[From A Second Manx Scrapbook]

CHAPTER III

SECOND SIGHT AND ASSOCIATED FACULTIES

§ 2. The Living and the Dead.

The form which Second Sight most often takes in the Island is that of the " phantom funeral," in which the coming event casts its likeness before it. In the following case the seer, whom I shall call Y.Z., has been well known to me for the greater part of my life. On approaching, by daylight, her aunt's house in Castletown, she saw when a short distance away a small knot of people, some of whom she recognized, and several carriages, standing in front of the gate, as though waiting for something to come out. Although she did not actually distinguish a hearse, she " felt " there was a funeral in progress. When she came nearer the gathering suddenly vanished. Feeling puzzled and uneasy, she continued on her way home and told what she had seen, but was rebuked by her elders for romancing. The aunt died within a year, and Y.Z. saw the same crowd again, this time in reality, as she went to the house on an errand connected with the funeral. Among the crowd were the persons whom she had recognized, in her vision, as friends of the family.¹

A former Rector of Arbory, a gentleman of Manx extraction, has recently described to me how he, his sister, their coachman, and the horse, all saw a " phantom funeral " when driving home one evening many years ago. He does not remember that their collective vision heralded a death in the neighbourhood. [similar tale told by Wentz - attributed to Canon Kewley]

A retired Presbyterian minister, likewise a Manxman, tells me that he saw one of these spectral processions coming along the main road at the Howe in Rushen, and that he recognized among the party a man whose features were very familiar to him. The man died a couple of weeks later.

In two of these visions a considerable difference will be noticed between the periods of time elapsing before the deaths of the persons identified ; in one case a fortnight, in the other nearly a year. In this connexion, though without any particular example being given, I have been told that certain signs denote the length of life remaining to the doomed one. When an image is seen of the person who is about to die, it may appear draped to a greater or lesser extent in a shroud. The height to which the shroud reaches from the feet upwards corresponds to the nearness of death. If the grave-clothes reach only to the middle of the figure, death is some months distant. If they come up to the neck and a little earth is clinging to them, death is not far off. If the figure is covered with adherent soil, only a few days of life remain. These are said to be the accepted rules, but I have not met with anyone who has proved them by experience. The fact that they were acknowledged in Scotland also in the 17th century ² need not weaken their validity for the isle of Man, where they have been known in a family of my acquaintance for at least three generations back. The coating of grave-mould recalls to mind the days when the body was buried in the earth without a coffin.

Another premonition of a friend's death happened to the same Y.Z,. some few years subsequent to the vision just described. It was less clearly visualized than the " phantom funeral," but no less movingly felt. A connexion of hers by marriage, whom she had nursed throughout his illness and who had become attached to her, lay slowly dying. While visiting the house the day before his death, she met, towards dusk, in a passage leading from the kitchen, what seemed to her a dark impalpable cloud barring her progress. She found herself quite unable to pass it, although she made two attempts. She felt as though something were pushing her backwards. This she immediately interpreted as meaning that Death was in close attendance on the sick man and that he had not long to live, and her inference was borne out before daybreak.

People have been similarly hindered and pushed back when passing the gate of Kirk Christ Rushen, and have regarded the invisible barrier as a sign that a " phantom funeral " was in progress. When it was over they were allowed to go by. Possibly, however, this interference was due to a certain ghostly procession which had a regular route from Ballagawne towards the church ; in that event it should be put down to the slightly different phantasm known as the Death Coach. A connexion is thought to exist between this particular Death Coach and a brownish stain near the wainscot of a room in Ballagawne house, said to be ineradicable because the result of a murder. Being rayed like a starfish, it looks more like a splash of spilt paint.

Akin to Y.Z.'s premonition just related was that of a hoxdale woman who, as she crossed her kitchen one day- in the course of her housework, struck her foot against something near the door which caused her to stumble ; but when she looked down there was nothing to be seen, nor could she feel it again. A few days later her husband's coffin was carried in and laid down in exactly the same spot.

Of the following remarkable symbolic warning of a death (related to me, as were all the preceding experiences except the last, by the living individuals concerned) I did not write down the details until some months after hearing them for the second time ; a few minor points are therefore queried, but the essentials of the story stamped themselves so strongly on my memory that they may be taken as accurate. The narrator, at the time of the vision about twelve years old, and her little sister of about half that age, were sleeping together in a certain house in Ramsey. During the night the elder sister awoke, and saw a beam of light slanting down from the upper part of the window ; it seemed to contain (or take the shape of ?) a tiny woman only a few inches high, standing on (or above ?) the bed. This figure gazed hesitatingly at the elder sister, and then, as though changing her mind, looked towards the younger one who lay asleep. She then kissed the latter on the forehead and vanished. The narrator said that the figure seemed to be going to kiss her at first, but chose the younger child instead. Next day this child sickened, and died within a week.

Two young brothers living in Douglas went recently on their bicycles to visit a woman they knew in Sulby. One of them was preoccupied with a love affair, and it is thought that he was intending to ask the girl next day to marry him. After tea he begged their hostess, who had a reputation for seeing into the future, to tell him what sort of luck he would have to-morrow. The other likewise wished to know something of his own future. She refused both of them, but after they had importuned her she consented to write down a few words for one of them (the lover) if he would promise not to read it that night. While they were cycling homewards in the late evening he was run down by a charabanc and killed. Before the funeral the survivor asked his mother whether he might look in Dick's coat-pocket to see what was on the paper. When he opened it he read: "There will be no to-morrow." He afterwards went to Sulby and blamed the woman for not having warned them before they left her house ; but she said that what she had foreseen could not have been avoided. (Communicated by a friend of the two young men.)

Death was foreknown, in a more general way, by watching at old chapel-sites on Hallowe'en, as has already been recorded. Lights could then be seen which corresponded in number to the deaths fated to occur during the ensuing twelve months. I have never heard that any spoken, or other charm was needed, or that the sight was not granted to all who ventured to foregather. It seems to have been a collective vision.

Visions at the death-moment of one to whom the seer is attached by some bond of sympathy-perhaps not wholly realized during life-are not lacking. One recounted to me twice, with several years intervening, by the son of the seer of the vision, runs thus. In the secluded farmhouse called Little London, in the parish of German, Evan C. lay dying. His elder sister Isabella, as she was walking up a path from a cornfield to the house, was astonished to see him coming down to meet her, dressed in his " wearing clothes "-that is to say, his working suit. He passed her without a word or a sign of recognition. When she reached the door she found her mother standing in the porch, and began to tell her what she had juist seen. " Hush ! " her mother whispered, " Evan is dead."

Of a less common type is a dream-vision of a young soldier's death in France during the late war. It was seen by an elder relative and friend of his, from whom I had the particulars. She woke suddenly in the middle of the night and sprang up with a vigorous clap of the hands, exclaiming, " That's the shot that killed C.H. ! " In her dream she had heard it and had seen him fall backwards from the top of a ridge. When she came in to breakfast the others present greeted her with a general hand-clapping, and chaffed her about her nocturnal performance. But it was learned afterwards that C.H. had been sniped that night while leading his men out to an attack or a raid, and had fallen backwards into the trench. He died next day. It will not be irrelevant to mention that the dreamer in this case is a woman who, while asleep, is highly suggestible and open to external impressions as well as being somnambulistic. She will, or would in earlier life, answer questions spoken into her ear, without any knowledge, after waking up, that she had done so. The imitation of the sound of the shot is of a piece with the imitative acts performed by subjects in the hypnotic state, and in her waking life this lady's receptiveness has resulted in a genius for mimicry.

An instinctive awareness of the neighbourhood of death with its conventional attributes is a trait common among " sensitives," as these experiences help to show. X.Y., when little more than a child, was spending a holiday with some friends in England. Several times when going upstairs after dark she felt an indefinable reluctance to pass a particular landing, a feeling so strong that it seemed as though an invisible power or presence were barring the way, and she was obliged to return. On one of these occasions somebody in the downstairs room, surprised at the shortness of her absence, asked whether she had already found what she had gone up for, and, not having any rational explanation to offer, she made some trivial excuse. When going up to bed she always contrived to have the company of one of the daughters of the house. Towards the end of her visit she discovered that on an old oak chest which stood on this landing had rested, not long before, the coffin of a member of the family, whose body had been carried thither from an adjoining room. Before learning this she had spent a night in that room, but though one of the other girls was with her she felt restless and could sleep but little, and next day she asked to be put in a different bedroom.

Another experience of what may be termed aftervision was shared a few years later by the same X.Y. and her elder sister. While occupying the same bedroom in a house on the outskirts of Ramsey into which the family had recently moved, X.Y. saw on different occasions a white figure kneeling at a chair by the window, as though in prayer. She was always wide awake when she saw it, not dreaming. As it caused her no alarm she said nothing about it until her elder sister told her she had seen the same figure, when she replied, " Oh, yes, I often see that ! " They were both troubled by a smell of oak in the same room, which they could not account for. Eventually they chanced to hear from a local doctor, with whom they were on friendly terms, that a short time before their father took the house two deaths had happened there in close succession—first a woman and then her daughter, both of consumption ; the bodies had lain in their coffins either in that room or the next, he could not be sure which.

A similar but more habitual sensitiveness to invisible surroundings was described to me recently by a doctor, to whom the wife of a fisherman living in a small Manx town came, as a last resort, in the hope of a cure. Whenever she and her family moved into a fresh dwelling she was distressed by sensing the events which had happened there and the psychic atmosphere left behind by the previous tenants.

A Manx Seer

The next two experiences differ in character from those previously narrated. They were not waking perceptions of a death recent or to come, but the active intrusion of two dead women upon the dream-life of the living, and so are rather to be classed with spiritualistic phenomena than with the messages received through Second Sight. The two living women, sisters, to whom they happened, were both of a mediumistic temperament; one was a waking seer and the other was a seer in dreams. The first sister, whom I shall call A.Z., dreamt a few weeks before the marriage of a third sister, the eldest, that their aunt (dead before A.Z. was born) came and warned her not to let the marriage go forward. She was able to describe the aunt's features and dress minutely, and the details were verified by her parents. (The possibility should be mentioned that her accuracy may have owed something to her having seen a feeble water-colour portrait which was preserved among the family relics, or to having heard a description of her aunt's appearance during life.) However that may be, the other sister similarly dreamt, shortly before or shortly after, that the intending bridegroom's first wife, who had died a couple of years previously, stood by her bedside and exhorted her in most earnest words to do her utmost to prevent the marriage. She felt deeply impressed, and awoke crying passionately, " I promise, I promise ! " Though I have called these " dreams," it was felt by both narrators that their visitors were " far more real " than the ordinary inhabitants of dreamland. The marriage came to pass, with almost tragically unhappy consequences that were terminated only by the death of the husband.

The aunt (whom I never met) was the one whose funeral was foreseen in a vision in a Castletown street, as already told. She must have been a woman of strong and persistent will, to make herself so plainly seen and heard after death (if this is how we are to understand the matter) as though she were still watching over the fortunes of her family. For, in addition to these two special occasions, the A.Z. already mentioned, who had been her aunt's greatest favourite, held lengthy conversations with her in frequently recurring dreams for long after she left this world. In A.Z.'s words, " they seemed too real for dreams "-a remark often made by those whose visions come to them in sleep, and not without reason, I would add. One night A.Z. was struck by the dull, earthy hue of her visitor's face, which always before had seemed the face of a living woman ; and her aunt told her that this was the last time she would be able to come. At her bidding the dreamer kissed her good-bye, and in doing so was aware of an almost overpowering smell of fresh, damp earth, as of soil newly turned up ; it was real enough to haunt her nostrils throughout the following day. After that she never saw her aunt so distinctly as before or conversed with her. " They only seemed vague, ordinary dreams," which grew fainter and fainter, and at last ceased entirely.

When the warning of a death comes through the sight, nothing is heard ; when the warning is heard as a voice or other sound, there is no vision, only an intuitive sense that the sound is not natural. This is the rule, but there are exceptions. Sounds having this prophetic significance are as numerous as visions. If we may take the following experience (from the lips of the man concerned) to embody something more than an accidental identity between two sounds at two different times, we learn from it that future events may cast sound-waves as well as light-waves backwards into the present and affect the physical hearing. A friend of mine was sitting quietly before the fireside one afternoon with the woman who was to be his wife. The rest of her family had gone out to some festivity or other, and these two were alone in the house. Without warning the stillness was broken by a resounding, hollow thump which seemed to come from above their heads; it was followed by what he described as " a tippetty-tippetty sound," which lasted for a few seconds ; then there was silence again. The girl leapt to her feet with a cry : " What was that ? " He searched the upper room and then the rest of the house, without finding anything that looked as though it had just fallen ; but, not to frighten her further, he told her he had discovered the cause of the sounds. That day week his mother died. In those days (about forty years ago) graves were dug by anyone who would lend his service., for there was no regular grave-digger in that parish. In filling up this grave one of the men unskilfully let drop a heavy clod on the coffin ; the result was a perfect repetition of the thump heard ten days previously, and in the ensuing silence my friend recognized the " tippetty - tippetty sound " of soil trickling down from the edge of the grave.

In another case, also in the South of the Island, there was, so far as I learnt, no later repetition of the sound which was taken as a death-warning. Two persons in a room were attending to a woman in bed who was dying of consumption. All three heard a sudden, loud knock at the front door. It was opened at once, but no one was there or in sight. The woman said, " That's for me ! ", and not long afterwards she died. How long after I am not certain, nor in what degree self-suggestion hastened her death.

A man well on in years, after watching by his wife's bedside when she was in her last illness, and holding her hand, lay down to rest in an adjoining room, without doffing his jacket, while his daughter took his place. The sick woman kept asking for him, and eventually the daughter went to him to ask him to come. When she entered the room he said to her, " It was very wrong of you, E., to let your mother get up and leave her room ; it might be the death of her." " But she hasn't been out of it, or even out of bed." " What nonsense ! Why, she has just been in here to me and put her hand in mine, and put three handfuls of rice info my coat-pocket." But there was no rice in the pocket, and his wife died a few hours later. Rice being used at weddings, it was thought by the family to have a kindred significance here ; a son interpreted it as meaning three years or three wedding anniversaries before husband and wife would be together again. This turned out to be the true reading of the dream or vision, for the old man lived to see only three more anniversaries, and then he rejoined her. At his death he spoke his dead wife's name, and clutched a hand which was invisible to his daughter; he retained his grasp of it till he died, holding the daughter's hand with his other one, and thus forming a link between the two worlds. It was the daughter who told me these circumstances ; I know- the family very well. Several members of it have been gifted with visionary powers, which have continued throughout their lifetimes. One of them recently experienced the following symbolical dream which came true.

She dreamt that her father, who had died three years before, came to her, and there was a baby there also, which had a great hole torn in its side. He looked very grieved, and was saying, " I am not to blame for this ; I never wished the baby anything but the best." She woke up, went to sleep again, and the dream repeated itself. The interpretation given was this her father had set great store by his little croft ; it had been his pet hobby, and he had spared neither labour nor money to improve it. This, then, was his " baby," and in the unprecedented floods which ruined Glen Aldyn in September, 1930, the portion of this land which bordered upon the river, and on which stood the house he had built and the garden he had cared for, was devastated. The dream preceded the floods by two or three days only. This description of it was given to me by the dreamer herself.

The same local disaster was foreseen in symbolic dreams by two other members of the same family, who afterwards related them to me. In one case the dreamer seemed to be coming down from the mountain road towards the farm. On reaching a certain field she saw her father (who had died three years previously) sitting on the stone hedge. He said, " Look down there ! ", and she saw that though the surrounding hills glowed with bright sunlight, a deep darkness covered the glen below. She felt strongly impressed by the strangeness of the contrast, and understood that it was charged with significance.

A third sister dreamt, three or four days before the floods caused by the same cloudburst swept away part of the churchyard at Lezayre, that she saw her mother's grave half full of water.

Shortly before the disastrous failure of Dumbell's Bank a girl whose father suffered heavily in the smash dreamt that X., the man who was afterwards held to be chiefly responsible, was striking at her father with an axe. She felt greatly distressed, and thrust herself between them, but the axe fell again and brought him to his knees. At the time of the dream the two men were on quite friendly terms.

A premonitory vision of evil, somewhat similar to these prophetic dreams, occurred to another seer when she was wide awake. While she was walking one afternoon down a road in Lonan which overlooks a broad stretch of sea, she saw to the South-East, in the direction of Liverpool, an unnatural-looking light, compact and rayless in form and bluish or livid in hue. It was moving slowly over the water, apparently about half-way between the cliffs and the horizon. She watched it for what seemed some minutes as she went along, until it disappeared. Before she had gone far a sense of utter depression and heart-chill came over her, and she realized that the light was meant for a warning of something dreadful. Her father had arranged to sail from Ramsey that night in the steamer Ellan Vannin, but she persuaded him to put off his journey, though without fully explaining her reason ; for what she had seen had such an effect on her that she could not bring herself to speak of it then or for some years afterwards. The foundering of the Ellan Vannin at the bar of the Mersey that night with all her crew and passengers is cut deep in the annals of the Island. The seer's account to me of the circumstances connected with her vision was independently corroborated by her father.

A warning of a death, or what is taken as a warning, may be seen by those to whom it does not apply, and who are unconscious of its nature and purport until it has been interpreted by the person for whom it is supposed to be intended. An example of this has reached me recently in the course of correspondence with a well-known Manxman of the highest credibility.

"One dark night at about ten o'clock my sister noticed a bright light in one of the west gable windows of Arbory Church. She thought that plumbers had been at work at the cistern close by it on the gallery. She called the maid. They went together to the church, observing the light all the time. On entering they found the place in darkness. They examined the gallery and found nothing. Next morning my sister suggested to the old sexton, who was also organ-blower, and whose seat for that purpose was in front of the windows, that he was very late in the church on the previous evening. He replied that he had not been near the church after dark. She told him what they had seen. He said, 'That was my sign, M'm.' We buried him (Jem Duggan [James Duggan, age 76 on 3 Dec 1897 - presumeably told by Canon Kewley]) within a fortnight, in December, 1897. He was in his usual health when the light appeared." In this case, as in others, self-suggestion may have had something to do with the ensuing death. The light would still require explanation.

Among other phenomena, in addition to unaccountable lights, which are accepted as death-signs, are the prancing and neighing of the horses drawing the hearse at a funeral. If the procession of mourners and other followers on foot straggles out in a thin line it is a sign that a second funeral will pass along the same road within a week. An unimpeachable witness gives me specific instances of the fulfilment of these omens. Children going about in a band singing or chanting is held to be a certain sign of a coming death. So, likewise, is the hearing of the songs or cries of birds, or seeing them going about in flocks, or hearing the rush of many wings ; all, be it understood, at irregular times and places. It is their unusualness which marks them as prophetic. A correspondent sends me the following recent illustration of this kind of " warning."

" In connexion with premonitions of death I once heard a rather curious one at Glen X. It came to the wife of a policeman whose little son was ill, though not despaired of by the doctor. The woman awoke her husband about midnight, saying that she heard a great flock of birds going over the house and singing beautifully. He listened, and after a moment or two heard what seemed to be the faint song of a blackbird, but he could not be sure of it. After it had passed over she said, ' That's a death in the house within twentvfour hours-it must be our W.,' and the boy grew worse rapidly and died the following evening. The man told me this a few days afterwards, and his wife confirmed it later on. I knew them both well."

With these secret intimations of mortality should perhaps be classed the family- death-warnings which are plentiful in Ireland and not unknown in England and other countries. No Manx family, so far as I am aware, possesses a typical banshee, but some of the Kaighans of Michael and German, who say they were " the Horsemen of Manannan," were—perhaps still are—liable to be warned of impending misfortune to members of their clan by the sound of the hoofs of invisible galloping horses. No one who is not of the Kaighan blood, even if in the company of a Kaighan at the time, is able to hear it. Some light may be cast on this tradition by the derivation of the name Kaighan from McEaeharn or McEachan, i.e. Each-tighearn, " Horse - master." The McEacharns (a Kintyre surname) were said in Scottish tradition to be " Manannan's Horsemen."³ Kintyre was associated with horses nearly 2,000 years ago, when the name of its inhabitants, recorded by Ptolemy from a previous authority, was Epidii, " The Horse-people "—probably a Pictish word which was replaced by the Gaelic name Echdi for the same tribe.

Waldron mentions the trampling of horses merely as a prognostic of the arrival of visitors, which is not regarded as a misfortune by the Manx of to-day. The sound is also heard in several parts of the Island as a local haunting without reference to future events—notably near the circle of stone graves on the Mull.

To return to birds : if a wild bird comes into the house it is looked upon as presignifying a death to occur shortly. There is also a dislike, seldom definitely expressed but none-the-less inveterate, to killing any kind of wild bird. These ideas are probably the remains of an old and widespread belief that the souls of the dead enter birds, or take their shape, and haunt the scenes which were most familiar to them during life. Therefore a bird which makes itself conspicuous by its unusual behaviour is a messenger from the underworld.

Human souls which have made the transit from the land of the living to the land of the dead can thus be glimpsed, in a shape other than that which they wore on earth, when the hour is ripe and the word is spoken. As I have heard it from an esteemed friend, " the ninth wave out from the shore with the new moon shining on it has birds on it which are the souls of the dead, and it never comes to land. They can be seen by saying the right words." The magic virtue of the ninth wave is too well known to need emphasizing. It might be supposed that " the dead " means here only the drowned ; in Brittany " the souls of drowned men may enter the birds of the sea, or appear as sea-birds to those who must follow them."⁴ This brings to mind how, in the fatal Baie des Trëpasses, near Quimper, in la Cornouaille, on the Night of All Souls, the pale phantoms travel on the crests of the waves seeking each other. ⁵ It is not said that they wear the shapes of birds at that place and hour, but from a non-Celtic part of Great Britain the catholicity of the Manx belief is confirmed. In one of a series of East Anglian literary sketches a countryman goes out in a North Sea fishing-boat intent on catching sight of his recently-drowned brother among the sea-birds. His brother had said, before starting on his last voyage, " Jack, when I die I'll be an owd gannet, and if I heave round yow'll heave me a herrin', won't yow ? " " George," I say, " how shall I know yow along with the other gannets ? ", and he say, " I'll hev a pair o' black arm-sleeves, so yow'll know me." Independently of this tryst between the brothers, the mate of the boat says of a gull which has been caught in the net and drowned, " Here comes an owd fisherman what hev hung hisself. He've come to look on at us."⁶ In a note on page 154 the author says : " I found that on certain parts of the East Coast many of the old fishermen believe that they turn into gulls when they die. It was with great difficulty I first found out that this strange belief in a post-mortem transformation existed at all, but once having learned it, I found to my astonishment that the belief was common, but was spoken of with much reserve. I have never seen any mention of such a superstition existing in our day, and should feel obliged to any critic who could throw light upon it. I asked one fisherman if he did not dislike their being shot on this account ? He replied philosophically, ' No ! they hev been dead onset, they hev been on earth onset, and we hev got quite enough old men now.' ' And the children,' I asked, ' what becomes of them ? ' ' I believe all the young 'uns what die are kitties (kittiwakes), they don't come to gulls. . . . The wives don't come back no more.' "⁷

This superstition is not unknown in districts other than Man and the East of England, though the Manx version has received, or retained, a stronger tincture of magic. " In West Sutherland I ascertained that some of the fishermen formerly held that it was unlucky to kill a gull, for gulls were the souls of the deceased."⁸ In Cornwall " the souls of old seacaptains never sleep ; they are turned into gulls and albatrosses." ⁹ In the Netherlands it is only " the soul of a person that dies on shipboard " which passes into a bird ; " when it appears, it is to predict the death of another."¹⁰

The ordinary kind of vision of a dead person is well typified by the following experience. Y.Y. saw her mother in the garden of their house in the North of the Island about a month after her death, dressed as usual but looking in better health than during the latter part of her life. She came down a path from the hill and turned towards the house, but stopped at the corner of the wall and looked intently and anxiously at her crippled daughter who was sleeping beside the one who saw the vision and who narrated it to me afterwards. The mother then passed on to the rear of the house. The kinship between some of these waking visions of the dead and similar appearances in ordinary dreams is suggested by the seer's statement in this case that she did not realize her mother was dead until the figure had disappeared. This, we all know, is usual in dreams of the dead.

A more uncommon mode of appearance is exemplified in a woman's description to me, a few hours after the occurrence, of the apparition of her dead father to her waking sight. In this instance the vision consisted of a face only, of natural size, and wearing a mournful expression. It appeared. high up, near the ceiling, surrounded by a luminous mist, and remained motion less until it vanished. He had died about three months before. Such visions usuallv herald a crisis in the seer's affairs, or appear during a time of emotional stress when the dividing wall between the inner and outer lives wears thin and translucent, and their contents become confused. This was the case here.

Y.Y., a middle-aged seafaring man living in a southern village, has seen his wife twice since her death. One of these occasions was " on the same day as she was laying out the sheets " ; i.e. on their wedding anniversary. He was lying awake in bed about four o'clock in the morning and saw her standing by his side. She had previously appeared to their son as he lay awake in his bunk in the Liverpool Docks after lights-out (11 p.m.), which was about the hour of her death. The boy sat up and put out his hand towards her, but she said, " Touch me not," and vanished. It should be remarked that he had that day received a telegram from his father telling him to come home as soon as possible, and no doubt he was thinking of his mother at the time.

The same man (the boy's father) was visited by his own mother after her death. His married brother lived within a stone's-throw of him, but there was ill-feeling between the women-folk of the two households, and the two brothers, though quite friendly when they met outside, did not visit each other. The mother came to Y.Y.'s bedside one night and told him to go down and see his brother in his home, " for you were the sons of one mother," she said. If he had not gone first thing next morning in obedience to her request, he would never again have seen his brother alive.

This man Y.Y., whom I know well, and the same son, were in the cabin of their schooner lying in Holyhead Harbour. It was Sunday evening, and they were singing hymns to the father's accompaniment on a harmonium. While he was singing and playing the man felt there was a third presence in the little cabin. Though he saw nothing he knew perfectly well who it was--an intimate and beloved friend of his named F.S. who had died in Castletown shortly before. (F.S. was a conspicuous figure in the South during his lifetime and is still well-remembered ; his name will be guessed by some of my Manx readers.) Y.Y. heard him say in the familiar voice, " The prize is well worth contending for." The hearer felt so deeply moved that the tears ran down his face. He understood the words in a religious sense, and they made a lasting impression upon his mind. The son was not conscious of the presence or of the spoken message.

From a Peel source comes a story—at second-hand only, this one—of an apparition of a dead woman who was troubled about her child's welfare. The youth who saw it, afterwards Captain M., and a friend of the friend who told me of the occurrence, was not more than fourteen at the time. A woman from Foxdale who had come to Peel to improve her health was stopping, together with her child of about five, in the next house to where the boy lived. This nextdoor house was full up with " visitors " (holidaymaking strangers), and a few of them were accommodated at the M.'s; as the child had taken a great fancy to young M. he was allowed to share his bed. During the night M. happened to be lying awake looking at a big star which was just setting above Peel Hill, when the door opened without a sound and the mother of the little boy was in the room, with her gaze fixed on him as he lay sleeping. She took a long look, and as her eyes at last turned away from his face they caught the elder boy's eyes ; she smiled at him, and disappeared as inexplicably as she had come. Next morning he learned that she had died that night, at about two o'clock. M.'s mother tried to reason him out of the belief that he had seen the woman and was not dreaming, so to prove that he had been awake he told her to look out for the star herself on the following night, and see if she would notice it setting about the same place, and at what hour. She watched for it, and saw it as he had described, about two o'clock.

Not all revenants are so well-disposed towards the living as those which have come under our notice hitherto. In Ballaugh a woman named C. by marriage came back after she had left this world and nearly strangled her husband in his bed. It was about a will she had left, I am told, which he was not doing right by ; he had hidden it, or the money it referred to, under the bed; but she frightened him into doing right. He did not live long after her visit.

"CHRISTIAN LEWAIGUE."

Sometimes the dead, instead of appearing directly to their kindred or their former friends, make use of an intermediary to whom they entrust their message. One notable interpreter of the dead to the living, according to an aspect of the legend which has grown around his name, was a member of a well-known Maughold family, the Christians of Lewaigue. It is probable, however, that the anecdotes which follow related originally, so far as they are based on facts, to more than one member of the Lewaigue family, which had dwelt on that site since the 16th century. Some of the material may pertain to other branches of the family, even to other families ; for a personality so powerful as Christian's has a magnet-like effect on floating scraps of biography, whether authentic or apocryphal. Ostensibly, at any rate, these illustrate the life and character of that Evan or Ewan Christian who, according to Moore's brief and discreet biographical sketch,¹¹ was born in 1803 and died in 1874. As nearly sixty years have now elapsed since his death, I trust I may, without offence, make public some of the memories and beliefs still attached to the name of this remarkable man, as I have picked them up from time to time in different parts of the Island.

Like so many of his surname, he was a faircomplexioned man, with yellowish or auburn hair worn rather long at the sides of his head; of middle height, stoutly built, with penetrating eyes and a powerful voice. In his youth he went abroad, and was " a bit of a scape "—a scapegrace, that is—but after his return home he was suddenly converted from his wild ways. Some say this conversion was the result of a meeting with a spirit or unearthly presence when crossing Ballure Bridge one night on his way home from Ramsey. A woman who remembers him as he was towards the end of his life, and whose grandfather was an intimate friend of his, thinks he was moved to religion by the same dream as that which prompted him to paint in large, black capitals across the western gable of his house, which confronts the lane leading from the high road, a minatory text of Scripture. This, though often painted over, is still faintly legible after rain : Prepare to meet thy God.

Whatever happened to cause the change in him, from a certain epoch in his life he became an earnest preacher of the Gospel and of teetotal principles, travelling with his pony and trap the length and breadth of the Island, holding forth eloquently at the chapels and social gatherings, and organizing religious revivals when and where he judged the soil to be sufficiently fertilized. He was something of a musician, and led a small band of local instrumentalists which he took about to further his crusade, himself playing the bass fiddle. So whole-heartedly, in fact, did he give himself up to preaching and charitable deeds that he was not successful as a farmer.

In illustration of the moral courage which inspired his striking personality the following story is told. On the occasion of the holding of an Agricultural Show in Workington he went across from Ramsey to attend it ; for he used to spend a lot of money in improving his livestock. In the evening, as he was passing the half-open door of the smoking-room or bar-room of his inn, he overheard the conversation of the men drinking there whom the Show had drawn to the town, and I have been assured that although the company was largely composed of nobility and gentry, their topics and vocabulary were far from edifying. Christian stepped inside and introduced himself by name. After a little preliminary small-talk he attacked his theme: " But, gentlemen, what do you think of God ? " And without protest or interruption from the company he spoke to them of the wages of sin and of God's mercy towards those who repent in time. When he had ended his discourse he knelt in the middle of the bar-room floor and prayed aloud for them and for himself. Finally he rose to his feet, bowed ceremoniously to each man present, and took his departure. It is further related that many years after this, two gentlemen who chanced to meet at a similar Show in the South of England and recognized each other as having been present at the scene in the Workington hotel, agreed that they had ever since retained a vivid memory of " that strange Manxman." " Do you remember that strange Manxman who came in and preached to us ? " " Yes, I have never forgotten him, or met anybody like him before or since."

Whatever the nature of Christian's reputation during his lifetime, after his death it began to develop two contrasting aspects. It is the dark side of it rather than the light side which calls for notice here. Though an ardent religionist and reformer of morals he is believed to have lived on perfectly familiar terms with the population of the spirit-world ; the woman whose opinion on the cause of his sudden conversion has just been quoted says she once heard him admit that the spirits of the dead showed themselves to him and spoke so that he could understand them. Whether she actually heard his own statement or not, (she is old enough to have done so), it is believed by some to whom his name is familiar that the dead came to him for help in their difficulties. Often the request was that he should deliver a message to a surviving relative about some task or duty left unfulfilled, or about valuables hidden away in houses or out of doors. After the death of a neighbour of Christian's (at, I think, Folieu), the will could not be found. The testator's spirit came to his bedside and told him it was hidden in the mattress of the bed where the man had died ; and there it was discovered. On another occasion a spirit stopped him on the steep road going up to the Hibernian and Laxey, at a spot near the house called " Clifton," and gave him information about some money put away in a safe place ; Christian passed on the message to the dead man's relatives, and the money, much to their satisfaction, was found.

It is thought not to have been beyond his powers to bring up a spirit if necessary, and make it reveal what its family had a right to know ; but no particular instance of his doing this has come my way. Understanding so well, however, the nature of spirits, Christian was at least able to handle them when they became refractory. A girl at Jurby was tormented by an invisible presence which would not let her sleep, but pinched her and knocked her about until her sides were black and blue. After ordinary charmers had failed to find a remedy Christian was sent for. He sat in her bedroom for three consecutive nights. On the first two nights nothing unusual happened; on the third he saw the door gently pushed open and the bedclothes lifted as though someone were getting under them. " Whatever it was he did to It " he banished this troublesome intruder, and the girl was never bothered by it again. In the lack of fuller details it remains doubtful whether the invisible visitor was supposed to be the spirit of a dead or a living person.

With a woman's spirit he had so desperate a struggle that all the hair was taken off his head, and he was bald ever after. Possibly expecting sympathy as a result of this baldness, a man whose hair had been cut too short for his liking just before or just after his death, and who felt troubled about it, came and complained to Christian, with what effect is now unknown.

He had the power, not otherwise unheard-of in the Isle of Man, of stopping the flow of blood by saying a charm. While walking one day on his land, or else on a neighbour's, he came across a man who had just injured his hand severely in a chaff-cutter or some other piece of machinery. The man was thought to be bleeding to death ; at any rate he was bleeding freely, but Christian stopped it, and without touching him. When the doctor who had been previously sent for arrived from Ramsey he was clean beat ; he couldn't make out what had been done.

It was Christian who brought up the Kione Prash out of the floor at Lewaigue, into a circle marked on a white sheet, to make it talk, but it burst and nearly killed him. This item of his biography, which I heard so recently as 1930, may need a little elucidation. By some accident the legend of Friar Bacon's Brazen Head—Kione Prash in Manx—was planted long ago among the wooded glens of North Maughold, and not unnaturally the later and strictly insular legend of Ewan Christian became intertwined with it. A rhymed and elaborated version of the story contained in a mid 19th century MS. was contributed to a Manx newspaper by the late G. W. Wood.¹² Appended to Wood's article are eight lines of cryptic doggerel in Manx which show that the legend of the Brass Head was connected with the neighbourhood of Lewaigue before 1836, and probably a long time before that date, in which case its presence there preceded that of the Ewan Christian who was born in 1803. One never knows what trifling circumstance may have sufficed to attach a legend to a personality. In Mr. P. M. C. Kermode's List of Manx Antiquities is mentioned a brass sundial formerly existing at Lewaigue but now taken off the Island, which preceded one of slate made by a Ewan Christian in 1666.

Lewaigue Farmhouse

The poem in English which attributes the making of the Brass Head to a man of this name and estate consists of nearly 500 lines in smoothly written couplets. Substantially, they narrate the achievement of Roger Bacon while crediting it to Christian and giving it the necessary local colour. Christian " lived in witchcraft's day " ; by his " astrologic skill " he raised storms which strewed the shore with rich cargoes to his personal profit ; and was accomplished in every department of magic except that he lacked the faculty of Second Sight, notwithstanding much earnest labour to obtain it. In a dream a female spirit advises him to construct a Brazen Head, which shall reveal things past and to come. The Arch-fiend supplies him with materials, with which he experiments for seven years in a glen near Lewaigue house ;¹³ but the Devil jealously contrives that a fit of sleepiness shall overcome him at the critical moment when the Head begins to speak, and his servant fails to wake him. Wanting his control, the Head, after uttering (in Manx) the words " Time was, Time is, and Time shall ever be," bursts into fragments, and Lewaigue, then middle-aged, dies soon afterwards of chagrin.¹⁴

And how was Ewan Christian of Lewaigue enabled to perform these surprising feats ? It was not merely that he possessed a strong will and a natural aptitude for exercising it in such directions ; no, he had a Black Book with magic of all sorts in it, things you wouldn't hardly like to speak of. What became of it after his death, or whatever it was happened to him in the end, there's no telling. It's like he took it away with him.

The moon reflects the sun's light. Christian's wife is also endowed by the shanachies with a small measure of supernatural faculty, the Sight to wit. For example, (the only example I know), while she sat listening to an address by her husband in chapel one morning her pious train of thought was interrupted by a vision of one of their cows trespassing in a field of corn just ready for the scythe. She was so perturbed by the jeel that was being done that she scandalized her husband and the congregation by shouting, " O Devil, if the cow's in the cornfield go thou and drive her out ! " It has been explained to me that in the circumstances she naturally attributed her vision to the Devil's agency.

The story of Christian Lewaigue's end unites the two contrasting sides of his reputation, for he perished as a consequence of engaging the Devil in single combat on a moral issue. He had for some days been leading a religious revival in the South of the Island, and was coming home from Port Erin with his pony-trap. Dusk was falling as he climbed the long hill from Laxey, and he still had five miles to cover before reaching Lewaigue. Early next morning one of his farm-servants found the pony waiting for the stable door to be opened; on the floor of the trap lay Christian doubled up and unconscious. After he had been taken into the house and brought round he described to his family, as well as he was able, the calamity which had overwhelmed him. As he was passing the gateway of Upper Ballachrink farm in Lonan, near the Maughold boundary, the Devil had come up to him out of the deep shadow there, and had accused him of having done him much harm by robbing him of souls which were his by right, and it had to stop. Christian defied him and all his works, and the dispute developed into a physical struggle. The Devil was too strong for the evangelist in the end, and Christian lost all knowledge of his surroundings until he found himself on his own " street." A week or two later he died. This account of his quietus was narrated to me recently by a man who is distantly related to Christian, as many Manxmen are ; slightly different versions of the affair used to circulate in the North of the Island years ago. On the other hand, some deponents venture to affirm that he died a natural death, like any ordinary man ; " but he used to be seen," says one ancient dame, " round the farm after he died, putting a sight on the place and watching how things were going on there, whether he had sold it or not, for it was a place he had loved and spent his money on, going over to Cumberland to the shows and buying pedigree stock ; but he lost a lot of that through the jealousy of neighbours."

A less scrupulous man than Ewan Christian is known to have been might have manoeuvred a personal profit or advantage out of some of his messages from the other world. Sometimes, indeed, it is the intention of the spirit to benefit his confessor. In that event the man who has " taken the ghost " will never reveal the secret that has been confided to him, for he knows that if he does so he will not only lose the usufruct of it, but will risk the offended spectre's ill-will. A certain native of Rushen was supposed to have been favoured with a communication from the lips of a dead man. Whatever may have been its import, it did not cure him of his excessive fondness for good ale, or, failing that, for any ale. When two of his friends found him one night rolling in the roadway near Ballacurrey, singing " We won't go home till morning," one said to the other, " We'll get the secret out of him this time, anyway," and asked him pointblank what it was the ghost had told him. The question sobered him into silence on the instant, but for a few moments only. Then he relapsed into song, to sober again when the question was repeated. The last time it was put he picked himself up without a word and walked steadily away.

THE DEATH-COACH.

The apparition called " the Death-coach " has some resemblance to the " phantom funeral " already discussed, but there are differences also. The "phantom funeral" is a shadowy reproduction of an actual funeral about to occur in the more or less near future ; among the company may be recognized one or more individuals known to the beholder, who is thereby warned of a coming death. The phantoms accompanying the Death-coach, when any are seen, are the already dead ; but sometimes the next person to die is seen among them. The " phantom funeral " is, therefore, akin to the prophetic manifestations of Second Sight. The Death-coach, on the other hand, appears to be descended from one of those religious or mythological conceptions which live on for thousands of years, adapting themselves to times and places. The coach, when seen, is less clearly defined than the funeral; often it is not visible, and its passing is perceived only through the hearing, and by an instinctive sense of something dire. The sounds heard (not necessarily all on the same occasion) are the tramping of the horses, the creaking of the coach or hearse, the grinding of its wheels, and a strange rustling or whirring noise, which cannot be explained. Popular opinion tends to regard the coach as a repetition of the funeral of some ungodly person already dead and in further trouble, but this is not the only interpretation of it ; sometimes it is taken as a warning of death to the one who meets with it, or to a relative. The Death-coach of which the horses and wheels used to be heard passing through Onchan village, (at one time attributed to the tragic end of a certain Finloe Oates),¹⁵ has had a still later explanation attached to it. This account gives it the name of " Spurrier's Coach," for the following reason. Spurrier was a wealthy man who left England in the middle of the 19th century to reside in the Isle of Man, for reasons not unconnected with the law. The house he occupied is still standing in the village, but as it is inhabited I forbear to name it. One of its rooms is believed to be haunted, and it is said that the door is never unlocked. When Spurrier lived there he used to travel about the Island in a coach-and-four, " with never less than £1,000 in his pocket." Dr. Palmer, the notorious poisoner, got wind of this and came over from England to look into the matter. He made friends with Spurrier, was invited to stay with him, and often accompanied him on his journeys. One day they drove together to Peel ; Spurrier was taken suddenly and violently ill at an hotel there, and died before they reached home. Palmer shortly afterwards left the Island, supposedly with the £1,000 and whatever more he could find in the house. The spectral coach heard in and near the village is a reproduction of Spurrier's four-in-hand.¹⁶

The same original Death-coach has been further confused in the popular mind with another dark affair which happened on the White Bridge Hill at some unascertainable date long ago. This was a case of highway robbery accompanied by murder. The sound of the blows, the groans of the victim, the galloping off of the murderer, all are vividly reproduced, but nothing can be seen. This invisibility, not to be wholly explained by the natural darkness of the night, heightens the terrifying effect of the experience, according to the man who gave me his account of it. He took to a tree.

In Malew the thing is often called Solomon's Coach, not from the monarch of that name, but from a local Manxman whose knowledge of one sort or another earned him the sobriquet. A specimen of it travelled, it is said, from time to time through Ballamodda, whence it eventually reached Peel and vanished in the direction of the main gate of the Castle.

Another, which went along Lime Street in Port St. Mary, was invisible ; the sound of the wheels was heard, but not the horses' hoofs. In one specific instance, at least, it preceded an actual funeral in that street by a few days, and I think it was generally regarded as a death-warning, as the same phenomenon is in Lincolnshire.

A number of others frequented various parts of the Island; some of them are mentioned in the previous Scrapbook. The possibility that processional apparitions of this type, suggested by the common belief, may have been staged by smugglers for their own purpose is put forward, I find, so early as 1815 in Roberts's Popular Cambrian Antiquities, page 171. In Wales the procession was a silent one, disappeared in the direction of the churchyard, and was held to presage a death. In these features it somewhat resembled the Manx " phantom funeral."

As a horse-drawn hearse with waving plumes the Death-coach cannot be a tradition of very long standing in an island where hearses are of comparatively recent introduction, and in this shape it may owe something to the similar apparition, the " phantom funeral." In Ireland, also, the Coach often takes the form of a hearse ; there, as in Wales, it is a premonition of death.¹⁷ In England it seems to have been seen most frequently in the districts which own the greatest proportion of Danish blood. In Brittany it is " the Cart of Brother Death," l'Ankou. Anciently (if a speculation may be ventured) it belonged, in either a literal or a symbolical sense, to religious doctrine. The dead in classical Greece were imagined as being borne out of this life in a chariot by Hades, God of the Lower World ; a representation of his thus carrying away Persephone occurs frequently on sarcophagi, as symbolic of the dead man's transit to the kingdom of Hades. In the frescoes on Etruscan tombs at Orvieto the dead man is being conveyed in a large chariot, in front of which his guardian spirit bears a scroll containing a record of his life.¹⁸ Perhaps the journey of the dead across water, a world-wide teaching or belief without a backward limit in time, has lent its vehicle-the boat of Osiris, of Charon, the barge in which Arthur was borne to Avalon, and the rest-to modern forms of the superstition ; for the funeral conveyance takes sometimes the form of a ship. Some support for this suggestion may be derived from the following strange folk-tale, which, though it was heard in Roscommon and attributed to Mayo, has not a peculiarly Irish flavour.

When the reckless Lord Tirawley was carousing in his castle, a great black coach drove up to the door, surrounded by a crowd of black-clothed attendants bearing lighted torches. Their demonic leader warned Lord Tirawley that he had but a year to live. He thereupon reformed, but relapsed again, though fully expecting the coach to come for him at the appointed date. He was not disappointed, for punctually the dark stranger knocked and entered, beckoning the young man to follow him to an empty room. The door being left open, the company and servants saw that 'the stranger drew a ship on the wall; it became solid and moved out ; he got on board, Lord Tirawley followed, and the ship sailed round and passed through the wall, which closed upon it, and neither of its occupants was seen again on earth.' "¹⁹

In that tale the Ship of Death came ashore; between Man and the adjacent coast of Scotland, in the year 1700, the Death-coach or Chariot was seen at sea" a chariot drawn by six horses, and conducted by three drivers, all of the Pandemonium stamp, coming plunging and snoring over the wild waves, attended by black clouds vomiting forth thunder and lightning." ²⁰ This was the vehicle sent to take to hell a venomous persecutor of the Covenanters, who had just died.

Though it has no obvious connexion with the world of the dead, a case of supernatural intervention and protection from danger may be added here in conclusion, since other visionary experiences of the individual thus favoured have already been related in this section. Throughout her life, indeed, she has been subject to occurrences which cannot be explained on natural grounds, in the ordinary sense of the word " natural."

Once, in the thick darkness which fills a narrow, steep-sided glen on a winter night when the sky is overcast and there is no moon, she was feeling her way towards a little wooden footbridge which connected the roadway with the path leading up her garden. There had been heavy and long-continuing rains, and the river was full and rapid. When she got hold of the end of the bridge-rail she thought she had hit the right spot and was about to step forward, but something like an arm shot out towards her and pressed her back , at the same moment she heard a low voice say, " Stoop down and feel where you are." She did so, and found she was on the wrong side of the rail ; another step would have taken her into the torrent.

After this had happened (in 1924) she would often be aware, when coming up the glen alone on dark nights, and when walking along other unlighted roads, that a light was shining just in front of her and making her way clearer. It seemed to come from behind her, but if she looked round there was never any light to be seen. In time it came to help her whenever she felt a strong need for it.

This light was on one occasion seen by others when she herself was not conscious of its presence. As she was walking along the promenade at Castletown one evening in 1928 her nephew and another boy chanced to be leaning out of a window on the opposite side of the road. (This nephew's phantasm appeared to her at a later date, shortly before he underwent an operation.) As she passed them they called out" Good night ! " and she answered. Next day the nephew asked her why she had been carrying that little electric torch with her in a place like that. She had not been carrying a torch, and did not know what he meant. " But there was a light shining before you as you went along—we both saw it ! "

Although she has sometimes deliberately wished for it since, the light has never again come to befriend her. She attributed it to the protecting influence of her deceased mother, whose form had appeared to her on several occasions.

Footnotes

1 Robertson, who published his Tour of the Isle of Man in 1791 [sic 1794], shows the " phantom funeral " as a positive agent of death, not merely a reflected picture. He describes it as a personal warning to the one who sees it. The seer hears his name called ; he is attended by the visionary funeral wherever he turns, until one of the spectres, a deceased relative, touches him, whereupon the whole vision vanishes. Soon the sickness of death seizes him, and it is not long before he joins the ghostly band.

2 See Martin's Western Isles.

3 The office of Horse-keeper to a fairy king is a recognized one in native Irish literature. It is solicited, for example, by an 18th-century poet quoted by O'Curry in the Atlantis, iv., 138, note. The poet addresses Don Dumhach, the fairy ruler of the southern coast of Co Clare, requesting him to " Take me in . . . to be a groom for thy fairy steeds. '

4 MacNicholl, The Piper of Kerimor, page 206

5 Souvestre, Les Derniers Bretons, i., 37.

6 P. H. Emerson, English Idylls, (1889), pages 68, 71, 72.

7 In an Eskimo folk-tale a " sea-girl " captured by a hunter marries him on condition that he never kills a grey gull, because they are of her race. One day he forgets this taboo ; his wife shakes the feathers of the slain birds over herself and the children, transforming them all into kittiwakes. (Wood-Martin, Rude Slone Monuments of Sligo, page 227.)

8 Henderson, Survivals of Belief, page 98.

9 Courtney, Cornish Feasts and Folk-lore, page 6o.

10 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, iii., 161.

11Manx Worthies, page 188.

12 It was reprinted in The Manx Quarterly for October, 1920.

13 Doubtless the glen meant is that which stretches up towards the former Hibernian Inn. Over the door of the house a recent wooden porch has covered up the initials and dates of the builders and rebuilders, Christians all.

14 Of this considerable piece of Anglo-Manx literature the author's name remains unknown. He was undoubtedly a Manxman and a practised verse-writer, and he had a working knowledge of machinery. Certain habits of phrasing and vocabulary, together with the evident enjoyment his imagination took in describing the mechanics of Christian's invention, make me think that the poem is the work of the Maughold bard who invented an early marine engine and many other ingenious devices. If " The Kione Prash " is indeed William Kennish's, its ripeness of style shows that it was written later than the verse published in his 1844 volume, Mona's Isle. Doubtless it would have appeared in the " more extensive work wholly devoted to his Native Isle," for which he solicits patronage in one of his letters.

15 See A Manx Scrapbook, page 345,

16 The slender facts that have swelled into this piece of fiction are these. Palmer's dissolute brother Walter, after becoming bankrupt in Rugeley, took refuge between 1849 and 1855 in the Isle of Man, where he achieved a second bankruptcy. That the Palmer family had other Manx connexions is suggested by the marriages of Walter and his eldest brother Joseph, a prosperous timber-merchant in Liverpool, to two sisters named " Milcrest " (Mylchreest), daughters of a Liverpool ship-builder. For these particulars I am indebted to Dr. Fletcher's Life of William Palmer—see page 54 of that work.

17 As, for instance, in its appearance near the seaboard junction of Galway and Mayo. The man who saw it there died shortly afterwards (Folk-lore, xxix., 310). In Ireland it is also called the Deaf-coach.

18 Abbreviated from Folk-lore, xxix., 311.

19 Folk-lore, xxvi., 98

20.Gallovidian Encyclopedia, page 242,