There is a story on record, of a piratical cruiser having captured a Spanish vessel, during the seventeenth century, and brought her into Marblehead harbor, which was then the site of a few humble dwellings. The male inhabitants were all absent on their fishing voyages. The pirates brought their prisoners ashore, carried them at the dead of night into a solitary glen, and there murdered them. Among the captives was an English female passenger. The women who belonged to the place heard her dying outcries, as they rose through the midnight air, and reverberated far and wide along the silent shores. She was heard to exclaim, "O, mercy, mercy! Lord Jesus Christ, save me! save me!" Her body was buried by the pirates on the spot. The same piercing voice is believed to be heard at intervals, more or less often, almost every year, in the stillness of a calm starlight, or clear moonlight night. There is something, it is said, so wild, mysterious, and evidently superhuman in the sound, as to strike a chill of dread into the hearts of all who listen to it. A writer in the Marblehead Register, of April 3, 1830, declares that "there are not persons wanting at the present day, persons of unimpeachable veracity and known respectability, who still continue to believe the tradition, and to assert that they themselves have been auditors of the sounds described, which they declare were of such an unearthly nature as to preclude the idea of imposition or deception." When "the silver moon holds her way," or when the stars are glistening in the clear, cold sky, and the dark forms of the moored vessels are at rest upon the sleeping bosom of the harbor,--when no natural sound comes forth from the animate or inanimate creation but the dull and melancholy note of the winding shore, how often, at midnight, is the watcher startled from the reveries of an excited imagination by the piteous, dismal, and terrific screams of the unlaid _ghost_ of the murdered lady!
Erroneous impressions are often connected with some bodily disease, more especially disease in the brain. Dr. Gregory mentions the case of a gentleman liable to epileptic fits, in whom the paroxysm was generally preceded by the appearance of an old woman in a red cloak, who seemed to come up to him, and strike him on the head with her crutch. At that instant he fell down in the fit. Another is mentioned by Dr. Alderston, of a man who kept a dram shop, and who would often see a soldier endeavoring to force himself into his house in a menacing manner; and in rushing forward to prevent him, would find it a mere phantom. This man was cured by bleeding and purgatives; and the source of this vision was traced to a quarrel which he had had some time before with a drunken soldier. In _delirium tremens_ such visions are common, and assume a variety of forms.