A schoolboy named Bligh, who went to Launceston Grammar School, of which the Rev. John Ruddle was headmaster, from being a lad of bright parts and no common attainments, became on a sudden moody, dejected, and melancholy.  His friends, seeing the change without being able to find the cause, attributed it to laziness, an aversion to school, or to some other motive which he was ashamed to avow.  He was led, however, to tell his brother, after some time, that in a field through which he passed to and from school, he invariably met the apparition of a woman, whom he personally knew while living, and who had been dead about eight years.  Ridicule, threats, persuasions, were alike used in vain by the family to induce him to dismiss these absurd ideas.  Finally, Mr Ruddle was sent for, and to him the boy ingenuously told the time, manner, and frequency of this appearance.  It was in a field called Higher Broomfield.  The apparition, he said, appeared dressed in female attire, met him two or three times while he passed through the field, glided hastily by him, but never spoke.  He had thus been occasionally met about two months before he took any particular notice of it; at length the appearance became more frequent, meeting him both morning and evening, but always in the same field, yet invariably moving out of the path when it came close to him.  He often spoke, but could never get any reply.  To avoid this unwelcome visitor he forsook the field, and went to school and returned from it through a lane, in which place, between the quarry pack and nursery, it always met him.  Unable to disbelieve the evidence of his own senses, or to obtain credit with any of his family, he prevailed upon Mr Ruddle to accompany him to the place.

“I arose,” says this clergyman, “the next morning, and went with him.  The field to which he led me I guessed to be about twenty acres, in an open country, and about three furlongs from any house.  We went into the field, and had not gone a third part before the spectrum in the shape of a woman, with all the circumstances he had described the day before, so far as the suddenness of its appearance and transition would permit me to discover, passed by.

“I was a little surprised at it, and though I had taken up a firm resolution to speak to it, I had not the power, nor durst I look back; yet I took care not to show any fear to my pupil and guide, and therefore, telling him I was satisfied of the truth of his statement, we walked to the end of the field and returned—­nor did the ghost meet us that time but once.

“On the 27th July, 1665, I went to the haunted field by myself, and walked the breadth of it without any encounter.  I then returned and took the other walk, and then the spectre appeared to me, much about the same place in which I saw it when the young gentleman was with me.  It appeared to move swifter than before, and seemed to be about ten feet from me on my right hand, insomuch that I had not time to speak