Macpherson declared that he had seen an apparition of a man in blue, who said, ‘I am Serjeant Davies,’ that he at first took this man for a brother of Donald Farquharson’s, that he followed the man, or phantasm, to the door, where the spectre repeated its assertions, and pointed out the spot where the bones lay.  He found them, and then went, as already shown, to Donald Farquharson.  Between the first vision and the burying, the ghost came to him naked, and this led him to inter the remains.  On the second appearance, the ghost denounced the prisoners.  Macpherson gave other evidence, not spectral, which implicated Clerk.  But, when asked what language the ghost spoke in, he answered, ’as good Gaelic as he had ever heard in Lochaber’.  ‘Pretty well,’ said his counsel, Scott’s informant, McIntosh, ‘for the ghost of an English serjeant.’  This was probably conclusive with the jury, for they acquitted the prisoners, in the face of the other incriminating evidence.  This was illogical.  Modern students of ghosts, of course, would not have been staggered by the ghost’s command of Gaelic:  they would explain it as a convenient hallucinatory impression made by the ghost on the mind of the ‘percipient’.  The old theologians would have declared that a good spirit took Davies’s form, and talked in the tongue best known to Macpherson.  Scott’s remark is, that McIntosh’s was ’no sound jest, for there was nothing more ridiculous in a ghost speaking a language which he did not understand when in the body, than there was in his appearing at all’.  But jurymen are not logicians.  Macpherson added that he told his tale to none of the people with him in the sheiling, but that Isobel McHardie assured him she ’saw such a vision’.  Isobel, in whose service Macpherson had been, deponed that, while she lay at one end of the sheiling and Macpherson at the other, ’she saw something naked come in at the door, which frighted her so much that she drew the clothes over her head’.  Next day she asked Macpherson what it was, and he replied ‘she might be easy, for that it would not trouble them any more’.

The rest of the evidence went very strongly against the accused, but the jury unanimously found them ‘Not Guilty’.

Scott conjectures that Macpherson knew of the murder (as indeed he had good reason, if his non-spectral evidence is true), but that he invented the ghost, whose commands must be obeyed, that he might escape the prejudice entertained by the Celtic race against citizens who do their duty.  Davies, poor fellow, was a civil good-humoured man, and dealt leniently (as evidence showed) with Highlanders who wore the tartan.  Their national costume was abolished, as we all know, by English law, after the plaid had liberally displayed itself, six miles south of Derby, in 1745.