From Dr. Pritchard, I quote this fragment:—“A maid-servant, who lived in the house of an elderly lady, some years since deceased, had risen, early on a winter’s morning, and was employed in washing by candle-light the entry of the house; when she was greatly surprised at seeing her mistress, who was then in a precarious state of health, coming down stairs in her night dress. The passage being narrow, she rose up to let her mistress pass, which the latter did with a hasty step, and walked into the street, appearing, to the terrified imagination of the girl, to pass through the door without opening it. The servant related the circumstance to the son and daughter of the lady, as soon as they came down stairs, who desired her to conceal it from their mother, and anxiously waited for her appearance. The old lady entered the room, while they were talking of the incident, but appeared languid and unwell, and complained of having been disturbed by an alarming dream. She had dreamed that a dog had pursued her from her chamber _down the staircase, and along the entry, and that she was obliged to take refuge in the streets_.”
In the manuscripts of Lady Fanshawe, how evident is the fact of spectral prophecy! Sir Richard Fanshawe and his lady were sleeping in a baronial castle in Ireland, surrounded by a moat. At midnight she was awoke by a ghostly and fearful screaming; and, gleaming before the window in the pale moonlight, a female spectre hovered, her light auburn hair dishevelled over her shoulders. While the lady looked in mute astonishment, the spectre vanished, uttering two distinct shrieks. Her terrific story was told in the morning to her host, who evinced no wonder at the mystery, “Indeed,” quoth he, “I expected this. This was the prophetic phantom of our house, the spectre of a lady wedded to an ancestor, and drowned by him in the moat from false notions of dignity, because she was not of noble blood. Since this expiation, the phantom appears before every death of my near relations, and one of these died last night in my castle.”—Here may be the prototype of the “White Lady of Avenel.”
Among the most exalted families we have other confident records of the recurrence of prophetic phantoms, antecedent to great events. A spectre of this kind formed a part of the household establishment of the Macleans. During the peninsular war, at the moment that the head of the clan died at Lisbon, this wraith was seen to ride screaming along the shore in Scotland.