[The Book of Dreams and Ghosts by Andrew Lang]@TWC D-Link bookThe Book of Dreams and Ghosts CHAPTER VI 15/36
He was affected much after such sort, as at the time of those _fits_, so that the people did not give that _attention_ and _regard_ to what he said as at other times; but when he returned again to himself (which was about an hour after) he solemnly protested to them that the daemon had carried him so high that his master's house seemed to him to be but _as a hay-cock_, and _that during all that time he was in perfect sense, and prayed to Almighty God not to suffer the devil to destroy him_; and that he was suddenly set down in that quagmire. The workmen found one shoe on one side of his master's house, and the other on the other side, and in the morning espied his perriwig hanging on the top of a tree; by which it appears he had been carried a considerable height, and that what he told them was not a fiction. "After this it was observed that that part of the young man's body which had been on the mud in the quagmire was somewhat benummbed and seemingly deader than the other, whereupon the following _Saturday_, which was the day before _Low Sunday_, he was carried to _Crediton, alias Kirton_, to be bleeded, which being done accordingly, and the company having left him for some little space, at their return they found him in one of his fits, with his _forehead_ much _bruised_, and _swoln_ to a _great bigness_, none being able to guess how it happened, until his recovery from that _fit_, when upon enquiry he gave them this account of it: _that a bird had with great swiftness and force flown in at the window with a stone in its beak, which it had dashed against his forehead, which had occasioned the swelling which they saw_. "The people much wondering at the strangeness of the accident, diligently sought the stone, and under the place where he sat they found not such a stone as they expected but a weight of brass or copper, which it seems the daemon had made use of on that occasion to give the poor young man that hurt in his forehead. "The persons present were at the trouble to break it to pieces, every one taking a part and preserving it in memory of so strange an accident.
After this the spirit continued to molest the young man in a very severe and rugged manner, often handling him with great extremity, and whether it hath yet left its violences to him, or whether the young man be yet alive, I can have no certain account." I leave the reader to consider of the extraordinary strangeness of the relation. The reader, considering the exceeding strangeness of the relation, will observe that we have now reached "great swingeing falsehoods," even if that opinion had not hitherto occurred to his mind.
But if he thinks that such stories are no longer told, and even sworn to on Bible oath, he greatly deceives himself.
In the chapter on "Haunted Houses" he will find statements just as hard narrated of the years 1870 and 1882.
In these, however, the ghosts had no purpose but mischief.
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