A memorably creepy ghost story is told of Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava:

One night when Lord Dufferin had accepted, in Ireland, the hospitality of a friend, he awakened suddenly, preyed upon by an indefinable restlessness. He got up, went to the window, which was lighted by the moon, and saw distinctly in the shadow below him a man bearing a large burden on his shoulder. This man was walking slowly. When he passed before the house, it became manifest that he bore a coffin; he lifted his head; his face was so repulsive that Lord Dufferin was greatly struck. His gaze followed the apparition as it drew away, and he went back to bed, where he had great difficulty in going to sleep once more.

The morning of the next day, he questioned his host, but the latter could give him no enlightenment. He knew no one corresponding to the description of the person carrying the coffin, and no burial was awaited in the village.

Some years later Lord Dufferin was appointed Ambassador to France. Determined faithfully to discharge the duties of his high position, he went, one day, to a diplomatic reception that was to be held in the Grand Hotel in Paris. His private secretary conducted him to a large lift before which there were several state officials standing respectfully in line. Lord Dufferin, passing them, bowed, and was about to step into the lift, when he gave an involuntary start. The employee who operated the cable was ugly, surly-looking, and had precisely the features of the mysterious apparition of the Irish village!

Moved by an instinctive impulse, the ambassador drew back; he retraced his steps, uttering some words of excuse, and, on the pretext that he had forgotten something, asked them to take up those who had gone on before, without waiting for him; he then went to the hotel office to make inquiries as to the person who had caused his very natural emotion. But he did not have time. At that moment a terrible crash was heard, mingled with cries of anguish. The lift, reaching a certain height, had dropped suddenly to the bottom of the shaft, crushing or mutilating those within it.

It appears that none of this is true — there was a lift accident in the Grand Hotel in 1878, but that was years before Dufferin arrived there, and the rest seems to have been made up. It’s such a striking story, though, that Dufferin himself used to relate it as a personal anecdote.

London doctor Thomas Ellerby had strong feelings about the disposal of his remains — in his will of February 1827 he threatens to haunt his doctors if they don’t follow his instructions:

I bequeath my heart to Mr. W., anatomist; my lungs to Mr. R.; and my brains to Mr. F., in order that they may preserve them from decomposition; and I declare that if these gentlemen shall fail faithfully to execute these my last wishes in this respect I will come — if it should be by any means possible — and torment them until they shall comply.

The Lancet records that “[t]he gentlemen named — eminent in their day — rightly renounced the legacies left them, and it never appeared that they were, like St. Dunstan and other medieval saints, tromented by visitations from the other world.”

A poignant little detail from my podcast research on Maurice Wilson, who in 1934 set out to climb Everest alone:

There was only one precedent in mountaineering history for such an impossible lone assault. In May of 1929 a young American climber, E.F. Farmer of New Rochelle, N.Y., had set off from Darjeeling on a suicidal attack on 28,146-foot Kangchenjunga. He disappeared into the clouds and was never seen again.

(John Cottrell, “The Madman of Everest,” Sports Illustrated, April 30, 1973.)

Lucian, why dost thou lament my death, or call me miserable that am much more happy than thyself? what misfortune is befallen me? Is it because I am not so bald, crooked, old, rotten, as thou art? What have I lost, some of your good cheer, gay clothes, music, singing, dancing, kissing, merry-meetings, thalami lubentias, &c., is that it? Is it not much better not to hunger at all than to eat: not to thirst than to drink to satisfy thirst: not to be cold than to put on clothes to drive away cold? You had more need rejoice that I am freed from diseases, agues, cares, anxieties, livor, love, covetousness, hatred, envy, malice, that I fear no more thieves, tyrants, enemies, as you do.

— Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

This stone, behind St. Peter’s Church in Heysham, Lancashire, commemorates the lives of James Jones and his two wives, Sarah and Sadie.

Which of them earned this epithet, and how, is not clear.

(Thanks, Dave.)