t on rarity of ghostly evidence. His pamphlet for
the Bannatyne Club. His other examples. Case of Mirabel. The
spectre, the treasure, the deposit repudiated. Trials of Auguier
and Mirabel. The case of Clenche's murder. The murder of Sergeant
Davies. Acquittal of the prisoners. An example from Aubrey. The
murder of Anne Walker. The case of Mr. Booty. An example from
Maryland, the story of Briggs and Harris. The Valogne phantasm.
Trials in the matter of haunted houses. Cases from Le Loyer.
Modern instances of haunted houses before the law. Unsatisfactory
results of legal investigations.

'What I do not know is not knowledge,' Sir Walter Scott might have
said, with regard to bogles and bar-ghaists. His collection at
Abbotsford of such works as the Ephesian converts burned, is
extensive and peculiar, while his memory was rich in tradition and
legend. But as his Major Bellenden sings,

Was never wight so starkly made,
But time and years will overthrow.

When Sir Walter in 1831, wrote a brief essay on ghosts before the
law, his memory was no longer the extraordinary engine, wax to
receive, and marble to retain, that it had been. It is an example
of his dauntless energy that, even in 1831, he was not only toiling
at novels, and histories, and reviews, to wipe out his debts, but
that, as a pure labour of love, he edited, for the Bannatyne Club,
'The trial of Duncan Terig alias Clerk, and Alexander Bane
Macdonald, for the murder of Arthur Davis, sergeant in General
Guise's regiment of foot, June, 1754'.

The trial, as Sir Walter says, in his dedication to the Bannatyne
Club, 'involves a curious point of evidence,' a piece of 'spectral
evidence' as Cotton Mather calls it. In another dedication (for
there are two) Scott addresses Sir Samuel Shepherd, remarking that
the tract deals with 'perhaps the only subject of legal inquiry
which has escaped being investigated by his skill, and illustrated
by his genius'. That point is the amount of credit due to the
evidence of a ghost. In his preface Sir Walter cites the familiar
objection of a learned judge that 'the ghost must be sworn in usual
form, but in case he does not come forward, he cannot be heard, as
now proposed, through the medium' (medium indeed!) 'of a third
party'. It seems to be a rule of evidence that what a dead man said
may be received, on the report of the person with whom he
communicated. A ghost is a dead man, and yet he is deprived,
acco