Guilty’.  Lofthouse, his wife, and a third person swore, however, that the dead woman was found buried in her clothes by the pond side, and on the prisoner’s confession being read, he was found guilty, and hanged in chains.  Probably he was guilty, but Aubrey’s dates are confused, and we are not even sure whether there were two ponds, and two quickset hedges, or only one of each.  Lofthouse may have seen a stranger, dressed like his sister-in-law, this may have made him reflect on Barwick’s tale about taking her to Selby; he visited that town, detected Barwick’s falsehood, and the terror of that discovery made Barwick confess.

Surtees, in his History of Durham, published another tale, which Scott’s memory did not retain.  In 1630, a girl named Anne Walker was about to have a child by a kinsman, also a Walker, for whom she kept house.  Walker took her to Dame Care, in Chester le Street, whence he and Mark Sharp removed her one evening late in November.  Fourteen days afterwards, late at night, Graime, a fuller, who lived six miles from Walker’s village, Lumley, saw a woman, dishevelled, blood-stained, and with five wounds in her head, standing in a room in his mill.  She said she was Anne Walker, that Mark Sharp had slain her with a collier’s pick, and thrown her body into a coal-pit, hiding the pick under the bank.  After several visitations, Graime went with his legend to a magistrate, the body and pick-axe were discovered, Walker and Sharp were arrested, and tried at Durham, in August, 1631.  Sharp’s boots, all bloody, were found where the ghost said he had concealed them ‘in a stream’; how they remained bloody, if in water, is hard to explain.  Against Walker there was no direct evidence.  The prisoners, the judge summing up against them, were found guilty and hanged, protesting their innocence.

It is suggested that Graime himself was the murderer, else, how did he know so much about it?  But Walker and Sharp were seen last with the woman, and the respectable Walker was not without a motive, while, at this distance, we can conjecture no motive in the case of Graime. {262} Cockburn’s Voyage up the Mediterranean is the authority (ii. 35) for a very odd trial in the Court of King’s Bench, London.  The logs of three ships, under Captains Barnaby, Bristow and Brown, were put in to prove that, on Friday, 15th May, 1687, these men, with many others, were shooting rabbits on Stromboli:  that when beaters and all were collected, about a quarter to four, they all saw a man in grey, and a man in black run towards them, the one in grey leading, that Barnaby exclaimed, ‘The foremost is old Booty, my next door neighbour,’ that the figures vanished into the flames of the volcano.  This occurrence, by Barnaby’s desire, they noted in their journals.  They were all making merry, on October 6, 1687, at Gravesend, when Mrs. Barnaby remarked to her husband:  ‘My dear, old Booty is dead!’ The captain replied:  ‘We all saw him run into hell’.  Mrs. Booty, hearing of this remark, sued Barnaby for libel, putting her damages at 1000 pounds.  The case came on, the clothes of old Booty were shown in court:  the date and hour of his death were stated, and corresponded, within two minutes, to the moment when the mariners beheld the apparition in Stromboli, ‘so the widow lost her cause’.  A mediaeval legend has been revived in this example.