CHAPTER XXXVI.

OF SPECTRES WHICH HAUNT HOUSES.

There are several kinds of spectres or ghosts which haunt certain
houses, make noises, appear there, and disturb those who live in them:
some are sprites, or elves, which divert themselves by troubling the
quiet of those who dwell there; others are spectres or ghosts of the
dead, who molest the living until they have received sepulture: some
of them, as it is said, make the place their purgatory; others show
themselves or make themselves heard, because they have been put to
death in that place, and ask that their death may be avenged, or that
their bodies may be buried. So many stories are related concerning
those things that now they are not cared for, and nobody will believe
any of them. In fact, when these pretended apparitions are thoroughly
examined into, it is easy to discover their falsehood and illusion.

Now, it is a tenant who wishes to decry the house in which he resides,
to hinder others from coming who would like to take his place; then a
band of coiners have taken possession of a dwelling, whose interest it
is to keep their secret from being found out; or a farmer who desires
to retain his farm, and wishes to prevent others from coming to offer
more for it; in this place it will be cats or owls, or even rats,
which by making a noise frighten the master and domestics, as it
happened some years ago at Mosheim, where large rats amused themselves
in the night by moving and setting in motion the machines with which
the women bruise hemp and flax. An honest man who related it to me,
desiring to behold the thing nearer, mounted up to the garret armed
with two pistols, with his servant armed in the same manner. After a
moment of silence, they saw the rats begin their game; they let fire
upon them, killed two, and dispersed the rest. The circumstance was
reported in the country and served as an excellent joke.

I am about to relate some of these spectral apparitions upon which the
reader will pronounce judgment for himself. Pliny[310] the younger
says that there was a very handsome mansion at Athens which was
forsaken on account of a spectre which haunted it. The philosopher
Athenodorus, having arrived in the city, and seeing a board which
informed the public that this house was to be sold at a very low
price, bought it and went to sleep there with his people. As he was
busy reading and writing during the night, he heard on a sudden a
great noise, as i