FRAZER  OF  TIREE  ON  THE  SECOND-SIGHT.

“Deuterosophia   (Second-Knowledge),  or  A Brief Discourse

concerning Second-Sight, commonly so-called, by the Rev. John Frazer, deceased, late minister of Tiree and Coll, and Dean of the Isles.”—“Pub. by Mr Andw. Symson, Edin.: 1707.”

To   Rt. Hon.   Universally Learned   and   My   very   Singular

Good Lord Geo., E. of Cromartie, Viscount of Tarbat, Lord M‘Leod and Castlehaven, etc.

“…The first instance is by a servant of my own, who had the trust of my barn, and nightly lay in the same. One day he told me he would not any longer lye there, because nightly he had seen a dead corpse in his winding sheet straighted beside him, particularly at the south side of the barn. About an half-year thereafter a young man, that had formerly been my servant, dangerously sick and expecting death, would needs be carried near my house, and shortly thereafter he died, and was laid up a night before he was buried in the same individual barn and place that was foretold, and immediately the servant that foretold this and came to me and minded me of the prediction, which was clearly out of my mind until he spoke of it.

“The second instance is after this manner. I was resolved to pay a visit to an English gentleman, Sir William Sacheverill, who had a commission from the English Court of Admirality to give his best tryall to find out gold or money, or any other thing of note, in one of the ships of the Spanish Armada that was blown up in the Bay of Topper-Mory, in the Sound of Mull. And having condescended upon the number of men that were to go with me, one of the number was a handsome boy that waited upon my own person, and, about an hour before I made sail, a woman, that was also one of my own servants, spoke to one of the seamen and bade him dissuade me to take that boy along with me, or, if I did, I should not bring him back alive. The seaman answered he had not confidence to tell me such unwarrantable trifles. I took my voyage and sailed the length of Topper-Mory, and having stayed two or three nights with a Literat and Ingenious Gentleman, who himself had collected many observations of the Second-Sight in the Isle of Man, and compared his notes and mine together, in the end I took leave of him. In the meantime the boy grew sick of a vehement bloody flux,¹ the winds turned so cross I could neither sail nor row. The boy died with me the eleventh night from his decumbiture,² and the seaman to whom it was foretold related the whole story when he saw it verified. I carried the boy’s corpse aboard with me, and after my arrival and his burial I called suddenly for the woman and asked at her what warrand she had to foretell the boy’s death. She said she had no other warrand but that she saw two days before I took my voyage the boy walking with me in the fields, sewed up in his winding sheets from top to toe, and that she had never seen this in others but that they shortly thereafter died, and therefore concluded that he would die too, and that shortly.”

¹ dysentery    ² the time a patient is in his sick bed

Extract from Highland Second-Sight edited by Norman MacRae, published in Dingwall by George Souter in 1908.