hdean, father of the author of The Castle of
Indolence. 'As to Plato, cited by my learned brother, Plato
believed in hauntings, as we read in the Phaedo,' Nau has him here.
In brief, 'the defendants have let a house as habitable, well
knowing the same to be infested by spirits'. The Fathers are then
cited as witnesses for ghosts. The learned counsel's argument about
a vice d'esprit is a pitiable pun.

The decision of the court, unluckily, is not preserved by Le Loyer.
The counsel for Bolacre told Le Loyer that the case was adjourned on
the formal point, but, that, having obtained letters royal for his
client, he succeeded in getting the remainder of the lease declared
void. Comparing, however, Bouchel, s. v. Louage, in his
Bibliotheque du droit Francois, one finds that the higher court
reversed the decision of the judge at Tours. In the Edinburgh case,
1835, the tenant, Captain Molesworth, did not try to have his lease
quashed, but he did tear up floors, pull down wainscots, and bore a
hole into the next house, that of his landlord, Mr. Webster, in
search of the cause of the noises. Mr. Webster, therefore, brought
an action to restrain him from these experiments.

Le Loyer gives two cases of ghosts appearing to denounce murderers
in criminal cases. He possessed the speech of the President Brisson
(at that time an advocate), in which he cited the testimony of the
spectre of Madame de Colommiers, mysteriously murdered in full day,
with her children and their nurse. Her ghost appeared to her
husband, when wide awake, and denounced her own cousins. As there
was no other evidence, beyond the existence of motive, the accused
were discharged. In another well-known case, before the Parlement
de Bretagne, the ghost of a man who had mysteriously vanished,
guided his brother to the spot where his wife and her paramour had
buried him, after murdering him. Le Loyer does not give the date of
this trial. The wife was strangled, and her body was burned.

Modern times have known dream-evidence in cases of murder, as in the
Assynt murder, and the famous Red Barns affair. But Thomas Harris's
is probably the last ghost cited in a court of law. On the whole,
the ghosts have gained little by these legally attested appearances,
but the trials do throw a curious light on the juridical procedure
of our ancestors. The famous action against the ghosts in the
Eyrbyggja Saga was not before a Christian court, and is too well
known