A Galashiels Ghost.
A case occurred in the year 1841, in the busy little manufacturing town of Galashiels. In Channel Street there, a one-storey house accommodated two families, while the garret above was occupied as a weaving shop. One of the families, Irish we believe, did not bear the best of characters, and their next neighbours had been in the habit of passing censorious remaks to their discredit. Sometimes in the course of the winter it was bruited abroad that the house was haunted.
Strange noises were heard overhead in the empty weaving shop; light articles of furniture in one of the tenements jumped friskingly hither and thither; plates and dishes performed pirouettes, whirling about as if instinct with life or galvanism, and the old weaver and his wife were terrified out of their wits by having things flung at their heads by invisible hands. The noises in the weaving shop were loud enough to be heard quite distinctly in the street, and for many successive nights crowds gathered round the door to listen, marvel, and speculate.
The Channel Street ghost was the sole current talk of the town, and all the natural philosophers in the place set their brains a-steep and their wits to work to find out the cause of the bewitchment, for such it seemed. One wiseacre suggested one theory, and another another, all more or less plausible, but all equally insufficient to account for some of the phenomena. Three gentlemen, sceptical as to there being any supernatural agency in the case, went and volunteered to sit all night in the dark among the looms in the weaving shop, confident that they would thereby unravel the mystery.
The fact of their being thus on the watch, however, having oozed out prematurely, instead of being kept a profound secret, the spirits made no demonstration whatever that night, and the trio got their trouble for their pains, and came away at daylight next morning, feeling rather foolish than otherwise, after having spent six or eight hours in weary silence.
The noises were recommenced on the following night, when no watch was set, and as there appeared to be no end of them, and no means of relief, the annoyed family determined to ‘pack up their all and begone’ to some less uncanny domicile, which they accordingly did. Then, and not till then, did the ghost cease its gambols.
A close examination of the premises subsequently revealed the fact that there was a hole in one of the fir deals composing the loft, made by a knot having fallen out of the unseasoned wood, and that a string had been passed through it and fastened to the treadles above, so that they could be set to work whenever the people below had a mind. The spasmodic movements of the furniture had been caused, it was suspected, by a mischievous young woman, who had managed, by sleight of hand, to bring them about when people’s backs were turned, or when their attention was purposely diverted.
Besides, a good deal could be rationally accounted for as the effect of nervousness, and, to no small extent, of excited and inflamed imagination. The affair certainly furnished material for more than the proverbial nine days’ wonder; but, after the forced evacuation of the couple of poor rooms by the honest weaver and his nervous wife, it speedily gave place to another popular topic of gossip and town’s talk, and was relegated to the misty realm of traditional folk-lore.
Border Advertiser, 3rd January 1883.