Note 562 — Chapter V · THE DEMONOLOGY OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES AND BOGEYS.

Mr F. M. Cornford draws my attention to a similar and even cruder English superstition. Sir Kenelm Digby, in his Observations on the Religio Medici (5th ed. p. 128), maintains as against Sir Thomas Browne who says that apparitions are devils, that those that appear in cemeteries and charnel-houses are the souls of the dead which have ‘a byas and a languishing’ towards their bodies, and that the body of a murdered man bleeds when the murderer approaches (‘which is frequently seen in England’) because the soul, desiring revenge, and being unable to speak, ‘must endeavour to cause a motion in the subtilest or most fluid parts (and consequently the most moveable ones) of it. This can be nothing but the blood, which then being violently moved, must needs gush out at those places where it findeth issues.’