Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 05.pdf/216

 The Supernatural in Crime.

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THE SUPERNATURAL IN CRIME. DREAMS have played no small part in the unravelling of the mystery sur rounding crimes, and the record of a few cases which have actually been elucidated in British law-courts may prove interesting to our readers. In the year 1695 a Mr. Stockden was robbed and murdered in his own house in the parish of Cripplegate. There was reason to believe that his assailants were four in number. Suspicion fell on a man named Maynard, but he succeeded at first in clear ing himself. Soon afterward a Mrs. Green wood voluntarily came forward and declared that the murdered man had visited her in a dream, and had shown her a house in Thames Street, saying that one of the murderers lived there. In a second dream he displayed to her a portrait of Maynard, calling her atten tion to a mole on the side of his face (she had never seen the man), and instructing her concerning an acquaintance who would be, he said, willing to betray him. Following up this information, Maynard was committed to prison, where he confessed his crime and impeached three accomplices. It was not easy to trace these men; but Mr. Stockden, the murdered man, again opportunely ap peared in Mrs. Greenwood's dreams, giving information which led to the arrest of the whole gang, who then freely confessed, and were finally executed. The story is related by the curate of Cripplegate, and " witnessed" by Dr. Sharp, then Bishop of York. On this story, be it remarked that Mrs. Greenwood's dreams only verified suspicions already aroused. Maynard had been sus pected at first; her dream brought home the guilt to him. It did not deal with his ac complices until Maynard, in his turn, had implicated them. A somewhat similar incident came before a legal tribunal nearly a century afterwards, when two Highlanders were arraigned for the murder of an English soldier in a wild

and solitary mountain district, known as " the Spital of Glenshie." In the course of the "proof for the Crown," to use the phrase of Scottish law, another Highlander, one Alex ander McPherson, deposed that on one night an apparition appeared to come to his bed side, and announced itself as the murdered soldier, Davies, and described the precise spot where his bones would be found, request ing McPherson to search for and bury them. He fulfilled but the first part of the behest, whereupon the dream or apparition came back, repeated it, and called his murderers by their names. It appears that with the strangely stern common-sense which in Scotland exists side by side with the strongest imaginative power, the prisoners were acquitted principally on account of this evidence, whose " visionary" nature threw discredit on the whole proceed ings. One difficulty lay in the possibility of communication between the murdered man and the dreamer, since the one spoke only English and the other nothing but Gaelic. Years afterwards, however, when both the accused men were dead, their law agent admitted confidentially that he had no doubt of their guilt. Singularly enough, a story strikingly similar in many of its details found its way before a criminal tribunal in England. In the remote and sequestered Highland region of Assynt, Sutherland, a rustic wed ding and merry-making came off in the spring of 1830. At this festivity there figured an itinerant pedler named Murdock Grant, who from that occasion utterly dis appeared. A month afterwards, a farmservant, passing a lonely mountain lake, observed a dead body in the water, and on its being drawn ashore, the features of the missing pedler were recognized. He had been robbed, and had met his death by violence. The sheriff of the district, a Mr. Lumsden, investigated the affair without any