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record that he saw the wraith or boggart of Abbot Paslew, which 

 others in later days pretend to have seen about Whalley Abbey 

 and Pendleton Hall. This monk was not ignorant, at any rate 

 not in the sense that the peasants about him were ignorant, yet 

 he did not doubt the reality of this apparition of his former 

 ecclesiastical superior. The fact is, the Church in mediaeval 

 times, if not the actual inventor of boggart stories for its own 

 purposes, fostered the belief in boggarts, and saturated the minds 

 of the people with the idea of souls liberated from the body going 

 to and fro among the scenes with which it was familiar while 

 tabernacled in the flesh. No elaborate proof of this statement 

 is necessary. We have several venerable Lancashire churches 

 dedicated to All Hallows, or All Souls. Let us walk into one of 

 them and think over this matter of boggarts and old-world Church 

 teaching. The church so dedicated that we know best, is not in 

 East Lancashire but at Bispham, away on the cliff beyond 

 Blackpool. 



The very name of All Hallows speaks of pre-Keformation 

 times. The very name is full of the romance of religion and 

 superstition. The mind is carried back by it to the far-off time 

 when the doors of the hamlet stood wide open and in every house 

 the supper-table was spread on All Hallows Eve, with clean linen 

 cloth, lights, and the evening meal. Around the table stood 

 vacant chairs ; and on the hearth there burned a fire, carefully 

 arranged to last to dawn. For it was the Night of the Dead ; 

 and after the death-bell had been tolled, the dead Mass said, the 

 supper eaten, and the household but retired to rest, the souls of 

 the Dead would enter in and partake of the solemn feast in the 

 dwellings where they had died, or where their kin abode. Then 

 the inmates would listen, and hear strange wailings at the doors 

 of the rooms ; and then they would rise from their beds, fall 

 upon their knees, and pray that, but for this one waking night 

 of the year, those they loved might sleep in peace. Not only 

 from the little churchyard on the hillside, where the light was 

 gleaming from the open chapel door, would the Souls of the Dead 

 come ; but over the wild mosses, and marshes, and waste inland, 

 and down the lonely roads from the far-off towns, and most of 

 all, in from the washing waters of the sea beneath the cliffs 

 beyond the church. Strange phosphorescent lights were moving 

 all night to and fro upon the deep. High in the air strange 

 eerie voices were calling and crying. From land and sea, from all 

 the places where they slept, the dead were coming back through 

 All Hallows night to the homes they loved in life. The observ- 

 ance of the festival of All Hallows was esteemed of such import- 

 ance, that in the event of its falling on a Sunday, it was ordered 

 not to be postponed till the Monday, as in the case of other cele- 

 brations, but to take place on the previous Saturday, that the 



