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Another visitor, Angus MacAlister Ban, whose grandson told the tale, had more experience of the bocan's reality. "Something seized his two big toes, and he could not get free any more than if he had been caught by the smith's tongs. It was the bocan, but he did nothing more to him."
It is also told of a farmer, named Callum Mohr MacIntosh, near Loch Traig, in Lochaber, that he had a fight with a Bocan, and in the fight he lost a charmed handkerchief. When he went back to get it again, he found the Bocan rubbing the handkerchief hard on a flat stone, and the Bocan said, "It is well for you that you are back, for if I had rubbed a hole in this you were a dead man."
So the two went together to fetch the butter, but it was dirtied just as usual. Things were worse during the night and they could get no sleep for the stones and clods that came flying about the house. "The bocan was throwing things out of the walls, and they would hear them rattling at the head of Donald's bed."
It was on the hill that Donald first met with the bocan, but he soon came to closer quarters, and haunted the house in a most annoying fashion.
The words, however, were hardly out of her mouth when the bocan answered her with, "Didn't you get enough of him before, you grey tether?" Another account says that at this last visit of the bocan, he was saying that various other spirits were along with him.
It will be observed that the symptoms are always of the same type, whatever the date or country. The first is Gaelic, of last century. It is fully a hundred years ago since there died in Lochaber a man named Donald Ban, sometimes called "the son of Angus," but more frequently known as Donald Ban of the Bocan.
Donald, whether naturally or by reason of his ghostly visitant, was a religious man, and commemorated his troubles in some verses which bear the name of "The Hymn of Donald Ban of the Bocan". In these he speaks of the common belief that he had done something to deserve all this annoyance, and makes mention of the "stones and clods" which flew about his house in the night time.
Donald was taking his dirk with him as he went out, but the bocan said, "leave your dirk inside, Donald, and your knife as well". Donald then went outside, and the bocan led him on through rivers and a birch-wood for about three miles, till they came to the river Fert. There the bocan pointed out to Donald a hole in which he had hidden some plough-irons while he was alive.
Donald's wife said to her husband: "I should think that if they were along with him they would speak to us"; but the bocan answered, "They are no more able to speak than the sole of your foot". He then summoned Donald outside as above. "I will come," said Donald, "and thanks be to the Good Being that you have asked me."
"Not just now," said Donald. "Put out that long grey tether, the MacGregor wife," said he. "I don't think I'll do that tonight," said Donald. "Come out yourself, then," said the bocan, "and leave your bonnet." The good-wife, thinking that the bocan was outside and would not hear her, whispered in Donald's ear as he was rising, "Won't you ask him when the Prince will come?"
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