dead of night, wails and cries,
presumably uttered by the phantasms of drowned sailors, are distinctly
heard by the terrified peasantry on shore. I can the more readily
believe this, because I myself have heard similar sounds off the Irish,
Scottish, and Cornish coasts, where shrieks, and wails, and groans as of
the drowning have been borne to me from the inky blackness of the
foaming and tossing sea. According to Mr Hunt in his _Romances of the
West of England_, the sands of Porth Towan were haunted, a fisherman
declaring that one night when he was walking on them alone, he suddenly
heard a voice from the sea cry out, "The hour is come, but not the man."
This was repeated three times, when a black figure, like that of a man,
appeared on the crest of an adjacent hill, and, dashing down the steep
side, rushed over the sands and vanished in the waves.

In other parts of England, as well as in Brittany and Spain, a voice
from the sea is always said to be heard prior to a storm and loss of
life. In the Bermudas, I have heard that before a wreck a huge white
fish is often seen; whilst in the Cape Verde Islands maritime disasters
are similarly presaged by flocks of peculiarly marked gulls.

On no more reliable authority than hearsay evidence, I understand that
off the coast of Finland a whirlpool suddenly appears close beside a
vessel that is doomed to be wrecked, and that a like calamity is
foretold off the coast of Peru by the phantasm of a sailor who, in
eighteenth-century costume, swarms up the side of the doomed ship,
enters the captain's cabin, and, touching him on the shoulder, points
solemnly at the porthole and vanishes.

_River Ghosts_

In China there is a strong belief that spots in rivers, creeks, and
ponds where people have been drowned are haunted by devils that,
concealing themselves either in the water itself or on the banks, spring
out upon the unwary and drown them. To warn people against these
dangerous elementals, a stone or pillar called "The Fat-pee," on which
the name of the future Buddha or Pam-mo-o-mee-to-foo is inscribed, is
set up near the place where they are supposed to lurk, and when the
hauntings become very frequent the evil spirit is exorcised. The
ceremony of exorcism consists in the decapitation of a white horse by a
specially selected executioner, on the site of the hauntings. The head
of the slaughtered animal is placed in an earthenware jar, and buried in
the exact spot where it wa