For a haunted house, Wodrow provides us with that of Johnstone of Mellantae, in Annandale (1707).  The authority is Mr. Cowan, who had it from Mr. Murray, minister of St. Mungo’s, who got it from Mellantae himself, the worthy gentleman weeping as he described his misfortunes.  His daughter, Miss Johnstone, was milking a cow in the byre, by daylight, when she saw a tall man, almost naked, probably a tramp, who frightened her into a swoon.  The house was then ‘troubled and disturbed’ by flights of stones, and disappearance of objects.  Young Dornock, after a visit to Mellantae, came back with a story that loud knockings were heard on the beds, and sounds of pewter vessels being thrown about, though, in the morning, all were found in their places.  The ghost used also to pull the medium, Miss Johnstone, by the foot, and toss her bed-clothes about.

Next, at first hand from Mr. Short, we have a death-wraith beheld by him of his friend Mr. Scrimgeour.  The hour was five a.m. on a summer morning, and Mr. Scrimgeour expired at that time in Edinburgh.  Again, we have the affair of Mr. Blair, of St. Andrews, the probationer, and the devil, who, in return for a written compact, presented the probationer with an excellent sermon.  On the petition of Mr. Blair, the compact fell from the roof of the church.  The tale is told by Increase Mather about a French Protestant minister, and, as Increase wrote twenty years before Wodrow, we may regard Wodrow’s anecdote as a myth; for the incident is of an unusual character, and not likely to repeat itself.  We may also set aside, though vouched for by Lord Tullibardine’s butler, ’ane litle old man with a fearful ougly face,’ who appeared to the Rev. Mr. Lesly.  Being asked whence he came, he said, ‘From hell,’ and, being further interrogated as to why he came, he observed:  ’To warn the nation to repent’.  This struck Mr. Lesly as improbable on the face of it; however, he was a good deal alarmed.

Lord Orrery is well known in ghostly circles, as the evidence for a gentleman’s butler being levitated, and floating about a room in his house.  It may be less familiar that his lordship’s own ghost appeared to his sister.  She consulted Robert Boyle, F.R.S., who advised her, if Orrery appeared again, to ask him some metaphysical questions.  She did so, and ’I know these questions come from my brother,’ said the appearance.  ‘He is too curious.’  He admitted, however, that his body was ‘an aerial body,’ but declined to be explicit on other matters.  This anecdote was told by Mr. Smith, who had it from Mr. Wallace, who had it from ‘an English gentleman’.  Mr. Menzies, minister of Erskine, once beheld the wraith of a friend smoking a pipe, but the owner of the wraith did not die, or do anything remarkable.  To see a friendly wraith smoking a pipe, even if he take the liberty of doing so in one’s bedroom, is not very ill-boding.  To be sure Mr. Menzies’ own father died not long after, but the attempt to connect the wraith of a third person with that event is somewhat desperate.