t could be coincidence at that; the motif is not that uncommon in tradition and (particularly, perhaps) in ghost fiction.  Professor Child was less than impressed by The Suffolk Miracle, and included it in his canon (as #272) only because it was the sole British representative in ballad form of the widespread Spectre Bridegroom story, in which the intention of the mysterious horseman is generally to take his promised bride down with him into the grave.  In some examples, he succeeds; in some she is saved, or escapes unaided, but often dies soon after.  Sometimes torn fragments of her dress, or a handkerchief, are subsequently found buried with the corpse.

Child describes a Cornish folktale which tells essentially the same story, but in which the girl performs a summoning ritual to bring her lover, three years abroad, to her; his spirit appears, but looking so angry (he is not at that point dead) that she shrieks and breaks the spell.  Later, he is shipwrecked and is saved; he expresses a wish to marry her before he dies, but there is no time.  The story then proceeds as in the ballad, until she realises that he is dead, and calls out for help; she is saved by a blacksmith, and the following day a piece of her dress is found on the grave.  She dies soon after, and it subsequently emerges that, at the time of the aborted conjuration, the young man had raved as if mad, and then lain for hours in a deathlike trance; on regaining consciousness, he had "declared that if he ever married the woman who had cast the spell, he would make her suffer for drawing his soul out of his body."

Child also refers to a French ballad noted in 1879, Les Deux Fiancés, which is almost identical to the English one, though more coherent as a narrative.  By comparison with some of the many Slavic and German analogues, he concludes, "...we may quite reasonably suppose that the headache in The Suffolk Miracle, utterly absurd to all appearances, was in fact occasioned by a spell which has dropped away from the Suffolk story, but is retained" [in a corrupted form, as the spell the girl recites there is only the familiar Hallowe'en charm which young girls used to catch a glimpse of the face of the man who would be their true-love] "in the Cornish."

Malcolm