Real Ghost Stories Part 18

Montgomery, Count of, was warned by an apparition to flee from Paris, and thus escaped the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholemew. (See Coligni.)

Shelburne, Lord, eldest son of the Marquis of Lansdowne, is said, in Mrs. Schimmelpenninck's Memoirs, to have had, when five years old, a premonitory vision of his own funeral, with full details as to stoppages, etc. Dr. Priestley was sent for, and treated the child for slight fever. When about to visit his patient (whom he expected to find recovered) a few days later, he met the child running bare-headed in the snow. When he approached to rebuke him the figure disappeared, and he found that the boy had died at the moment. The funeral was arranged by the father--then at a distance--exactly in accordance with the premonition.

Eglinton, Lord, was three times warned of his death by the apparition of the family ghost, the Bodach Glas--the dark-grey man. The last appearance was when he was playing golf on the links at St. Andrews, October 4th, 1861. He died before night.

Cornwall, the Duke of, in 1100, saw the spectre of William Rufus pierced by an arrow and dragged by the devil in the form of a buck, on the same day that he was killed. (Story told in the "Chronicle of Matthew Paris.")

Chesterfield, Earl of (second), in 1652, saw, on waking, a spectre with long white robes and black face. Accepting it as intimation of some illness of his wife, then visiting her father at Networth, he set off early to inquire, and met a servant with a letter from Lady Chesterfield, describing the same apparition.

Mohun, Lord, killed in a duel in Chelsea Fields, appeared at the moment of his death, in 1642, to a lady in James's Street, Covent Garden, and also to the sister (and her maid) of Glanvil (author of "Sadducismus Triumphatus").

Swifte, Edmund Lenthal, keeper of the Crown jewels from 1814, himself relates (in Notes and Queries, 1860, p. 192) the appearance, in Anne Boleyn's chamber in the Tower, of "a cylindrical figure like a gla.s.s tube, hovering between the table and the ceiling"--visible to himself and his wife, but not to others present.

W Mate & Sons (1919) Ltd., Bournemouth.