This is a rare case of an Italian Banshie.  William of Paris, in Bodin (iii. ch. vi.) tells of a stone-throwing fiend, very active in 1447.  The bogey of Bingen, a rapping ghost of 856, is duly chronicled; he also threw stones.  The dormitory of some nuns was haunted by a spectre who moaned, tramped noisily around, dragged the sisters out of bed by the feet, and even tickled them nearly to death!  This annoyance lasted for three years, so Wierus says. {132} Wodrow chronicles a similar affair at Mellantrae, in Annandale.  Thyraeus distinguishes three kinds of haunting sprites, devils, damned souls, and souls in purgatory.  Some are mites, mild and sportive; some are truculenti ferocious.  Brownies, or fauni, may act in either character, as Secutores et joculatores.  They rather aim at teasing than at inflicting harm.  They throw stones, lift beds, and make a hubbub and crash with the furniture.  Suicides, murderers, and spirits of murdered people, are all apt to haunt houses.  The sprites occasionally appear in their proper form, but just as often in disguise:  a demon, too, can appear in human shape if so disposed:  demons being of their nature deceitful and fond of travesty, as Porphyry teaches us and as Law (1680) illustrates.  Whether the spirits of the dead quite know what they are about when they take to haunting, is, in the opinion of Thyraeus, a difficult question.  Thomas Aquinas, following St. Augustine, inclines to hold that when there is an apparition of a dead man, the dead man is unconscious of the circumstance.  A spirit of one kind or another may be acting in his semblance.  Thyraeus rather fancies that the dead man is aware of what is going on.

Hauntings may be visual, auditory, or confined to the sense of touch.  Auditory effects are produced by flutterings of air, noises are caused, steps are heard, laughter, and moaning.  Lares domestici (brownies) mostly make a noise.  Apparitions may be in tactile form of men or animals, or monsters.  As for effects, some ghosts push the living and drive them along, as the Bride of Lammermoor, in Law’s Memorialls, was ‘harled through the house,’ by spirits.  The spirits of an amorous complexion seem no longer to be numerous, but are objects of interest to Thyraeus as to Increase Mather.  Thyraeus now raises the difficult question:  ’Are the sounds heard in haunted houses real, or hallucinatory?’ Omnis qui a spiritibus fit, simulatus est, specie sui fallit.  The spirits having no vocal organs, can only produce noise.  In a spiritual hurly-burly, some of the mortals present hear nothing (as we shall note in some modern examples), but may they not be prevented from hearing by the spirits?  Or again, the sounds may be hallucinatory and only some mortals may have the power of hearing them.  If there are visual, there may also be auditory hallucinations. {133} On the whole Thyraeus thinks that the sounds may be real on some occasions, when all present hear