There is the dead-bell, which the Scottish peasants believe to foretell the death of a friend; and the death-cart of Lancashire, which is heard rattling along the streets like a whirlwind; and the Owke Mouraske, a demon of Norway, which never enters a house but some one of the family dies within the year. We are assured also by the Saxon, Cranmer, that ere one of the electoral house of Brandenburgh dies, a woman in white appears to many throughout the dominions of Prussia.
The wild mountains that surround us are prolific in the “Anderyn y Corff,” or “Corpse-bird,” and the “Cwm Amon,” or “Dogs of Hell,” which are believed to be demons of death, in the shape of hounds, and, like the mongrel of Faust, marked by a train of fire. These howl forth their awful warning, while the death-peal rings in the ears of the nearest kin of one about to die.
There is the legend of the “Ellyllon,” a prototype of the Scotch and Irish “Banshie,” which appears as an old crone, with streaming hair and a coat of blue, with her boding scream of death. The “Gwrach y Rhibyn,” or “Hag of the Dribble,” whose pastime is to carry stones in her apron across the mountains, and then to loosen her apron-string, and by the shower of stones to make a “dribble.” This hag, at twilight, flaps her raven wing against the chamber window of a doomed creature, and, with a howl, cries out, “A a a ui ui Anni.”
In the wilderness of Zin, which stretches between Palestine and the Red Sea, both the Bedouin Arab and the traveller are greeted by the sound of _matin_ bells, like the convent peal which calls the nuns to their devotion; and this, according to tradition, has been heard ever since the crusades.
Then there is a fatal spirit of the desert, which, like an ignis fatuus, lures men to destruction, by
“Airy tongues that syllable men’s names.”
The Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, writes of those who, wandering unwarily from the track of the caravans in Tartary, hear the phantom voice of some dear friend (who indeed sometimes appears in person), which entices them from the route, and they perish in the desert.
And Lord Lindsay, in his travels through Egypt and the defiles of Edom, tells us one circumstantial story from Vincent de Blanc, of a man decoyed away from the caravan of an Arabian merchant by the entreaties of a phantom voice.