In honor of Halloween, we're posting an excerpt from one of the horror stories in the rare book collection, The Night Hag; or, St. Swithin's Chair: A Romance, which was published in the form of a small pamphlet by J. Bailey in the early nineteenth century (the pamphlet is undated). There are only two three copies reported in WorldCat, and Special Collections has the only reported copy of this text in the United States (2014 update: there's another copy reported in the U.S. now, at the University of Pittsburgh).
He who dares sit on St. Swithin's chair…
The star of the romance is Fergus Campbell, "a captain in the Scotch service then stationed in Edinburgh, in the reign of James the Sixth." Fergus' aunt is the wealthy Lady Margaret Mucklethrift, and Fergus is second in line after his cousin to inherit all of her money and property. Thirsty for riches, Fergus decides to rob his aunt of her riches and depose his cousin as her heir. After a series of failed plots, Fergus decides to seek supernatural help.
"It was now Hallow mass E'en, and Fergus thought of the ancient spell of St. Swithin's applicable to that season, that then the Night Hag, delighting in scenes of blood and murderous deeds, has full power.
He who dares sit on St. Swithin's chair,
When the Night Hag rides the troubled air,
Questions three, if they speak the spell,
They may ask, and she must tell."
Fergus asks his three questions and finds that he will indeed gain his aunt's incredible riches, with the Night Hag's treacherous help. After stabbing his aunt to death, with the household on the alert, Fergus hides in her iron-clad strong box. Will he be discovered?
No spoilers here! Of course, there's much more to the story: an innocent man framed for murder, a pair of star-crossed lovers, and a reformed criminal with a critical decision to make. Read more about it in Special Collections!
The Scott Connection
This pamphlet purports to be "a romance, on which is founded the popular drama now performing with unbounded applause at Astley's Amphitheatre." Several plays were produced under this title in the early nineteenth century, featuring Fergus Campbell, his unfortunate aunt, and the rest of the characters in the romance. Indeed, the first of these plays was performed at Astley's Amphitheatre and ran in September and October 1820. The playbill for this production said "The Idea from which the Subject is arranged [is] taken from the Interesting Legend of St. Swithin's Chair, in Walter Scott's Popular Novel of Waverly."
The problem? The interesting legend of St. Swithin's Chair, as far as it pertains to Fergus Campbell, isn't in Waverley. The novel includes a poem entitled "St. Swithin's Chair", based on an old Scottish legend, but that's all. In his 1992 catalog of playbills and scripts based on Scott's works, H. Philip Bolton notes the difficulty in relating The Night Hag to Waverley, judging the play "doubly apocryphal."
How does this pamphlet relate to the Night Hag plays of the nineteenth century? When was it published? And, perhaps most importantly, who was its author?
At this point, we don't know. If you're a researcher in this area, come finish the story, and help us find out.
Bolton, H. Philip. Scott dramatized. London ; New York : Mansell, 1992.
As far as we know, this cuneiform tablet dates to around 2500 B.C.E., making it the oldest item held in Special Collections (it predates the next oldest item, an Egyptian scarab seal, by about 500 years).
If you guessed that the scroll represents the oldest book form in Special Collections, you were right! The scroll predated the codex (the form we usually associate with a book nowadays) by thousands of years.
This manuscript copy of De Constructione by Priscianus dates to around 1150 A.D. Although Special Collections holds manuscript fragments that are older, this is the oldest complete book in the collection. It is a work on grammar, written in Latin with passages in Greek.
Dating from approximately 1500-1100 B.C.E., this fragment from the Egyptian Book of the Dead isn’t the oldest item in Special Collections – but it is the oldest piece of writing on papyrus in Special Collections.
The current student newspaper, the 
Although the Bastille could only hold around 50 prisoners, the rumors and mystery that surrounded it caused the prison to loom large in French culture. Rebellious subjects, religious dissenters, journalists, common criminals and those who simply incurred the king’s displeasure were all confined there. No one really knew what happened in the Bastille; prisoners were forced to take an oath of secrecy, promising never to divulge anything they saw or heard while inside the walls.
In 1774, a different type of pamphlet was published: 
ns: each has two great bolts, and as many locks. … There are five ranks of chambers. The most dreadful next to the dungeons, are those in which are iron cages or dungeons. Of these there are three. These cages are formed of beams lined with strong iron plates. They are six feet by eight.
In the rest of Europe, the pamphlet gained acceptance as a true and accurate depiction of the Bastille. English editions of the pamphlet came out in 1780 and 1784, and a new translation was issued after the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The English criminologist and reformer John Howard endorsed it as “the best account of this celebrated structure ever published” and included content from the pamphlet in his survey of European penitentiaries.
