Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/227

 GHOST LIGHTS OF THE WEST HIGHLANDS.

BY R. C. MACLAGAN, M.D.

The belief in portents of death is deeply seated in the mind of the Highlander. These "Manaidhean" are not the peculiar gift of the "Taibhsdear," the seer of spectres, the "Second Sighted," as they say in the Lowlands. There are apparently very few who have not had a manadh of some sort during their life. The rattle of a bridle hung against a wall, which bridle becomes the needful gear of a messenger of evil tidings, the fall of a tray from the "dresser," which tray will become the bearer of the refreshments at a funeral, the rumble of an invisible cart, which is reproduced in the procession to the grave of the funeral suggested, are manaidhean warnings, occurring every day.

Among such warnings one naturally expects that when the light of life is going to leave its possessor here, it might not improbably be, as it were, seen in the act, and so be an intimation of the fatal result. "Each man has a star in heaven, the brighter or darker light of which betokens his greater or lesser good fortune. The fall of a star each time betokens the death of a man. If one sees a star fall, he calls out three times 'Not mine.'" That is a Jewish belief, but astrology is confined to no nationality. Distinctions, however, are made in certain places according to the phenomena observed. In some parts of Hungary if a star moves without falling down, as it were, they say a soul is loosed from purgatory, and the person who sees it should offer a prayer; but if it passes away so as to become invisible, a human being is said to die.