The black ribbon

Chambers gives the Beresford family legend under the death of Sir Tristram Beresford in 1701. His wife and the young Earl of Tyrone had promised each other that whoever died first would come back to tell the other of a world to come. The night after the earl died she saw him at her bedside, and he foretold her future and touched her wrist with an icy finger that left a black, shrunken mark, which she hid under a black ribbon for the rest of her life. She died in her forty-seventh year as he had said, and only then was the ribbon removed. Chambers notes similar tales of a mark left by a ghost’s touch from the Highlands and from Germany.