Family Ghosts... relations of the banshee, surely.

By James Hannay.

What is the reason why ghost-stories have a peculiar charm at this period of the year? Is it that the long nights naturally recall our thoughts to the shadowy beings of whom night is the peculiar time? Or is it that we want to increase the relish of the Christmas fireside by tinging our comfort with a little imaginative fear to make it more piquant? For if there was no fear - or suggestion of fear, at all events - even to minds thoroughly incredulous about ghost stories, there would be no pleasure in them. The lurking enjoyment as the lurking sentiment of pain to the enjoyment of a tragedy. You know that the tragedy is only a play, and you know that the ghost story is only a yarn. Nevertheless, the half-conscious coming and going of pain and fear, in both cases, is an indispensible element of the admiration and the joy.

I am going to deal on this occasion with a special class of ghosts, and a class, let me tell you at once, of the highest respectability. There are ghosts and ghosts. We are not to deal just now with our plebeian apparitions - your murdered misers, haunting old tumble-down places, and that kind of thing - but with spirits boasting the entree into the best houses in the kingdom. There are parvenues among them to be sure, but they are parvenues whom the highest people are obliged to receive - to receive, ay, and to treat with great respect into the bargain. They make themselves quite at home, indeed, and find their way to rooms in the highest mansions, where none but members of the family are in the habit of dwelling.

Family ghosts, I say, are special class of ghosts. Let me add that they are a modern classs of ghosts. I find no trace of the family ghost proper among the ancients. Like heraldry, family ghosts are essentially feudal - not classical. they belong to a life of castles in the country - to races living for generations surrounded by the same woods, dying in the same bedrooms, being buried in the same church vaults; in a kind of isolation throughout, which made the consciousness of common blood or kinmanship all the stronger. It is to this concentrated sort of existence, with all that it implies, that we must look for the germ of the particular belief under review. the family ghost belongs to the family as a family, though it is not necessarily seen only in certain places. Nevertheless, as the old familie s of Europe have generally lived most of their time at their principal seats, these seats have in most cases come to be considered the peculiar haunts of the family ghost. The White Lady of the Hohenzollerns, for instance, has usually been talked of as loving to appear in Berlin. Her reputation had reached England as early at least as Charles the Second's time, for she is mentioned by Aubrey in his miscellanies. "Also at Berlin," says that quaint old gossip, "when one shall die of the electoral house of Brandenberg, a woman dressed in white linen appears always to several, without speaking, or doing any harm, for several weeks before. The father of Frederick the Great fancied that he had seen this supernatural lady-in-waiting on one occasion; and her appearance was gossiped about in the newpapers during the revolution of 1848; but she has not, I believe, been heard of lately. As the White Lady is associated with Berlin, so the little Red Man belongs to the Tuileries. The little Red Man - a fearful hunchback, with a squint, dressed in scarlet and having a serpent for a crevat - is said by the tradition to show himself in the Tuileries before any calamity which may befall its masters. This legend is sure to live, for Beranger has based on it one of his best songs, "Le Petit Homme Rouge." With admirable philosophical humour, Beranger makes him appear in 1792, in sabots, singing the "Marseillaise;" and again during Charles the Tenth's reign in a big Jesuit's hat. There was an attempt to set going a story that Bonapart had seen the malignant little hobgoblin in Egypt; but this never took root. The Little Red Man belongs to the Tuileries and the Bourbons.

In these two conspicuous instances, the apparitions portend disaster. And this is true of the vast majority of the apparitions which such legends record. Very commonly the family ghost has injuries done in a long past age to avenge; and he comes to predict calamity, because he loves the office. Thus, the Monk of the Byrons, as their descendant the poet tells, was wont to visit Newstead, for no good. He had been expelled by the Byrons at the Reformation from the abbey, and his spirit came to vex those who had succeeded to his order.

The wrongs of the Drummer of the Ogilvies, Earls of Airlie, in Scotland, are more strictly personal. Many generations ago he was murdered and flung out of the windows of their castle, with his head sticking in his drum; having been found, it is said, aspiring to the love of a daughter of the house. Ever since that time, his drum has been heard beating when misfortune has been impending over the race; and it is said that a lady visiting the family during the present generation, and ignorant of the tradition, heard him beating his tattoo while she was dressing for dinner, and startled her host at table by asking who his drummer was? A premature death in the family circle - so runs the story - followed on this incident.

Of a similar kind was the Lad of Hilton, a ghost which was wont to vex the ancient Hiltons, of Hilton, in the county of Durham, one of the first families in the North. A Baron of Hilton - for they were always called barons - whose servant had not been quick enough in getting his horse ready, struck the lad with a hay-fork, and killed him, and the family were haunted by his ghost ever after. What is curious too, and shows that supernatural legends, like globules of quicksilver, run naturally into each other, this Lad of Hilton comes to be mixed up in the popular imagination with a famous Brownie that had for ages attached himself to Hilton Castle. Yet the Brownie, a kindly and useful sprite, is not a family ghost strictly so called. He is a fairy, and the fairies have always been a people by themselves.

All superstition is doubtless more closely related to the passion of fear than the passion of love; ut the Irish Banshee gives her warning to families not in the spirit of hate, but in the spirit of sympathy. She attaches herself only to old houses of her native land; and when her sobbing and her wail are heard on the wind, she is sorrowing, not rejoicing, at the impending doom. The awe, then, that she inspires is mixed with tenderness; and the watching care of a hereditary Banshee adds to the dignity of McCarthy, a Butler, or an O'Neill. The Banshee of the O'Neills was believed to have been heard before a fire which took place not very many years ago at Shanes Castle; and it was affirmied by the peasantry that on the extinction of the legitimate line in the person of the late chief of the O'Neills, the Banshee would drown herself in Lough Neagh. When the race was at an end her mission of centuries was over.

I have heard a Banshee story more striking than any of those in Mr. Crofton Croker's book, and which was a great favourite with my late friend Alexander Smith. An Irish chief, who had heard the Banshee, and wished to escape her, came to London. But her sorrowful cry, mixed with little heart-breaking sobs, rose under his window in Park Lane. He went away to the opera, where, surrounded by all that was brilliant of the modern world's prose, he hoped to shake himself clear from the terrors of the old world's poetic dreams. In vain. No sooner did the orchestra break into the overture, than the fatal mournful cry pierced through the sound of all the instruments. The musical critics, we may be sure, did not hear it. Twas meant for one heart only in all the gay throng, but it knew not how to reach that.

One of the family ghosts I have met with of which the association are cheerful, connects itself with the name of Lord Castlereagh. He was staying on a visit with a friend in the North of Ireland, and walking in an old chamber, he saw a singular vision. It was that of a youngster, beautiful as Cupid, with a kind of aureole round his head and a sheen of light playing about him. Lord Castlereagh, not without some suspicion that a joke had been played upon him, mentioned the apparition to his host. "Indeed," his host said, "that confirms an ancient tradition about the room in which you slept. You have seen the Radiant Boy. His appearance is usually regarded as an omen of good fortune; but let us talk of him no more."

Sometimes the family ghost is himself an ancestor of the race about which his spirit lingers. In such cases he is always seen in the costume of his own age, and the legend about him is most commonly a gloomy one. A myth of the kind sprang out of the career of Alexander de Lindsay, fourth Earl of Crawford, a stormy feudal noble of the fifteenth century, remembered in Scotland as the "Tiger Earl."  "The Tiger Earl," writes Lord Lindsay, "is believed to be still playing at the 'de'il's bucks' in a mysterious chamber in Glamis Castle, of which no one now knows the entrance - doomed to play there till the end of time. He was constantly losing, it is said, when one of his companions advising him to give up the game, 'Never,' cried he, 'till the day of judgment.' The Evil One instantly appeared, and both chamber and company vanished. No one has since discovered them; but in the stormy nights, when the winds howl drearily around the old castle, the stamps and curses of the doomed gamesters may still, it is said, be heard mingling with the blast."

In a few cases, one seems to recognise the action of a friendly family ghost, akin to that of the person "good genius" of the classical world. A sea-story occurs to me in illustration of this. During the great war, Sir Henry Digby, afterwards an admiral, was bowling along in command of a frigate off Cape Finisterre. He had shaped his course for Cape Saint Vincent, and was running S.S.W., with a fair wind. He had "turned in" in his cabin, when at six bells in the first watch - eleven o'clock - he heard a voice close to him say, "Digby, Digby, Digby, go to the northward!" It was so distinct that he rang his bell immediately for the officer of the watch, and asked if anybody had been in the cabin. Nobody had been there. He composed himself again, supposing he had been dreaming; and again, at two o'clock in the moring, came the same voice, with the same energetic advice, "Digby, Digby, Digby, go to the northward!" This time Captain Digby acted upon the mysterious suggestion. He ordered the ship to be hauled to the wind; and told the officer of the watch to tack every hour, and to call him at daylight.

Great was the surprise of the lieutenant of the morning watch, when, coming to relieve his mesmate at four o'clock, he found the vessel close hauled. "What does this mean?" he asked his friend. "Only that the captain's gone mad," was the answer. But at daylight a strange sail was seen on the bow. She proved to be a Spanish prize with a heap of dollars and a rich cargo; and that prize money laid the foundation of Sir Henry Digby's fortune. How explain the story, which rests, I may observe, on excellent naval authority? For my own part, I believe that the voice was that of one of the old Digby's  - perhaps of the ghost of the famous Sir Kenelm, celebrated by Ben Jonson and many another wit. Sir Kenelm was a scholar and philosopher; but he had fought a naval action himself, and could not but have a kindness for a Digby serving England afloat.

Here there was not an apparition exactly, only a presence and a voice, and this brings me to another branch of the subject, where supernatural communications, though still of a gentle or family character, are made by other than absolute ghosts in the narrower sense. They are made, we shall find sometimes, through the medium of our humbler fellow-creatures of the animal creation. Our ancestors used to associate these with themselves more closely than we do - nay, they sometimes derived their pedigree from them, and one of the great German families professed to descend from a bear. It was held as a faith in some parts of England that the labouring ox used to kneel at midnight on the night preceding the Nativity, and that the bees used to sing at the same hour. Naturally, then, what we supercilliously call the lower animals were brought by our old sires within the magic ring of spiritual influence and affinity.

For example, there is an ancient stock in the English peerage which receives its warnings from a white bird. A near cadet of these earls was one of my most intimate friends and brother middies on the Mediterranean Station, more years ago than I care to remember. He has since told me that after he became a lieutenant, being again in the Mediterranean, he was sitting in his cabin, at sea, when a white bird flew unexpectedly in at the cabin window. Of course, he thought at once of the family tradition. The very next mail which arrived at Malta brought him news of the death of his nearest and dearest relative - of the worst calamity, except one, that can fall a man in that way. Another old line where a bird was the link with the unseen world, was that of the Kirkpatricks of Closeburne, in Dumfriesshire, from a cadet of which the Empress of the French is said to be descended. Impending calamity was announced to them by the apparition, on the lake before their chateau, of a swan with a bleeding breast. The story went that an ancestor had slain a swan in some cruel and wanton way, and that the unseen power used the form of that bird in which to remind them, by the saddest association, of the wrong.

Since I am talking of birds, I may add that the better sort of West Indian families suppose themselves to receive these premonitions from owls - an ill-omened bird among the negroes, as it was (in spite of its place on Athenian coins) in the ancient world. There are, however, some pleasant associations between birds and old families. It is reported of the Dykeses of Dovenby, in Cumberland, that when a daughter is to be married, the rooks follow the wedding party from the rookery to the church, and swarm on the roof and on the tombstones in the churchyard during the ceremony.

Finally, it may be remarked that apparitions of the genus under review are occasionally apparitions of some inanimate object, like the marble head - spotted, according to some versions, with blood, - which rises mysteriously at intervals, through the dining-table of the noble house of Grey; and on this legend the late N.P. Willis, of America, founded a somewhat picturesque story. He made its chief interest turn on the fact that the head would not be seen by anybody who was not of the blood of the family. And this is in harmony with the general spirit of such legends. They belong to the feudal or aristocratic side of modernlife, which owes no little of its poetry to them. But besides their historical suggestiveness, they are strikingly illustrative of the belief of bygone times; and when are fully thought over will be found pregnant with [moral interest??] into the bargain.

From Cassell's Christmas Annual,  reprinted in the Frome Times, Wednesday 25th December, 1867.