The peat-fire flame : folk-tales and traditions of the Highlands & Islands

GHOST TALES AND HAUNTED PLACES
wife hastened out to her husband, who at the time was busy
with the thatching of his cottage. As the result of a brief
conversation with him, it was decided that the Pearsanach
Mor would be concealed imder the thatch until the scare
was past.
Barely a minute was the deserter under the thatch when
armed men rode up to the cottage, and enquired of the
thatcher whether he had noticed a fugitive pass by. To this
interrogation they received a reply in the negative. So they
sped on in the direction in which they imagined the deserter
to have gone. On reaching the point beyond which they
knew no human being could have fled In so short a time,
they returned to the cottage and insisted on searching it.
House, byre, stable, loft were ransacked; but no deserter
did they find. Whereupon they gave up the pursuit, and
returned to their quarters.
Toward the evening of the same day, the husband opened
up the thatch and extricated the Pearsanach Mor. Now,
the goodwife did a certain amount of weaving in her spare
moments ; and
her brother-in-law was a tailor. So, between
them, they made a new suit to take the place of the fugitive's
uniform, which he alreadv had discarded. And it was while
the Pearsanach Mor sojourned at this cottage in Northern
Ireland that he learnt of his hostess that it was she who, as
a girl, had seen in the Ocean of the Spectre the extraordinary
apparition, of which he had heard tell in his
boyhood days. She declared to him that the foretellings of
the stranger, who confronted her when creeling peats on
Mingulay, had come true—she was settled happily in
Ireland, and her Pabbay companion had died of fever years
before.
As I have just mentioned, it is only about forty years
since the final part of this prophecy was witnessed in the
loss in the Cuan a' Bhochdain, in the Ocean of the Spectre,
of a fishing-boat with all hands.
The folks of the Barra Isles still affirm that the
occupants of this boat were the great-grand-children of a
family once living on Mingulay, whose unborn posterity
was associated with the accident at the time of its spectral
happening.
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