Pièce 86 - Letter from James Lamont to Sir James G. Frazer

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72 Grange Loan, Edinburgh - A friend urged him to write Frazer; when a very young child he was told by his mother in Aberdeenshire that people believed in a the presence of a ghost in every graveyard of the last person buried who had to remain on duty until someone else was buried there; in 1873 in Hong Kong he came across the story of a boatman who should have given help to a drowning man but did not, saying that the ghost of the last person who drowned would do him injury if he did anything to cause his time to be prolonged; asks if there are any other similar beliefs among people so far apart from one another.