Another group of short tales of terror consists of those which purport to be faithful renderings of the beliefs of simple people.  To this category belong Allan Cunningham’s Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry, which first appeared, with one exception, in the London Magazine (1821-23).  Cunningham has the tact to preserve the legends of elves, fairies, ghosts and bogles, as they were passed down from one generation to another on the lips of living beings.  Later he attempted, in a novel, Sir Michael Scott (1828), a kind of Gothic romance; but there is no trace in the Traditional Tales of the influence of the terrormongers with whose works he was familiar.  Perhaps the finest story of the collection is The Haunted Ships, in which are embodied the traditions associated with two black and decayed hulls, half immersed in the quicksands of the Solway.  Lewis would have dragged us on board ship, and would have shown us the devil in his own person.  Cunningham wisely keeps ashore, and repeats the tales that are told concerning the fiendish mirth and revelry to be heard, when, at certain seasons of the year, they arise in their former beauty, with forecastle and deck, with sail and pennon and shroud.  James Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, who was a friend of Cunningham, was steeped in the same folk-lore. The Mysterious Bride, printed among his Tales and Sketches, tells of a beautiful spirit-lady, dressed in white and green, who appears three times on St. Lawrence’s Eve to the Laird of Birkendelly.  On the morning, after the night on which she had promised to wed him, he is found, a blackened corpse, on Birky Brow. Mary Burnet is the story of a maiden who is drowned when keeping tryst with her lover.  She returns to earth, like Kilmeny, and assures her parents of her welfare.  A demon woman, whose form resembles that of Mary, haunts her lover, and entices him to evil.  Since Hogg can give to his legends a “local habitation and a name,” pointing to the very stretch of road on which the elfin lady first appeared, it seems ungracious to doubt his veracity.  The Ettrick Shepherd’s most memorable achievement, however, is his Confessions of a Fanatic (1824), a terribly impressive account of a man afflicted with religious mania, who believes himself urged into crime by a mysterious being.  The story abounds in frightful situations and weird scenes, one of the most striking being the reflection, seen at daybreak on Arthur’s Seat, of a human head and shoulders, dilated to twenty times its natural size.  Professor Saintsbury has suggested that Lockhart probably had the principal hand in this story.  “Christopher North” was another member of the Noctes confraternity who came sometimes under the spell of the unearthly.