I must have been
dreaming, I noticed he looked singularly grave, and, on our return home,
he begged me never to go near the tree again. I asked him if he had had
any idea it was haunted, and he said: 'No! but I know there are such
trees. Ask Dingan.' Dingan was one of our native servants--the one we
respected most, as he had been with my husband for nearly twelve
years--ever since, in fact, he had settled in Assam. 'The mango tree,
mem-sahib!' Dingan exclaimed, when I approached him on the subject, 'the
mango tree on the Yuka Road, just before you get to the bridge over the
river? I know it well. We call it "the devil tree," mem-sahib. No other
tree will grow near it. There is a spirit peculiar to certain trees that
lives in its branches, and persuades anyone who ventures within a few
feet of it, either to kill themselves, or to kill other people. I have
seen three men from this village alone, hanging to its accursed
branches; they were left there till the ropes rotted and the jackals
bore them off to the jungles. Three suicides have I seen, and three
murders--two were women, strangers in these parts, and they were both
lying within the shadow of the mango's trunk, with the backs of their
heads broken in like eggs! It is a thrice-accursed tree, mem-sahib.'
Needless to say, I agreed with Dingan, and in future gave the mango a
wide berth."

Vagrarians, tree devils (a type of vice elemental), and phantasms of
dead trees are some of the occult horrors that haunt woods, and, in
fact, the whole country-side! Added to these, there are the fauns and
satyrs, those queer creatures, undoubtedly vagrarians, half-man and
half-goat, that are accredited by the ancients with much merry-making,
and grievous to add, much lasciviousness. Of these spirits there is
mention in Scripture, namely, Isaiah xiii. 21, where we read: "And their
houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and owls shall dwell there,
and satyrs shall dance there"; and in Baddeley's _Historical
Meditations_, published about the beginning of the seventeenth century,
there is a description by Plutarch, of a satyr captured by Sulla, when
the latter was on his way from Dyrrachium to Brundisium. The creature,
which appears to have been very material, was found asleep in a park
near Apollonia. On being led into the presence of Sulla, it commenced
speaking in a harsh voice that was an odd mixture of the neighing of a
horse and the crying of a goat. As neither Sulla nor any o