hought it was only a
favourite boy of his indulging in a little hunting with some friends;
but on looking up he saw in front of him a woman at least three hundred
feet high, with a sword thirty feet long. Her lower extremities were
like those of a dragon, and snakes were coiling round her neck and
shoulders. Eucrates was not in the least alarmed, but turned the seal of
his ring, when a vast chasm opened in the earth, into which she
disappeared. This seems rather to have astonished Eucrates; but he
plucked up courage, caught hold of a tree that stood near the edge, and
looked over, when he saw all the lower world lying spread before him,
including the mead of asphodel, where the shades of the blessed were
reclining at ease with their friends and relations, arranged according
to clans and tribes. Among these he recognized his own father, dressed
in the clothes in which he was buried; and it must have been comforting
to the son to have such good evidence that his parent was safely
installed in the Elysian Fields. In a few moments the chasm closed.

Dio Cassius[108] relates how Trajan was saved in the great earthquake
that destroyed nearly the whole of Antioch by a phantom, which appeared
to him suddenly, and warned him to leave his house by the window. A
similar story is told of the poet Simonides, who was warned by a spectre
that his house was going to fall, and thus enabled to make his escape in
time.

I will include here a couple of stories which, if they cannot exactly be
classed as stories of warning apparitions, are interesting in
themselves, and may at least be considered as ghost stories. Pliny the
Younger[109] tells us how a slave of his, named Marcus, imagined that he
saw someone cutting his hair during the night. When he awoke, the vision
proved to have been a true one, for his hair lay all round him. Soon
afterwards the same thing happened again. His brother, who slept with
him, saw nothing; but Marcus declared that two people came in by the
windows, dressed in white, and, after cutting his hair, disappeared.
"Nothing astonishing happened," adds Pliny, "except that I was not
prosecuted, as I undoubtedly should have been, had Domitian lived; for
this happened during his principate. Perhaps the cutting of my slave's
hair was a sign of my approaching doom, for accused people cut their
hair," as a sign of mourning. One may be allowed to wonder whether,
after all, a fondness for practical joking is not even older t