The Anatomy of Melancholy

This kind of devil often appears to people and frightens them out of their wits, sometimes walking at midday and sometimes at night, impersonating the ghosts of the dead. Such was Caligula’s ghost, which Suetonius says was seen walking in Lavinia’s garden. Spirits haunted the place where his body was buried, and in the house where he died “no night passed without terror until it was consumed by fire.” This happened every night: there was no peace until the house burned down.

Ghosts commonly walk around Hekla in Iceland, “impersonating the souls of the dead,” says Johannes Ananias, On the Nature of Demons, book 3; so too Olaus, book 2, chapter 2; Natalis Taillepied, On Apparitions of Spirits; and Kornmann, Wonders of the Dead, part 1, chapter 44. Such sights are frequently seen “around graves and monasteries,” says Lavater, book 1, chapter 19—in monasteries and around churchyards, “marshy places, large isolated buildings, and places marked by murder,” and so on.

Thyraeus adds, “where some grave sin has been committed, where the impious, oppressors of the poor, and people notorious for wickedness live.” These spirits often foretell people’s deaths by various signs—knocking, groaning, and the like—though Richard Argentine, On the Deceptions of Demons, chapter 18, attributes these predictions to good angels, on the authority of Ficino and others.

“Portents occur more frequently at the deaths of princes,” and so on. Thus, in the Lateran church in Rome, popes’ deaths are foretold by Sylvester’s tomb. Near Rupes Nova in Finland, in the kingdom of Sweden, there is a lake where, before the governor of the castle dies, an apparition dressed as Arion with his harp appears and plays exquisite music.

The same is true of those logs in Cheshire which, they say, foretell the death of the head of the family, or that oak in Lanthadran Park in Cornwall which foretells the same. Many European families are reminded of their end by such predictions, and many people are forewarned—if we may believe Paracelsus—by familiar spirits in various forms, such as cocks, crows and owls, which often hover around sick people’s rooms.

It may be “because they smell the foulness of the dying,” as Baracellus conjectures, “and therefore caw above the roofs of the sick”—because they smell a corpse. Or it may be because, as Bernardino de’ Busti thinks, God allows the Devil to appear in the form of crows and similar creatures to frighten those who live wickedly here on earth.

Shortly before Cicero’s death, says Plutarch, crows made a tremendous noise around him, “clamouring tumultuously”; they pulled the pillow from beneath his head. Robert Gaguin’s History of France, book 8, tells another such marvellous story about the death in 1345 of Jean de Montfort, a French lord: “So great a multitude of crows settled on the dying man’s house that no one would have believed there were that many in all France.”

Such portents are very common in the authors. See further instances in the same Lavater; Thyraeus, On Haunted Places, part 3, chapter 58; Pictorius; Delrio; and Cicogna, book 3, chapter 9. Necromancers claim to summon and dismiss these spirits at will.

They claim the same power over those whom Mizaldus calls Ambulones, “wanderers,” that walk about at midnight on vast heaths and in deserted places. These, says Lavater, draw people off the road and lead them along a wrong path all night, or entirely block their way. They have different names in different places; we commonly call them Pucks.