The Supernatural Murders by Jonathan Goodman

Author:Jonathan Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kent State University Press

The Ghost of Sergeant Davies

WILLIAM ROUGHEAD

‘You must not tell us what the soldier or any other man said, Sir; it’s not evidence.’

BARDELL v PICKWICK

FEW JUDICIAL UTTERANCES are better known or more widely quoted than this immortal dictum of Mr Justice Stareleigh. Yet there was precedent against his Lordship’s ruling, for in the year 1754 the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh had admitted as evidence what was said by ‘the soldier’s’ ghost! and so lately as 1831 the testimony of a voice from the other world was accepted in the Assynt murder case by the same tribunal. But English practice was no stricter, and although only two instances of spectral evidence occur in the State Trials, the research of Mr Andrew Lang has disclosed similar cases. Both of the Scots spirits spoke in Gaelic, which would seem to be an appropriate medium of communication but for the fact that the soldier, an Englishman, while in the flesh had no knowledge of that tongue.

The case first mentioned arose out of the slaying of Sergeant Davies, and the trial of his murderers was privately printed for the Bannatyne Club at the instance of Sir Walter Scott. The time was some three years after the doleful day of Drummossie, the place a solitary hillside at the head of Glenclunie, in the heart of the Grampians. ‘A more waste tract of mountain and bog, rocks and ravines, extending from Dubrach to Glenshee, without habitations of any kind until you reach Glenclunie, is scarce to be met with in Scotland,’ writes Sir Walter; ‘a more fit locality, therefore, for a deed of murder could hardly be pointed out, nor one which could tend more to agitate superstitious feelings.’

The swell following the great gale of the 1745 Rebellion had not subsided in the remoter Highlands; and bands of disaffected and broken men still lurked in security among the grim defiles and rugged fastnesses of that formidable land. The disarming of the Highlanders was a farce, as Prestongrange admitted to David Balfour. To stamp out the smouldering embers of the Rising, and to enforce the Disarming Act and that which proscribed the national dress, the Government still maintained garrisons throughout the suspected districts. From these stations small pickets were sent out to occupy various posts, whence they communicated with one another, and constantly patrolled the country.

In the month of September, 1749, Sergeant Arthur Davies, with a party of eight men of the regiment of foot commanded by Lieutenant-General Guise, were quartered at Dubrach, a small upland farm near the clachan of Inverey in Braemar. They had marched thither in the previous June from their headquarters at Aberdeen. Another party of the same regiment, under the command of a corporal, guarded the Spittal of Glenshee, some eight miles off. In the course of patrolling the district, these two parties were wont to meet twice a week at a spot midway between their respective stations. During the three or four months in which Sergeant Davies had occupied the hostile

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