Lang Andrew
Cock Lane and Common-Sense
We now turn to the account by Sleidan, in Wierus. The provost’s wife had left directions for a cheap funeral in the Franciscan Church. This economy irritated the Fathers, who only got six pieces of gold, ‘having expected much greater plunder’. ‘Colimannus’ (Colimant), an exorcist named in the process, was the ringleader. They stationed a lad in the roof of the church, who rapped with a piece of wood, and made a great noise ‘when they mumbled their prayers at night’. St. Mesmin appealed to the king, the Fathers were imprisoned, and the youth was kept in Fumée’s house, and plied with questions. He confessed the trick, and the friars were punished. Of all this confession, and of the mode of imposture, nothing is said in the legal process. From the whole affair came a popular saying, c’est l’esprit d’Orléans, when any fable was told. Buchanan talks of cauta parum pietas in fraude paranda.
The evidence, it may be seen, is not very coherent, and the Franciscans may have been the deceived, not the deceivers. 83 Wierus himself admits that he often heard a brownie in his father’s house, which frightened him not a little, and Georgius Pictorius avers that a noisy spirit haunted his uncle’s house for thirty years, a very protracted practical joke, if it was a practical joke. 84 This was a stone-throwing demon.
A large book might easily be filled with old stories of mysterious flights of stones, and volatile chairs and tables. The ancient mystics of the Levant were acquainted with the phenomena, as Iamblichus shows. The Eskimo knew them well. Glanvill is rich in examples, the objects flying about in presence of a solitary spectator, who has called at a ‘haunted house,’ and sometimes the events accompany the presence of a single individual, who may, or may not be a convulsionary or epileptic. Sometimes they befall where no individual is suspected of constitutional electricity or of imposture.
We may select a laughable example from a rare tract. ‘An authentic, candid, and circumstantial narrative of the astonishing transactions at Stockwell, in the county of Surrey, on Monday and Tuesday, the 6th and 7th of January, 1772. Published with the consent and approbation of the family and other parties concerned, to authenticate which, the original copy is signed by them. London, 1772, printed for J. Marks, bookseller, in St. Martin’s Lane.’
The dramatis personæ are old Mrs. Golding, of Stockwell parish, ‘a gentlewoman of unblemished honour and character’; Mrs. Pain, her niece, a farmer’s wife, ‘respected in the parish’; Mary Martin, her servant, previously with Mrs. Golding; Richard Fowler, a labourer, living opposite Mrs. Pain; Sarah Fowler his wife – all these sign the document, – and Ann Robinson, Mrs. Golding’s maid, just entered on her service. Ann does not sign.
The trouble began at ten a.m. on January 6, when Mrs. Golding heard a great smash of crockery, an event ‘most incident to maids’. The lady went into the kitchen, when plates began to fall from the dresser ‘while she was there and nobody near them’. Then a clock tumbled down, so did a lantern, a pan of salt beef cracked, and a carpenter, Rowlidge, suggested that a recent addition of a room above had shaken the foundation of the house. Mrs. Golding rushed into the house of Mr. Gresham, her next neighbour, and fainted. Meanwhile Ann Robinson was ‘mistress of herself, though china fall,’ and seemed in no hurry to leave the threatened dwelling. The niece of Mrs. Golding, Mrs. Pain, was sent for to Mr. Gresham’s, Mrs. Golding was bled, when, lo, ‘the blood sprang out of the basin upon the floor, and the basin broke to pieces!’ A bottle of rum, of sympathetic character, also burst. Many of Mrs. Golding’s more fragile effects had been carried into Mr. Gresham’s: the glasses and china first danced, and then fell off the side-board and broke. Mrs. Golding, ‘her mind one confused chaos,’ next sought refuge at Mr. Mayling’s for three-quarters of an hour. Here nothing unusual occurred, but, at Mr. Gresham’s (where Ann Robinson was packing the remains of her mistress’s portable property) a ‘mahogany waiter,’ a quadrille box, a jar of pickles and a pot of raspberry jam shared the common doom. ‘Their end was pieces.’ Mrs. Pain now hospitably conveyed her aunt to her house at Rush Common, ‘hoping all was over’. This was about two in the afternoon.
At eight in the evening, the whole row of pewter dishes, bar one, fell from a shelf, rolled about a little, and ‘as soon as they were quiet, turned upside down; they were then put upon the dresser, and went through the same a second time’. Then of two eggs, one ‘flew off, crossed the kitchen, struck a cat on the head, and then burst in pieces’. A pestle and a mortar presently ‘jumped six feet from the floor’. The glass and crockery were now put on the floor, ‘he that is down need fear no fall,’ but the objects began to dance, and tumble about, and then broke to pieces. A china bowl jumped eight feet but was not broken. However it tried again, and succeeded. Candlesticks, tea-kettles, a tumbler of rum and water, two hams, and a flitch of bacon joined in the corroboree. ‘Most of the genteel families around were continually sending to inquire after them, and whether all was over or not.’ All this while, Ann was ‘walking backwards and forwards’, nor could they get her to sit down, except for half an hour, at prayers, ‘then all was quiet’. She remarked, with stoicism, ‘these things could not be helped’. Fowler came in at ten, but fled in a fright at one in the morning. By five, Mrs. Golding summoned Mrs. Pain, who had gone to bed, ‘all the tables, chairs, drawers, etc., were tumbling about’.
They rushed across to Fowler’s where, as soon as Ann arrived, the old game went on. Fowler, therefore, like the landlord in the poem, ‘did plainly say as how he wished they’d go away,’ at the same time asking Mrs. Golding ‘whether or not, she had been guilty of some atrocious crime, for which providence was determined to pursue her on this side the grave,’ and to break crockery till death put an end to the stupendous Nemesis. ‘Having hitherto been esteemed a most deserving person,’ Mrs. Golding replied, with some natural warmth, that ‘her conscience was quite clear, and she could as well wait the will of providence in her own house as in any other place,’ she and the maid went to her abode, and there everything that had previously escaped was broken. ‘A nine-gallon cask of beer that was in the cellar, the door being open and nobody near it, turned upside down’; ‘a pail of water boiled like a pot’. So Mrs. Golding discharged Miss Ann Robinson and that is all.
At Mrs. Golding’s they took up three, and at Mrs. Pain’s two pails of the fragments that were left. The signatures follow, appended on January 11.
The tale has a sequel. In 1817 an old Mr. Braidley, who loved his joke, told Hone that he knew Ann, and that she confessed to having done the tricks by aid of horse-hairs, wires and other simple appliances. We have not Mr. Braidley’s attested statement, but Ann’s character as a Medium is under a cloud. Have all other Mediums secret wires? (Every-day Book, i. 62.)
Ann Robinson, we have seen, was a tranquil and philosophical maiden. Not so was another person who was equally active, ninety years earlier.
Bovet, in his Pandæmonium (1684), gives an account of the Demon of Spraiton, in 1682. His authorities were ‘J. G., Esquire,’ a near neighbour to the place, the Rector of Barnstaple, and other witnesses. The ‘medium’ was a young servant man, appropriately named Francis Fey, and employed in the household of Sir Philip Furze. Now, this young man was subject to ‘a kind of trance, or extatick fit,’ and ‘part of his body was, occasionally, somewhat benumbed and seemingly deader than the other’. The nature of Fey’s case, physically, is clear. He was a convulsionary, and his head would be found wedged into tight places whence it could hardly be extracted. From such a person the long and highly laughable tale of ghosts (a male ghost and a jealous female ghost) which he told does not much win our acceptance. True, Mrs. Thomasin Gidley, Anne Langdon, and a little child also saw the ghost in various forms. But this was probably mere fancy, or the hallucinations of Fey were infectious. But objects flew about in the young man’s presence. ‘One of his shoe-strings was observed (without the assistance of any hand) to come of its own accord out of his shoe and fling itself to the other side of the room; the other was crawling after it (!) but a maid espying that, with her hand drew it out, and it clasp’d and curl’d about her hand like a living eel or serpent. A barrel of salt of considerable quantity hath been observed to march from room to room without any human assistance,’ and so forth. 85
It is hardly necessary to add more modern instances. The ‘electric girl’ Angélique Cottin, who was a rival of Ann Robinson, had her powers well enough attested to arouse the curiosity of Arago. But, when brought from the country to Paris, her power, or her artifice, failed.
It is rather curious that tales of volatile furniture are by no means very common in trials for witchcraft. The popular belief was, and probably still is, that a witch or warlock could throw a spell over an enemy so that his pots, and pans, tables and chairs, would skip around. The disturbances of this variety, in the presbytery at Cideville, in Seine Inférieure (1850), came under the eye of the law, because a certain shepherd injudiciously boasted that he had caused them by his magic art. 86 The curé, who was the victim, took him at his word, and the shepherd swain lost his situation. He then brought an action for defamation of character, but was non-suited, as it was proved that he had been the fanfaron of his own vices. In Froissart’s amusing story of Orthon, that noisy sprite was hounded on by a priest. At Tedworth, the owner of the drum was ‘wanted’ on a charge of sorcery as the cause of the phenomena. The Wesleys suspected that their house was bewitched. But examples in witch trials are not usual. Mr. Graham Dalyell, however, gives one case, ‘the firlote rynning about with the stuff popling,’ on the floor of a barn, and one where ‘the sive and the wecht dancit throw the hous’. 87
A clasped knife opened in the pocket of Christina Shaw, and her glove falling, it was lifted by a hand invisible to several persons present. One is reminded of the nursery rhyme, – ‘the dish it ran after the spoon’. In the presence of Home, even a bookcase is said to have forgotten itself, and committed the most deplorable excesses. In the article of Mr. Myers, already cited, we find a table which jumps by the bedside of a dying man. 88 A handbag of Miss Power’s flies from an arm-chair, and hides under a table; raps are heard; all this when Miss Power is alone. Mr. H. W. Gore Graham sees a table move about. A heavy table of Mr. G. A. Armstrong’s rises high in the air. A tea-table ‘runs after’ Professor Alexander, and ‘attempts to hem me in,’ this was at Rio de Janeiro, in the Davis family, where raps ‘ranged from hardly perceptible ticks up to resounding blows, such as might be struck by a wooden mallet’. A Mr. H. falls into convulsions, during which all sorts of things fly about. All these stories closely correspond to the tales in Increase Mather’s Remarkable Providences in New England, in which the phenomena sometimes occur in the presence of an epileptic and convulsed boy, about 1680. To take one classic French case, Segrais declares that a M. Patris was lodged in the Château d’Egmont. At dinner-time, he went into the room of a friend, whom he found lost in the utmost astonishment. A huge book, Cardan’s De Subtilitate, had flown at him across the room, and the leaves had turned, under invisible fingers! There are plenty of bogles in that book. M. Patris laughed at this tale, and went into the gallery, when a large chair, so heavy that two men could scarcely lift it, shook itself and came at him. He remonstrated, and the chair returned to its usual position. ‘This made a deep impression on M. Patris, and contributed in no slight degree to make him a converted character’ —à le faire devenir devot. 89
Tales like this, with that odd uniformity of tone and detail which makes them curious, might be collected from old literature to any extent. Thus, among the sounds usually called ‘rappings,’ Mr. Crookes mentions, as matter within his own experience, ‘a cracking like that heard when a frictional machine is at work’. Now, as may be read in Southey’s Life of Wesley and in Clarke’s Memoirs of the Wesleys, this was the very noise which usually heralded the arrival of ‘Jeffrey,’ as they called the Epworth ‘spirit’. 90 It has been alleged that the charming and ill-fated Hetty Wesley caused the disturbances. If so (and Dr. Salmon, who supports this thesis, does not even hazard a guess as to the modus operandi), Hetty must have been familiar with almost the whole extent of psychical literature, for she scarcely left a single phenomenon unrepresented. It does not appear that she supplied visible ‘hands’. We have seen Glanvill lay stress on the apparition of a hand. In the case of the devil of Glenluce, ‘there appeared a naked hand, and an arm from the elbow down, beating upon the floor till the house did shake again’. 91 At Rerrick, in 1695, ‘it knocked upon the chests and boards, as people do at a door’. ‘And as I was at prayer,’ says the Rev. Alexander Telfair, ‘leaning on the side of a bed, I felt something thrusting my arm up, and casting my eyes thitherward, perceived a little white hand, and an arm from the elbow down, but it vanished presently.’ 92 The hands viewed, grasped, and examined by Home’s clientèle, hands which melted away in their clutch, are innumerable, and the phenomenon, with the ‘cold breeze,’ is among the most common in modern narratives.
Our only conclusion is that the psychological conditions which begat the ancient narratives produce the new legends. These surprise us by the apparent good faith in marvel and myth of many otherwise credible narrators, and by the coincidence, accidental or designed, with old stories not generally familiar to the modern public. Do impostors and credulous persons deliberately ‘get up’ the subject in rare old books? Is there a method of imposture handed down by one generation of bad little girls to another? Is there such a thing as persistent identity of hallucination among the sane? This was Coleridge’s theory, but it is not without difficulties. These questions are the present results of Comparative Psychological Research.
HAUNTED HOUSES
Reginald Scot on Protestant expulsion of Ghosts. His boast premature. Savage hauntings. Red Indian example. Classical cases. Petrus Thyræus on Haunted Houses. His examples from patristic literature. Three species of haunting spirits. Demons in disguises. Hallucinations, visual, auditory, and tactile. Are the sounds in Haunted Houses real or hallucinatory? All present do not always hear them. Interments in houses to stop hauntings. Modern example. The Restoration and Scepticism. Exceptional position of Dr. Johnson. Frequency of Haunted Houses in modern Folklore. Researches of the S. P. R. Failure of the Society to see Ghosts. Uncertain behaviour of Ghosts. The Society need a ‘seer’ or ‘sensitive’comrade. The ‘type’ or normal kind of Haunted Houses. Some natural explanations. Historical continuity of type. Case of Sir Walter Scott. A haunted curacy. Modern instances. Miss Morton’s case: a dumb ghost. Ghost, as is believed, of a man of letters. Mr. Harry’s ghost raises his mosquito curtains. Columns of light. Mr. Podmore’s theory. Hallucinations begotten by natural causes are ‘telepathically’ transferred, with variations, to strangers at a distance. Example of this process. Incredulity of Mr. Myers. The spontaneous phenomena reproduced at ‘séances’. A ghost who followed a young lady. Singular experience of the writer in Haunted Houses. Experience negative. Theory of ‘dreams of the dead’. Difficulties of this theory; physical force exerted in dreams. Theory of Mr. James Sully. His unscientific method and carelessness as to evidence. Reflections.
Reginald Scot, the humane author who tried, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, 1584 (xv. 39), to laugh witch trials away, has a triumphant passage on the decline of superstition. ‘Where are the soules that swarmed in time past? where are the spirits? who heareth their noises? who seeth their visions?’ He decides that the spirits who haunt places and houses, may have gone to Italy, because masses are dear in England. Scot, as an ardent Protestant, conceived that haunted houses were ‘a lewd invention,’ encouraged, if not originated, by the priests, in support of the doctrine of purgatory. As a matter of fact the belief in ‘haunting,’ dates from times of savagery, when we may say that every bush has its bogle. The Church had nothing to do with the rise of the belief, though, early in the Reformation, some ‘psychical phenomena’ were claimed as experimental proofs of the existence of purgatory. Reginald Scot decidedly made his Protestant boast too soon. After 300 years of ‘the Trewth,’ as Knox called it, the haunted houses are as much part of the popular creed as ever. Houses stand empty, and are said to be ‘haunted’. Here not the fact of haunting, but only the existence of the superstition is attested. Thus a house in Berkeley Square was long unoccupied, for reasons perfectly commonplace and intelligible. But the fact that it had no tenants needed to be explained, and was explained by a myth, – there were ghosts in the house! On the other hand, if Reginald Scot asked today, ‘Who heareth the noises, who seeth the visions?’ we could answer, ‘Protestant clergymen, officers in the army, ladies, land-agents, solicitors, representatives of all classes, except the Haunted House Committee of the Psychical Society’.
Before examining the researches and the results of this learned body, we may glance at some earlier industry of investigators. The common savage beliefs are too well known to need recapitulation, and have been treated by Mr. Tylor in his chapter on ‘Animism,’ 93 and by Mr. Herbert Spencer in Principles of Psychology. The points of difference between these authors need not detain us here. As a rule the spirits which haunt the bush, or the forest, are but vaguely conceived of by the Australian blacks, or Red Men: they may be ghosts of the dead, or they may be casual spirits unattached. An example analogous to European superstition is given by John Tanner in his Narrative of a Captivity among the Red Indians, 1830. In this case one man had slain his brother, or, at least, a man of his own Totem, and was himself put to death by the kindred. The spectres of both haunted a place which the Indians shunned, but Tanner (whose Totem was the same as that of the dead) passed a night on the scene. His dreams, if not his waking moments, for his account is indistinct, were disturbed by the ghosts. It is impossible to ascertain how far this particular superstition was coloured by European influences. 94
Over classical tales we need not linger. Pliny, Plutarch, Suetonius, St. Augustine, Lucian, Plautus (in the Mostellaria), describe, with more or less of seriousness, the apparitions and noises which haunted houses, public baths, and other places. Occasionally a slain man’s phantom was anxious that his body should be buried, and the reported phenomena were akin to those in modern popular legends. Sometimes, in the middle ages, and later, the law took cognisance of haunted houses, when the tenant wished to break his lease. A collection of authorities is given elsewhere, in Ghosts before the Law. It is to be noticed that Bouchel, in his Bibliothèque du Droit Français, chiefly cites classical, not modern, instances.
Among the most careful and exhaustive post-mediæval writers on haunted houses we must cite Petrus Thyræus of the Society of Jesus, Doctor in Theology. His work, published at Cologne in 1598, is a quarto of 352 pages, entitled, ‘Loca Infesta; That is, Concerning Places Haunted by Mischievous Spirits of Demons and of the Dead. Thereto is added a Tract on Nocturnal Disturbances, which are wont to bode the deaths of Men.’ Thyræus begins, ‘That certain places are haunted by spectres and spirits, is no matter of doubt,’ wherein a modern reader cannot confidently follow him.
When it comes to establishing his position Thyræus most provokingly says, ‘we omit cases which are recent and of daily occurrence,’ such as he heard narrated, during his travels, in ‘a certain haunted castle’. A modern inquirer naturally prefers recent examples, which may be inquired into, but the old scholars reposed more confidence in what was written by respected authors, the more ancient the more authoritative. However Thyræus relies on the anthropological test of evidence, and thinks that his belief is confirmed by the coincident reports of hauntings, ‘variis distinctissimisque locis et temporibus,’ in the most various times and places. There is something to be said for this view, and the identity of the alleged phenomena, in all lands and ages, does raise a presumption in favour of some kind of abnormal occurrences, or of a common species of hallucinations. Like most of the old authors Thyræus quotes Augustine’s tale of a haunted house, and an exorcism in De Civitate Dei (lib. xxii. ch. viii.). St. Gregory has also a story of one Paschasius, a deacon, who haunted some baths, and was seen by a bishop. 95 There is a ghost who rode horses, and frightened the religious in the Life of Gregory by Joannes Diaconus (iv. 89). In the Life of Theodorus one Georgius, a disciple of his, mentions a house haunted by stone-throwing sprites, a very common phenomenon in the books of Glanvill, and Increase Mather, in witch trials, and in rural disturbances. Omitting other examples Cardan 96 is cited for a house at Parma, in which during a hundred years the phantom of an old woman was seen before the death of members of the family. This is a rare case of an Italian Banshie. William of Paris, in Bodin (iii. ch. vi.) tells of a stone-throwing fiend, very active in 1447. The bogey of Bingen, a rapping ghost of 856, is duly chronicled; he also threw stones. The dormitory of some nuns was haunted by a spectre who moaned, tramped noisily around, dragged the sisters out of bed by the feet, and even tickled them nearly to death! This annoyance lasted for three years, so Wierus says. 97 Wodrow chronicles a similar affair at Mellantrae, in Annandale. Thyræus distinguishes three kinds of haunting sprites, devils, damned souls, and souls in purgatory. Some are mites, mild and sportive; some are truculenti ferocious. Brownies, or fauni, may act in either character, as Secutores et joculatores. They rather aim at teasing than at inflicting harm. They throw stones, lift beds, and make a hubbub and crash with the furniture. Suicides, murderers, and spirits of murdered people, are all apt to haunt houses. The sprites occasionally appear in their proper form, but just as often in disguise: a demon, too, can appear in human shape if so disposed: demons being of their nature deceitful and fond of travesty, as Porphyry teaches us and as Law (1680) illustrates. Whether the spirits of the dead quite know what they are about when they take to haunting, is, in the opinion of Thyræus, a difficult question. Thomas Aquinas, following St. Augustine, inclines to hold that when there is an apparition of a dead man, the dead man is unconscious of the circumstance. A spirit of one kind or another may be acting in his semblance. Thyræus rather fancies that the dead man is aware of what is going on.
Hauntings may be visual, auditory, or confined to the sense of touch. Auditory effects are produced by flutterings of air, noises are caused, steps are heard, laughter, and moaning. Lares domestici (brownies) mostly make a noise. Apparitions may be in tactile form of men or animals, or monsters. As for effects, some ghosts push the living and drive them along, as the Bride of Lammermoor, in Law’s Memorialls, was ‘harled through the house,’ by spirits. The spirits of an amorous complexion seem no longer to be numerous, but are objects of interest to Thyræus as to Increase Mather. Thyræus now raises the difficult question: ‘Are the sounds heard in haunted houses real, or hallucinatory?’ Omnis qui a spiritibus fit, simulatus est, specie sui fallit. The spirits having no vocal organs, can only produce noise. In a spiritual hurly-burly, some of the mortals present hear nothing (as we shall note in some modern examples), but may they not be prevented from hearing by the spirits? Or again, the sounds may be hallucinatory and only some mortals may have the power of hearing them. If there are visual, there may also be auditory hallucinations. 98 On the whole Thyræus thinks that the sounds may be real on some occasions, when all present hear them, hallucinatory on others. But the sounds need not be produced on the furniture, for example, when they seem to be so produced. ‘Often we think that the furniture has been all tossed about, when it really has not been stirred.’ The classical instance of the disturbances which aroused Scott at Abbotsford, on the death of his agent Bullock, is in point here. ‘Often a hammer is heard rapping, when there is no hammer in the house’ (p. 82). These are curious references to phenomena, however we explain them, which are still frequently reported.
Thyræus thinks that the air is agitated when sounds are heard, but that is just the question to be solved.
As for visual phantasms, these Thyræus regards as hallucinations produced by spirits on the human senses, not as external objective entities. He now asks why the sense of touch is affected usually as if by a cold body. Beyond assuming the influence of spirits over the air, and, apparently, their power of using dead bodies as vehicles for themselves, Thyræus comes to no distinct conclusion. He endeavours, at great length, to distinguish between haunters who are ghosts of the dead, and haunters who are demons, or spirits unattached. The former wail and moan, the latter are facetious. He decides that to bury dead bodies below the hearth does not prevent haunting, for ‘the hearth has no such efficacy’. Such bodies are not very unfrequently found in old English houses, the reason for this strange interment is not obvious, but perhaps it is explained by the superstition which Thyræus mentions. One might imagine that to bury people up and down a house would rather secure haunting than prevent it. And, indeed, at Passenham Rectory, where the Rev. G. M. Capell found seven skeletons in his dining-room, in 1874, Mrs. Montague Crackanthrope and her nurse were ‘obsessed’ by ‘a feeling that some one was in the room,’ when some one was not. 99 Perhaps seven burials were not sufficient to prevent haunting. The conclusion of the work of Thyræus is devoted to exorcisms, and orthodox methods of expelling spirits. The knockings which herald a death are attributed to the Lares, a kind of petty mischievous demons unattached. Such is the essence of the learned Jesuit’s work, and the strange thing is that, in an age of science, people are still discussing his problems, and, stranger still, that the reported phenomena remain the same.
That the Church in the case of Thyræus, and many others; that medical science, in the person of Wierus (b. 1515); that law, in the book of Bouchel, should have gravely canvassed the topic of haunted houses, was, of course, very natural in the dark ages before the restoration of the Stuarts, and the founding of the Royal Society. Common-sense, and ‘drolling Sadduceeism,’ came to their own, in England, with the king, with Charles II. After May 29, 1660, Webster and Wagstaffe mocked at bogles, if Glanvill and More took them seriously.
Before the Restoration it was distinctly dangerous to laugh at witchcraft, ghosts and hauntings. But the laughers came in with the merry monarch, and less by argument than by ridicule, by inveighing against the horror, too, of the hideous witch prosecutions, the laughers gradually brought hauntings and apparitions into contempt. Few educated people dared to admit that their philosophy might not be wholly exhaustive. Even ladies sneered at Dr. Johnson because he, having no dread of common-sense before his eyes, was inclined to hold that there might be some element of truth in a world-old and world-wide belief; and the romantic Anna Seward told, without accepting it, Scott’s tale of ‘The Tapestried chamber’. That a hundred years after the highday and triumph of common-sense, people of education should be found gravely investigating all that common-sense had exploded, is a comfortable thought to the believer in Progress. The world does not stand still.
A hundred years after the blue stockings looked on Johnson as the last survivor, the last of the Mohicans of superstition, the Psychical Society can collect some 400 cases of haunted houses in England.
Ten years ago, in 1884, the society sifted out nineteen stories as in ‘the first class,’ and based on good first-hand evidence. Their analysis of the reports led them to think that there is a certain genuine type of story, and, that when a tale ‘differs widely from the type, it proves to be incorrect, or unattainable from an authentic source’. This is very much the conclusion to which the writer is brought by historical examination of stories about hauntings. With exceptions, to be indicated, these tales all approximate to a type, and that is not the type of the magazine story.
It may be well, in the first place, to make some negative statements as to what the committee does not discover. First, it has never yet hired haunted house in which the sights and sounds continued during the tenancy of the curious observers. 100 The most obvious inference is that the earlier observers who saw and heard abnormal things were unscientific, convivial, nervous, hysterical, or addicted to practical joking. This, however, is not the only possible explanation. As a celebrated prophet, by his own avowal had been ‘known to be steady for weeks at a time,’ so, even in a regular haunted house, the ghost often takes a holiday. A case is well known to the writer in which a ghost began his manœuvres soon after a family entered the house. It made loud noises, it opened doors, turning the handle as the lady of the house walked about, it pulled her hair when she was in bed, plucked her dress, produced lights, and finally appeared visibly, a hag dressed in grey, to several persons. Then as if sated, the ghost struck work for years, when it suddenly began again, was as noisy as ever, and appeared to a person who had not seen it before, but who made a spirited if unsuccessful attempt to run it to earth.
