The Book of Dreams and Ghosts

This encounter was after Davies left his men, before meeting the patrol, it being his intention to cross the hill and try for a shot at a stag. The sergeant never rejoined his men or met the patrol! He vanished as if the fairies had taken him. His captain searched the hill with a band of men four days after the disappearance, but to no avail. Various rumours ran about the country, among others a clatter that Davies had been killed by Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald. But the body was undiscovered. In June, one Alexander Macpherson came to Donald Farquharson, son of the man with whom Davies had been used to lodge. Macpherson (who was living in a sheiling or summer hut of shepherds on the hills) said that he "was greatly troubled by the ghost of Sergeant Davies, who insisted that he should bury his bones, and that, he having declined to bury them, the ghost insisted that he should apply to Donald Farquharson". Farquharson "could not believe this," till Macpherson invited him to come and see the bones. Then Farquharson went with the other, "as he thought it might possibly be true, and if it was, he did not know but the apparition might trouble himself". The bones were found in a peat moss, about half a mile from the road taken by the patrols. There, too, lay the poor sergeant's mouse- coloured hair, with rags of his blue cloth and his brogues, without the silver buckles, and there did Farquharson and Macpherson bury them all.