Closely allied to ‘second sight’ is the doctrine of ‘wraiths’ or ‘fetches,’ sometimes designated ‘doubles’—an apparition exactly like a living person, its appearance, whether to that person or to another, being considered an omen of death. The ‘Fetch’ is a well-known superstition in Ireland, and is supposed to be a mere shadow, ‘resembling in stature, features, and dress, a living person, and often mysteriously or suddenly seen by a very particular friend.’ Spiritlike, it flits before the sight, seeming to walk leisurely through the fields, often disappearing through a gap or lane. The person it resembles is usually known at the time to be labouring under some mortal illness, and unable to leave his or her bed. When the ‘fetch’ appears agitated, or eccentric in its motions, a violent or painful death is indicated for the doomed prototype. Such a phantom, too, is said to make its appearance at the same time, and in the same place, to more than one person.[306] Should it be seen in the morning, a happy longevity for the original is confidently expected; but if it be seen in the evening, immediate dissolution of the living prototype is anticipated. It is thought, too, that individuals may behold their own ‘fetches.’ Queen Elizabeth is said to have been warned of her death by the apparition of her own double, and Miss Strickland thus describes her last illness: ‘As her mortal illness drew towards a close, the superstitious fears of her simple ladies were excited almost to mania, even to conjuring up a spectral apparition of the Queen while she was yet alive. Lady Guilford, who was then in waiting on the Queen, leaving her in an almost breathless sleep in her privy chamber, went out to take a little air, and met her Majesty, as she thought, three or four chambers off. Alarmed at the thought of being discovered in the act of leaving the royal patient alone, she hurried forward in some trepidation in order to excuse herself, when the apparition vanished away. She returned terrified to the chamber, but there lay the Queen in the same lethargic slumber in which she left her.’

Shelley, shortly before his death, believed he had seen his wraith. ‘On June 23,’ says one of his biographers, ‘he was heard screaming at midnight in the saloon. The Williamses ran in and found him staring on vacancy. He had had a vision of a cloaked figure which came to his bedside and beckoned him to follow. He did so, and when they had reached the sitting-room, the figure lifted the hood of his cloak and disclosed Shelley’s own features, and saying “Siete soddisfatto?” vanished. This vision is accounted for on the ground that Shelley had been reading a drama attributed to Calderon, named ‘El Embozado, Ó el Encapotado,’ in which a mysterious personage who had been haunting and thwarting the hero all his life, and is at last about to give him satisfaction in a duel, unmasks and proves to be the hero’s own wraith. He also asks, “Art thou satisfied?” and the haunted man dies of horror.’ Sir Robert Napier is supposed to have seen his double, and Aubrey quaintly relates how ‘the beautiful Lady Diana Rich, daughter to the Earl of Holland, as she was walking in her father’s garden at Kensington to take the air before dinner, about 11 o’clock, being then very well, met her own apparition, habit and everything, as in a looking-glass. About a month after, she died of small-pox. And it is said that her sister, the Lady Isabella Thynne, saw the like of herself also before she died. This account I had from a person of honour. A third sister, Mary, was married to the Earl of Breadalbane, and it has been recorded that she also, not long after her marriage, had some such warning of her approaching dissolution.’

The Irish novelist, John Banim, has written both a novel and a ballad on this subject, one which has also largely entered into many a tradition and folk-tale.[307] In Cumberland this apparition is known by the peasantry as a ‘swarth,’ and in Yorkshire by the name of a ‘waff.’ The gift of wraith-seeing still flourishes on the Continent, and examples abound in Silesia and the Tyrol.

‘With regard to bilocation, or double personality,’ writes a Catholic priest,[308] ‘there is a great deal of very interesting matter in St. Thomas of Aquin, and also in Cardinal Cajetan’s “Commentaries of St. Thomas.” The substance of the principles is this: Bilocation, properly so called, is defined by the scholastics as the perfect and simultaneous existence of one and the same individual in two distinct places at the same time. This never does and never can happen. But bilocation, improperly so called, and which St. Thomas terms raptus, does occur, and is identical with the double, as you call it, in the cases of St. Gennadius, St. Ignatius, &c.

‘St. Thomas quotes as illustrations or instances, St. Paul being taken up to the Third Heaven. Ezekiel, the prophet, was taken by God and shown Jerusalem, whilst at the same time he was sitting in the room with the ancients of the tribe of Judah before him (Ezekiel viii.), &c. In which the soul of man is not wholly detached from the body, being necessary for the purpose of giving life, but is detached from the senses of the body. St. Thomas gives three causes for this phenomenon: (1) Divine power; (2) the power of the Devil; and (3), disease of the body when very violent sometimes.’ Bardinus tells how Marsilius Ficinus appeared at the hour of his death on a white horse to Michael Mercatus, and rode away crying, ‘O Michael, Michael, vera, vera sunt illa,’ that is, the doctrine of a future life is true. Instances of this kind of phenomenon have been common in all ages of the world, and Lucretius suggested the strange fancy that the superficial surfaces of all bodies were continually flying off like the coats of an onion, which accounted for the appearance of apparitions; whilst Jacques Gaffarel suggested that corrupting bodies send forth vapours which, being compressed by the cold night air, appear visible to the eye in the forms of men.[309]

In one of the notes to ‘Les Imaginations Extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle,’ by the AbbÉ BordÉlon, it is said that the monks and nuns, a short time before their death, have seen the images of themselves seated in their chairs or stalls. Catharine of Russia, after retiring to her bedroom, was told that she had been seen just before to enter the State Chamber. On hearing this she went thither, and saw the exact similitude of herself seated upon the throne. She ordered her guards to fire upon it.

In Scotland and the northern counties of England it was formerly said that the apparition of the person that was doomed to die within a short time was seen wrapped in a winding-sheet, and the higher the winding-sheet reached up towards the head the nearer was death. This apparition was seen during day, and it might show itself to anyone, but only to one, who generally fell into a faint a short time afterwards. If the person who saw the apparition was alone at the time, the fainting fit did not come on till after meeting with others.

In the ‘Statistical Account of Scotland’ (xxi. 148), the writer, speaking of the parish of Monquhitter, says, the ‘fye gave due warning by certain signs of approaching mortality’; and, again (149), ‘the fye has withdrawn his warning.’ Some friends observing to an old woman, when in the ninety-ninth year of her age, that, in the course of nature, she could not long survive, she remarked, with pointed indignation, ‘What fye-token do you see about me?’

In the same work (iii. 380) the minister of Applecross, county of Ross, speaking of the superstitions of that parish, says: ‘The ghosts of the dying, called “tasks,” are said to be heard, their cry being a repetition of the moans of the sick. Some assume the sagacity of distinguishing the voice of their departed friends. The corpse follows the track led by the “tasks” to the place of interment, and the early or late completion of the prediction is made to depend on the period of the night at which the “task” is heard.’

The Scotch wraith and Irish fetch have their parallel in Wales in the Lledrith, or spectre of a person seen before his death. It never speaks, and vanishes if spoken to. It has been seen by miners previous to a fatal accident in the mine. The story is told of a miner who saw himself lying dead and horribly maimed in a phantom tram-car, led by a phantom horse, and surrounded by phantom miners. As he watched this dreadful group of spectres they passed on, looking neither to the right nor the left, and faded away. The miner’s dog was as frightened as its master, and ran away howling. The miner continued to work in the pit, and as the days passed on and no harm came to him he grew more cheerful, and was so bold as to laugh at the superstition. But the day he did this a stone fell from the roof and broke his arm. As soon as he recovered he resumed work in the pit; but a stone crushed him, and he was borne maimed and dead in the tram along the road where his ‘lledrith’ had appeared.[310]

‘Examining,’ says Dr. Tylor,[311] ‘the position of the doctrine of wraiths among the higher races, we find it specially prominent in three intellectual districts: Christian hagiology, popular folk-lore, and modern spiritualism. St. Anthony saw the soul of St. Ammonius carried to heaven in the midst of choirs of angels, the same day that the holy hermit died five days’ journey off in the desert of Nitria. When St. Ambrose died on Easter Eve, several newly-baptized children saw the holy bishop and pointed him out to their parents; but these, with their less pure eyes, could not behold him.’ Numerous instances of wraith-seeing have been chronicled from time to time, some of which are noteworthy. It is related how Ben Jonson, when staying at Sir Robert Cotton’s house, was visited by the apparition of his eldest son, with a mark of a bloody cross upon his forehead, at the moment of his death by the plague. Lord Balcarres, it is said, when in confinement in Edinburgh Castle under suspicion of Jacobitism, was one morning lying in bed when the curtains were drawn aside by his friend Viscount Dundee, who looked upon him steadfastly, and then left the room. Shortly afterwards the news came that he had fallen about the same hour at Killiecrankie. Lord Mohun, who was killed in a duel in Chelsea Fields, is reported to have appeared at the moment of his death, in the year 1642, to a lady in James Street, Covent Garden, and also to the sister of Glanvill, famous as the author of ‘Sadducismus Triumphatus.’ It is related how the second Earl of Chesterfield, in 1652, saw, when walking, a spectre with long white robes and black face. Regarding it as an intimation of some illness of his wife, then visiting her father at Networth, he set off early to inquire, and met a servant from Lady Chesterfield, describing the same apparition. Anna Maria Porter, when living at Esher, was visited by an old gentleman, a neighbour, who frequently came in to tea. On this occasion, the story goes, he left the room without speaking; and, fearing that something had happened, she sent to inquire, and found that he had died at the moment of his appearance. Similarly Maria Edgeworth, when waiting with her family for an expected guest, saw in a vacant chair the apparition of a sailor cousin, who suddenly stated that his ship had been wrecked and he himself the only one saved. The event proved the contrary—he alone was drowned.[312]

One of the most striking and best authenticated cases on record is known as the Birkbeck Ghost, and is thus related in the ‘Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society’: ‘In 1789, Mrs. Birkbeck, wife of William Birkbeck, banker, of Settle, and a member of the Society of Friends, was taken ill and died at Cockermouth while returning from a journey to Scotland, which she had undertaken alone—her husband and three children, aged seven, five, and four years respectively, remaining at Settle. The friends at whose house the death occurred made notes of every circumstance attending Mrs. Birkbeck’s last hours, so that the accuracy of the several statements as to time as well as place was beyond the doubtfulness of man’s memory, or of any even unconscious attempt to bring them into agreement with each other. One morning, between seven and eight o’clock, the relation to whom the care of the children had been entrusted, and who kept a minute journal of all that concerned them, went into their bedroom, as usual, and found them all sitting up in bed in great excitement and delight. “Mamma has been here,” they cried; and the little one said, “She called, ‘Come, Esther!’” Nothing could make them doubt the fact, and it was carefully noted down to entertain the mother when she came home. That same morning, as their mother lay on her dying bed at Cockermouth, she said, “I should be ready to go if I could but see my children.” She then closed her eyes, to reopen them, as they thought, no more. But after ten minutes of perfect stillness she looked up brightly, and said, “I am ready now; I have been with my children;” and at once passed peacefully away. When the notes taken at the two places were compared, the day, hour, and minutes were the same.’

Baxter, in his ‘World of Spirits,’ records a very similar case of a dying woman visiting her children in Rochester, and in a paper on ‘Ghosts and Goblins,’ which appeared in the ‘Cornhill’ (1873, xxvii. 457), the writer relates how, in a house in Ireland, a girl lay dying. Her mother and father were with her, and her five sisters were praying for her in a neighbouring room. This room was well lit, but overhead was a skylight, and the dark sky beyond. One of the sisters, looking towards this skylight, saw there the face of her dying sister looking sorrowfully down upon them. She seized another sister and pointed to the skylight; one after another the sisters looked where she pointed. They spoke no word; and in a few moments their father and mother called them to the room where their sister had just died. But when afterwards they talked together about what had happened that night, it was found that they had all seen the vision and the sorrowful face. But, as the writer observes, ‘in stories where a ghost appears for some useful purpose, the mind does not reject the event as altogether unreasonable, though the circumstances may be sufficiently preposterous;’ but one can conceive no reason why the vision of a dying sister should look down through a skylight.

According to a Lancashire belief, the spirits of persons about to die, especially if the persons be in distant lands, are supposed to return to their friends, and thus predict the event. While the spirit is thus away, the person is supposed to be in a swoon, and unaware of what is passing. But his desire to see his friends is necessary; and he must have been thinking of them.[313]

It is related from Devonshire, of the well-known Dr. Hawker, that, when walking one night, he observed an old woman pass by him, to whom he was in the habit of giving a weekly charity. As soon as she had passed, he felt somebody pull his coat, and on looking round he recognised her, and put his hand in his pocket to seek for a sixpence, but on turning to give it to her she was gone. On his return home he heard she was dead, but his family had forgotten to mention the circumstance.[314]

A correspondent of ‘Notes and Queries’ (3rd S. vi. 182) tells how a judge of the Staffordshire County Courts, being on one occasion in the North, went with his sisters into the church of the place to inspect its monuments. While there they were surprised to see a lady, whom they knew to be in Bath, walk in at one door and out through another. They immediately followed, but could neither see nor hear anything further of her. On writing to her friends, it was found that she was dead, and a second letter elicited the fact that she had died at the very same time at which she had been seen by them in the North.

Patrick Kennedy, in his ‘Legendary Fiction of the Irish Celt,’ speaking of the Irish fetch, gives the following tale of ‘The Doctor’s Fetch,’ based, it is stated, on the most authentic sources: ‘In one of our Irish cities, and in a room where the mild moonbeams were resting on the carpet and on a table near the window, Mrs. B., wife of a doctor in good practice and general esteem, looking towards the window from her pillow, was startled by the appearance of her husband standing near the table just mentioned, and seeming to look with attention on the book which was lying open on it. Now, the living and breathing man was by her side apparently asleep, and, greatly as she was surprised and affected, she had sufficient command of herself to remain without moving, lest she should expose him to the terror which she herself at the moment experienced. After gazing on the apparition for a few seconds, she bent her eyes upon her husband to ascertain if his looks were turned in the direction of the window, but his eyes were closed. She turned round again, although now dreading the sight of what she believed to be her husband’s fetch, but it was no longer there. She remained sleepless throughout the remainder of the night, but still bravely refrained from disturbing her partner.

‘Next morning, Mr. B., seeing signs of disquiet on his wife’s countenance while at breakfast, made some affectionate inquiries, but she concealed her trouble, and at his ordinary hour he sallied forth to make his calls. Meeting Dr. C. in the street, and falling into conversation with him, he asked his opinion on the subject of fetches. “I think,” was the answer, “and so I am sure do you, that they are mere illusions produced by a disturbed stomach acting upon the excited brain of a highly imaginative or superstitious person.” “Then,” said Dr. B., “I am highly imaginative or superstitious, for I distinctly saw my own outward man last night standing at the table in the bedroom, and clearly distinguishable in the moonlight. I am afraid my wife saw it too, but I have been afraid to speak to her on the subject.”

‘About the same hour on the ensuing night the poor lady was again roused, but by a more painful circumstance. She felt her husband moving convulsively, and immediately afterwards he cried to her in low, interrupted accents, “Ellen, my dear, I am suffocating; send for Dr. C.” She sprang up, huddled on some clothes, and ran to his house. He came with all speed, but his efforts for his friend were useless. He had burst a large blood-vessel in the lungs, and was soon beyond human aid. In her lamentations the bereaved wife frequently cried out, “Oh! the fetch, the fetch!” and at a later period told the doctor of the appearance the night before her husband’s death.’ But, whilst many stories of this kind are open to explanation, it is a singular circumstance how even several persons may be deceived by an illusion such as the following. A gentleman who had lately lost his wife, looking out of window in the dusk of evening, saw her sitting in a garden-chair. He called one of his daughters and asked her to look out into the garden. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘mother is sitting there.’ Another daughter was called, and she experienced the same illusion. Then the gentleman went out into the garden, and found that a garden-dress of his wife’s had been placed over the seat in such a position as to produce the illusion which had deceived himself and his daughters.

In ‘Phantasms of the Living’[315] very many strange and startling cases are recorded, in which the mysterious ‘double’ has appeared, sometimes speaking, and sometimes without speech, although such manifestations have not always been omens of death. Thus the late Lord Dorchester[316] is said to have seen the phantom of his daughter standing at the window, having his attention aroused by its shadow, which fell across the book he was reading at the time. She had accompanied a fishing expedition, was caught in a storm, and was distressed at the thought that her father would be anxious on her account.

In Fitzroy’s ‘Cruise of the Beagle’ an anecdote is told of a young Fuegian, Jemmy Button, and his father’s ghost. ‘While at sea, on board the “Beagle,” about the middle of the year 1842, he said one morning to Mr. Byno, that in the night some man came to the side of his hammock, and whispered in his ear that his father was dead. Mr. Byno tried to laugh him out of the idea, but ineffectually. He fully believed that such was the case, and maintained his opinion up to the time of finding his relations in Beagle Channel, when, I regret to say, he found that his father had died some months previously.’ This story is interesting, especially as Mr. Lang says it is the only one he has encountered among savages, of a warning conveyed to a man by a ghost as to the death of a friend.[317]