"Spirits of the living" of this kind are common enough
- Date of account
- Published 1897
- Source
- The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
- Reference
- The Book of Dreams and Ghosts · selected passage 75
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
"Spirits of the living" of this kind are common enough
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention only"Spirits of the living" of this kind are common enough. In the Highlands "second sight" generally means a view of an event or accident some time before its occurrence. Thus an old man was sitting with a little boy on a felled tree beside a steep track in a quarry at Ballachulish. Suddenly he jerked the boy to one side, and threw himself down on the further side of the tree. While the boy stared, the old man slowly rose, saying, "The spirits of the living are strong to-day!" He had seen a mass of rock dashing along, killing some quarrymen and tearing down the path. The accident occurred next day. It is needless to dwell on second sight, which is not peculiar to Celts, though the Highlanders talk more about it than other people.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.