Second-sight, a gift of prophetic vision, was long supposed in the Scottish Highlands and elsewhere to belong to particular persons. The most common form it took was to see the wraith, fetch, or shadowy second self of some person soon to die, often wrapped in a shroud, or attended with some other of the special circumstances of death or burial.

Of course the prophetic character may easily enough have been a mere additional assumption, the time of occurrence of distant events being apt to be confused with the time of hearing of them. In the popular mind everywhere the mystery of death, and the instinctive human longing to believe in a continuity of conscious spiritual life and sympathy, have generated a belief in the probability of an appearance coinciding with, or soon succeeding, the death of an individual; and from this the step is easy to a belief in the possibility of similar appearances before death, in order to foreshadow or forewarn.