Ste. Elizabeth of Hungary, being on the point of expiring, said to those around him, “Do you see those doves more white than snow?” His attendants supposed him to be a prey to visions; but a little while afterwards he said to them, “I must fly away with those brilliant doves.” Having said this he fell asleep in peace. Then his almoner, Berthold, perceived doves flying away to the east, and followed them along with his eyes.’ We may compare a similar story told of the most beautiful woman of the Knistenaux, named ‘Foot of the Fawn,’ who died in her childbirth, and her babe with her. Soon afterwards two doves appeared, one full grown, and the other a little one. They were the spirits of the mother and child, and the Indians would gather about the tree on which they were perched with reverential love, and worship them as the spirit of the woman and child.103 There is Lord Lyttelton’s well-known ghost story, and the belief of the Duchess of Kendal that George I. flew into her window in the shape of a raven. Another well-known case was that of the Duchess of St. Albans, who, on her death-bed, remarked to her step-daughter, Lady Guilford, ‘I am so happy to day because your father’s spirit is breathing upon me; he has taken the shape of a little bird singing at my window.’ Kelly relates an anecdote of a credulous individual who believed that the departing soul of his brother-in-law, in the form of a bird, tapped at his window at the time of his death;104 and in FitzPatrick’s ‘Life of Bishop Doyle’ it is related, in allusion to his death, that, ‘considering the season was midsummer, and not winter, the visit of two robin redbreasts to the sick-room may be noticed as interesting. They remained fluttering round, and sometimes perching on the uncurtained bed. The priests, struck by the novelty of the circumstance, made no effort to expel the little visitors, and the robins hung lovingly over the bishop’s head until death released him.’ A singular instance of this belief was the extraordinary whim of a Worcester lady, who, imagining her daughter to exist in the shape of a singing-bird, literally furnished her pew in the Cathedral with cages full of the kind; and we are told in Lord Oxford’s letters that, as she was rich, and a benefactress in beautifying the church, no objection was made to her harmless folly.
CHAPTER VIII
ANIMAL GHOSTS
It is the rule rather than the exception for ghosts to take the form of animals. A striking feature of this form of animism is its universality, an argument, it is said, in favour of its having originally sprung from the old theory of metempsychosis which has pertinaciously existed in successive stages of the world’s culture. ‘Possibly,’ it has been suggested, ‘the animal form of ghosts is a mark of the once-supposed divinity of the dead. Ancestor worship is one of the oldest of the creeds, and in all mythologies we find that the gods could transform themselves into any shape at will, and frequently took those of beasts and birds.’105 At the same time, one would scarcely expect to come across nowadays this fanciful belief in our own and other civilised countries, and yet instances are of constant occurrence, being deeply rooted in many a local tradition. Acts of injustice done to a person cause the soul to return in animal form by way of retribution. Thus, in Cornwall, it is a very popular fancy that when a young woman who has loved not wisely but too well dies forsaken and broken-hearted, she comes back to haunt her deceiver in the form of a white hare.106 This phantom pursues the false one everywhere, being generally invisible to everyone but himself. It occasionally rescues him from danger, but invariably causes his death in the end. A Shropshire story tells107 how ‘two or three generations back there was a lady buried in her jewels at Fitz, and afterwards the clerk robbed her; and she used to walk Cuthery Hollow in the form of a colt. They called it Obrick’s Colt, and one night the clerk met it, and fell on his knees, saying, “Abide, Satan! abide! I am a righteous man, and a psalm singer.”’108 The ghost was known as Obrick’s Colt from the name of the thief, who, as the peasantry were wont to say, ‘had niver no pace atter; a was sadly troubled in his yed, and mithered.’109
Sometimes the spirit in animal form is that of a wicked person doomed to wear that shape for some offence. A man who hanged himself at Broomfield, near Shrewsbury, ‘came again in the form