“Solaque, culminibus ferali carmine bubo.  Saepe queri et longas in fletum ducere voces,” writes Virgil.

Pliny, in describing this bird, says, “bubo funebris et maxime abominatus”; whilst Chaucer writes:  “The owl eke that of death the bode ybringeth.”

In the Arundel family a white owl is said to be a sure indication of death.

That Shakespeare attached no little importance to the fatal crying of the bird may be gathered from the scene in Macbeth, when the murderer asks: 

“Didst thou not hear a noise?” and Lady Macbeth answers: 

“I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry”; and the scene in Richard III, where Richard interrupts a messenger of evil news with the words: 

“Out on ye, owls!  Nothing but songs of death?”

Gray speaks of “moping” owls; Chatterton exclaims, “Harke! the dethe owle loude dothe synge”; whilst Hogarth introduces the same bird in the murder scene of his Four Stages of Cruelty.

Nor is the belief in the sinister prophetic properties of the owl confined to the white races; we find it everywhere—­among the Red Indians.  West Africans, Siamese, and Aborigines of Australia.

In Cornwall, and in other corners of the country, the crowing of a cock at midnight was formerly regarded as indicating the passage of death over the house; also if a cock crew at a certain hour for two or three nights in succession, it was thought to be a sure sign of early death to some member of the household.  In Notes and Queries a correspondent remarks that crowing hens are not uncommon, that their crow is very similar to the crow of a very young cock, and must be taken as a certain presagement of some dire calamity.

It was generally held that in all haunted localities the ghosts would at once vanish—­not to appear again till the following night—­at the first crowing of the cock after midnight.  I believe there is a certain amount of truth in this—­at all events cocks, as I myself have proved, are invariably sensitive to the presence of the superphysical.

The whistler is also a very psychic bird.  Spenser, in his Faerie Queene (Book II, canto xii, st. 31), alludes to it thus:—­

     “The whistler shrill, that whoso hears doth die”;

whilst Sir Walter Scott refers to it in a similar sense in his Lady of the Lake.

The yellow-hammer was formerly the object of much persecution, since it was believed that it received three drops of the devil’s blood on its feather every May morning, and never appeared without presaging ill luck.  Parrots do not appear to be very susceptible to the influence of the Unknown, and indicate little or no dread of superphysical demonstrations.

Doves, wrens, and robins are birds of good omen, and the many superstitions regarding them are all associated with good luck.  Doves, I have found in particular, are very safe psychic barometers in haunted houses.