d.

St. Germain,[318] Bishop of Capua, taking a bath in one particular
quarter of the town, found there Paschaus, a deacon of the Roman
Church, who had been dead some time, and who began to wait upon him,
telling him that he underwent his purgatory in that place for having
favored the party of Laurentius the anti-pope, against Pope Symachus.

St. Gregory of Nicea, in the life of St. Gregory of Neocaesarea, says
that a deacon of this holy bishop, having gone into a bath where no
one dared go after a certain hour in the evening, because all those
who had entered there had been put to death, beheld spectres of all
kinds, which threatened him in a thousand ways, but he got rid of them
by crossing himself and invoking the name of Jesus.

Alexander ab Alexandro,[319] a learned Neapolitan lawyer of the
fifteenth century, says that all the world knows that there are a
number of houses at Rome so much out of repute on account of the
ghosts which appear in them every night that nobody dares to inhabit
them. Nicholas Tuba, his friend, a man well known for his probity and
veracity, who came once with some of his comrades to try if all that
was said of those houses was true, would pass the night in one of them
with Alexander. As they were together, wide awake, and with plenty of
light, they beheld a horrible spectre, which frightened them so much
by its terrific voice and the great noise which it made, that they
hardly knew what they did, nor what they said; "and by degrees, as we
approached," says he, "with the light, the phantom retreated; at last,
after having thrown all the house into confusion, it disappeared
entirely."

I might also relate here the spectre noticed by Father Sinson the
Jesuit, which he saw, and to which he spoke at Pont-a-Mousson, in the
cloister belonging to those fathers; but I shall content myself with
the instance which is reported in the _Causes Celebres_,[320] and
which may serve to undeceive those who too lightly give credit to
stories of this kind.

At the Chateau d' Arsillier, in Picardy, on certain days of the year,
towards November, they saw flames and a horrible smoke proceeding
thence. Cries and frightful howlings were heard. The bailiff, or
farmer of the chateau, had got accustomed to this uproar, because he
himself caused it. All the village talked of it, and everybody told
his own story thereupon. The gentleman to whom the chateau belonged,
mistrusting some contrivance, came there near All