witched'. Before Mr. Shaw's death his groom,
in the stable, saw 'a great heap of hay rolling toward him, and then
appeared' (the hay not the groom) 'in the shape and lykness of a
bair. He charges it to appear in human shape, which it did.' The
appearance made a tryst to meet the groom, but Mr. Shaw forbade this
tampering with evil in the lykness of a bair. However a stone was
thrown at the groom, which he took for a fresh invitation from the
bair, so he went to the place appointed. 'The divill appears in
human shape, with his heid running down with blood,' and explains
that he is 'the spirit of a murdered man who lay under his bed, and
buried in the ground, and who was murdered by such a man, naming him
by name'. The groom, very naturally, dug in the spot pointed out by
this versatile phantom, 'but finds nothing of bones or anything lyke
a grave, and shortly after this man dyes,' having failed to discover
that the person accused of murder had ever existed at all.

Many ghosts have a perfect craze for announcing that bodies or
treasures, are buried where there is nothing of the sort. Glanvill
has a tale of a ghost who accused himself of a murder, and led a man
to a place in a wood where the corpse of the slain was to be found.
There was no corpse, the ghost was mad. The Psychical Society have
published the narratives of a housemaid and a butler who saw a lady
ghost. She, later, communicated through a table her intention to
appear at eleven p.m. The butler and two ladies saw her, the
gentlemen present did _not_. The ghost insisted that jewels were
buried in the cellar; the butler dug, but found none. The writer is
acquainted with another ghost, not published, who labours under
morbid delusions. For reasons wholly unfounded on fact she gave a
great deal of trouble to a positive stranger. Now there was
literally no sense in these proceedings. Such is ghostly evidence,
ever deceitful!

'It's not good,' says Mr. Law, 'to come in communing terms with
Satan, there is a snare in the end of it;' yet people have actually
been hanged, in England, on the evidence of a ghost! On the
evidence of the devil, some other persons were accused of theft, in
1682. This is a remarkable instance; we often hear of raising the
ghostly foe, but we are seldom told how it can be done. This is how
it was done in February, 1682, at the house of the Hon. Robert
Montgomery, in Irvine. Some objects of silver plate were stolen, a
mai