The Book of Dreams and Ghosts by Andrew Lang (the lemonade war series TXT) 📕

The Slaying of Sergeant Davies in 1749.  The Trial.  Scott’s Theory.  Curious recent Corroboration of Sir Walter’s Hypothesis.  Other Trials involving Ghostly Evidence.  Their Want of Authenticity.  “Fisher’s Ghost” criticised.  The Aylesbury Murder.  The Dog o’ Mause.  The Ghosts of Dogs.  Peter’s Ghost.

Much later in time than the ghost of Sir George Villiers is the ghost of Sergeant Davies, of Guise’s regiment.  His purpose was, first, to get his body buried; next, to bring his murderers to justice.  In this latter desire he totally failed.

We now examine a ghost with a purpose; he wanted to have his bones buried.  The Highlands, in spite of Culloden, were not entirely pacified in the year 1749.  Broken men, robbers, fellows with wrongs unspeakable to revenge, were out in the heather.  The hills that seemed so lonely were not bare of human life.  A man was seldom so solitary but that eyes might be on him from cave, corry, wood, or den.  The Disarming Act had been obeyed in the usual style: old useless weapons were given up to the military.  But the spirit of the clans was not wholly broken.  Even the old wife of Donald Ban, when he was “sair hadden down by a Bodach” (ghost) asked the spirit to answer one question, “Will the Prince come again?”  The song expressed the feelings of the people:—

The wind has left me bare indeed,
And blawn my bonnet off my heid,
But something’s hid in Hieland brae,
The wind’s no blawn my sword away!

Traffickers came and went from Prince Charles to Cluny, from Charles in the Convent of St. Joseph to Cluny lurking on Ben Alder.  Kilt and tartan were worn at the risk of life or liberty, in short, the embers of the rising were not yet extinct.

At this time, in the summer of 1749, Sergeant Arthur Davies, of Guise’s regiment, marched with eight privates from Aberdeen to Dubrach in Braemar, while a corporal’s guard occupied the Spital of Glenshee, some eight miles away.  “A more waste tract of mountain and bog, rocks and ravines, without habitations of any kind till you reach Glenclunie, is scarce to be met with in Scotland,” says Sir Walter.

The sergeant’s business was the general surveillance of the country side.  He was a kindly prosperous man, liked in the country, fond of children, newly married, and his wife bore witness “that he and she lived together in as great amity and love as any couple could do, and that he never was in use to stay away a night from her”.

The sergeant had saved fifteen guineas and a half; he carried the gold in a green silk purse, and was not averse to displaying it.  He wore a silver watch, and two gold rings, one with a peculiar knob on the bezel.  He had silver buckles to his brogues, silver knee-buckles, two dozen silver buttons on a striped lute-string waistcoat, and he carried a gun, a present from an officer in his regiment.  His dress, on the fatal 28th of September, was “a blue surtout coat, with a striped silk vest, and teiken breeches and brown stockings”.  His hair, of “a dark mouse colour,” was worn in a silk ribbon, his hat was silver laced, and bore his initials cut in the felt.  Thus attired, “a pretty man,” Sergeant Davies said good-bye to his wife, who never saw him again, and left his lodgings at Michael Farquharson’s early on 28th September.  He took four men with him, and went to meet the patrol from Glenshee.  On the way he met John Growar in Glenclunie, who spoke with him “about a tartan coat, which the sergeant had observed him to drop, and after strictly enjoining him not to use it again, dismissed him, instead of making him prisoner”.

This encounter was after Davies left his men, before meeting the patrol, it being his intention to cross the hill and try for a shot at a stag.

The sergeant never rejoined his men or met the patrol!  He vanished as if the fairies had taken him.  His captain searched the hill with a band of men four days after the disappearance, but to no avail.  Various rumours ran about the country, among others a clatter that Davies had been killed by Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald.  But the body was undiscovered.

In June, one Alexander Macpherson came to Donald Farquharson, son of the man with whom Davies had been used to lodge.  Macpherson (who was living in a sheiling or summer hut of shepherds on the hills) said that he “was greatly troubled by the ghost of Sergeant Davies, who insisted that he should bury his bones, and that, he having declined to bury them, the ghost insisted that he should apply to Donald Farquharson”.  Farquharson “could not believe this,” till Macpherson invited him to come and see the bones.  Then Farquharson went with the other, “as he thought it might possibly be true, and if it was, he did not know but the apparition might trouble himself”.

The bones were found in a peat moss, about half a mile from the road taken by the patrols.  There, too, lay the poor sergeant’s mouse-coloured hair, with rags of his blue cloth and his brogues, without the silver buckles, and there did Farquharson and Macpherson bury them all.

Alexander Macpherson, in his evidence at the trial, declared that, late in May, 1750, “when he was in bed, a vision appeared to him as of a man clothed in blue, who said, ‘I am Sergeant Davies!’”.  At first Macpherson thought the figure was “a real living man,” a brother of Donald Farquharson’s.  He therefore rose and followed his visitor to the door, where the ghost indicated the position of his bones, and said that Donald Farquharson would help to inter them.  Macpherson next day found the bones, and spoke to Growar, the man of the tartan coat (as Growar admitted at the trial).  Growar said if Macpherson did not hold his tongue, he himself would inform Shaw of Daldownie.  Macpherson therefore went straight to Daldownie, who advised him to bury the bones privily, not to give the country a bad name for a rebel district.  While Macpherson was in doubt, and had not yet spoken to Farquharson, the ghost revisited him at night and repeated his command.  He also denounced his murderers, Clerk and Macdonald, which he had declined to do on his first appearance.  He spoke in Gaelic, which, it seems, was a language not known by the sergeant.

Isobel MacHardie, in whose service Macpherson was, deponed that one night in summer, June, 1750, while she lay at one end of the sheiling (a hill hut for shepherds or neatherds) and Macpherson lay at the other, “she saw something naked come in at the door, which frighted her so much that she drew the clothes over her head.  That when it appeared it came in in a bowing posture, and that next morning she asked Macpherson what it was that had troubled them in the night before.  To which he answered that she might be easy, for it would not trouble them any more.”

All this was in 1750, but Clerk and Macdonald were not arrested till September, 1753.  They were then detained in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh on various charges, as of wearing the kilt, till June, 1754, when they were tried, Grant of Prestongrange prosecuting, aided by Haldane, Home and Dundas, while Lockhart and Mackintosh defended.  It was proved that Clerk’s wife wore Davies’s ring, that Clerk, after the murder, had suddenly become relatively rich and taken a farm, and that the two men, armed, were on the hill near the scene of the murder on 28th September, 1749.  Moreover, Angus Cameron swore that he saw the murder committed.  His account of his position was curious.  He and another Cameron, since dead, were skulking near sunset in a little hollow on the hill of Galcharn.  There he had skulked all day, “waiting for Donald Cameron, who was afterwards hanged, together with some of the said Donald’s companions from Lochaber”.  No doubt they were all honest men who had been “out,” and they may well have been on Cluny’s business of conveying gold from the Loch Arkaig hoard to Major Kennedy for the prince.

On seeing Clerk and Macdonald strike and shoot the man in the silver-laced hat, Cameron and his companion ran away, nor did Cameron mention the matter till nine months later, and then only to Donald (not he who was hanged).  Donald advised him to hold his tongue.  This Donald corroborated at the trial.  The case against Clerk and Macdonald looked very black, especially as some witnesses fled and declined to appear.  Scott, who knew Macintosh, the counsel for the prisoners, says that their advocates and agent “were convinced of their guilt”.  Yet a jury of Edinburgh tradesmen, moved by Macintosh’s banter of the apparition, acquitted the accused solely, as Scott believes, because of the ghost and its newly-learned Gaelic.  It is indeed extraordinary that Prestongrange, the patron of David Balfour, allowed his witnesses to say what the ghost said, which certainly “is not evidence”.  Sir Walter supposes that Macpherson and Mrs. MacHardie invented the apparition as an excuse for giving evidence.  “The ghost’s commands, according to Highland belief, were not to be disobeyed.”  Macpherson must have known the facts “by ordinary means”.  We have seen that Clerk and Macdonald were at once suspected; there was “a clatter” against them.  But Angus Cameron had not yet told his tale of what he saw.  Then who did tell?  Here comes in a curious piece of evidence of the year 1896.  A friend writes (29th December, 1896):—

“DEAR LANG,

“I enclose a tradition connected with the murder of Sergeant Davies, which my brother picked up lately before he had read the story in your Cock Lane.  He had heard of the event before, both in Athole and Braemar, and it was this that made him ask the old lady (see next letter) about it.

“He thinks that Glenconie of your version (p. 256) must be Glenclunie, into which Allt Chriostaidh falls.  He also suggests that the person who was chased by the murderers may have got up the ghost, in order to shift the odium of tale-bearing to other shoulders.  The fact of being mixed up in the affair lends some support to the story here related.”

Here follows my friend’s brother’s narrative, the name of the witness being suppressed.

There is at present living in the neighbourhood of --- an old lady, about seventy years of age.  Her maiden name is ---, {140} and she is a native of Braemar, but left that district when about twenty years old, and has never been back to it even for a visit.  On being asked whether she had ever heard the story of Sergeant Davies, she at first persisted in denying all knowledge of it.  The ordinary version was then related to her, and she listened quietly until it was finished, when she broke out with:—

“That isn’t the way of it at all, for the men were seen, and it was a forbear of my own that saw them.  He had gone out to try to get a stag, and had his gun and a deer-hound with him.  He saw the men on the hill doing something, and thinking they had got a deer, he went towards them.  When he got near them, the hound began to run on in front of him, and at that minute he saw what it was they had.  He called to the dog, and turned to run away, but saw at once that he had made a mistake, for he had called their attention to himself, and a shot was fired after him, which wounded the dog.  He then ran home as fast as he could, never looking behind him, and did not know how far