Seeing Ernie’s amazement, Father Dominique laughed out loud, and then explained, “I know it has become fashionable for priests of my generation not to believe in the supernatural, Heaven and Hell…In some cases to not even believe in God…But in my case I have always had an unshakeable belief in the Lord Above and the Devil Below.   So I have no trouble believing in either the tale that Benjamin Charlton and Father Francis tell in their diaries, or the ones that you have just told me.”

They talked for a moment longer, then the priest asked, “Has it occurred to you that the old hag that Tony Frankland saw in the eyes of Leonard Moffett could well have been Agnetha Chambers risen from the grave?”

“Yes it has occurred to me,” admitted Ernie.   “But if it is Aunt Aggie, how could she have returned from the grave as Leonard Moffett?   And why did it take her sixty years to return in the first place?”

“The answer is right here,” said Father Dominique.   Striding across to the reading table, he picked up the book Spells, Conjurings, Charms, and Magicks! and read out part of the passage that Ernie had already read in Benjamin Charlton’s diary: “Whenever a witch is killed by anyone other than a priest…unless her corpse is buried in pure soil, where blood of no man or woman has ever been spilt, she can revive herself…in the form of whoever’s blood has been spilt on the site….”

“So after she was buried on the side of Mount Abergowrie in 1887,” interrupted Ernie, “she could not return for sixty years until the blood of Leonard Moffett was spilt on the mountainside?”

“Exactly.   Then she was able to return as Leonard Moffett to take over his life where it had left off,” explained the priest.

“But one thing I don’t understand is, in Ben Charlton’s diary he talks of Aunt Aggie having to drag herself along the footpath because of her shattered legs, yet when ‘she’ chased me through the streets of Glen Hartwell, she could clearly run without having to drag her shattered legs?”

The priest thought for a t before admitting, “That is a bit of a mystery, but I suppose that her ghoul was somehow able to restore itself over the last century.”