HISTORIC GHOSTS AND GHOST HUNTERS HISTORIC GHOSTS AND GHOST HUNTERS BY H. ADDINGTON BRUCE A utkor of " The Riddle of Personality " NEW YORK MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 1908 Copyright, 1908, by MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY NEW YORK PiMished, September, 1908 The Plimpton Press Norwood MASS. U3.A. Co THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND JOHN J. HENRY CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE ix I. THE DEVILS OF LODDTJN 1 II. THE DRUMMER OF TEDWORTH 17 EQ. THE HAUNTING OF THE WESLEYS 36 IV. THE VISIONS OF EMANUEL SWEDENBORG .... 66 V. THE COCK LANE GHOST 81 VI. THE GHOST SEEN BY LORD BROUGHAM . . . . 102 VII. THE SEERESS OF PREVORST 120 m. THE MYSTERIOUS MB. HOME ........ 143 IX. THE WATSEKA WONDER 171 X. A MEDIEVAL GHOST HUNTER 198 XI. GHOST HUNTERS OF YESTERDAY AND TO-DAY . 216 vii PREFACE THE following pages represent in the main a discussion of certain celebrated mysteries, as viewed in the light of the discoveries set forth in the writer's earlier work "The Riddle of Personality." That dealt, it may briefly be recalled, with the achievements of those scientists whose special endeavor it is to illumine the nature of human personality. On the one hand, it reviewed the work of the psychopathologists, or investigators of abnormal mental life; and, on the other hand, the labors of the psychical researchers, those enthusiastic and patient ex- plorers of the seemingly supernormal in hu- man experience. Emphasis was laid on the fact that the two lines of inquiry are more closely interrelated than is commonly sup- posed, and that the discoveries made in each aid in the solution of problems apparently belonging exclusively in the other. To this phase of the subject the writer now returns. The problems under examination x Preface are, all of them, problems in psychical re- search: yet, as will be found, the majority in no small measure depend for elucidation on facts brought to light by the psychopathol- ogists. Of course, it is not claimed that the last word has here been said with respect to any one of these human enigmas. But it is believed that, thanks to the knowledge gained by the investigations of the past quarter of a century, approximately correct solutions have been reached; and that, in any event, it is by no means imperative to regard the phe- nomena in question as inexplicable, or as explicable only on a spiritistic basis. Before attempting to solve the problems, it manifestly was necessary to state them. In doing this the writer has sought to present them in a readable and attractive form, but without any distortion or omission of material facts. H. ADDINGTON BRUCE. BHOOKLLNE, N. H., July, 1908. I THE DEVILS OF LOUDUN LOUD UN is a small town in France about midway between the ancient and ro- mantic cities of Tours and Poitiers. To-day it is an exceedingly unpretentious and an exceedingly sleepy place; but in the seven- teenth century it was in vastly better estate. Then its markets, its shops, its inns, lacked not business. Its churches were thronged with worshipers. Through its narrow streets proud noble and prouder ecclesiastic, thrifty merchant and active artisan, passed and re- passed in an unceasing stream. It was rich in points of interest, preeminent among which were its castle and its convent. In the castle the stout-hearted Loudunians found a refuge and a stronghold against the ambitions of the feudal lords and the tyranny of the crown. To its convent, pleasantly situated in a grove of time-honored trees, they sent their children to be educated. i 2 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters It is to the convent that we must turn our steps; for it was from the convent that the devils were let loose to plague the good people of Loudun. And in order to understand the course of events, we must first make ourselves acquainted with its history. Very briefly, then, it, like many other institutions of its kind, was a product of the Catholic counter- reformation designed to stem the rising tide of Protestantism. It came into being in 1616, and was of the Ursuline order, which had been introduced into France not many years earlier. From the first it proved a magnet for the daughters of the nobility, and soon boasted a goodly complement of nuns. At their head, as mother superior, was a certain Jeanne de Belfiel, of noble birth and many attractive qualities, but with character- istics which, as the sequel will show, wrought much woe to others as well as to the poor gentlewoman herself. Whatever her defects, however, she labored tirelessly in the inter- ests of the convent, and in this respect was ably seconded by its father confessor, worthy Father Moussaut, a man of rare good sense and possessing a firm hold on the consciences and affections of the nuns. The Devils of Loudun 3 Conceive their grief, therefore, when he suddenly sickened and died. Now ensued an anxious time pending the appointment of his successor. Two names were foremost for consideration that of Jean Mignon, chief canon of the Church of the Holy Cross, and that of Urbain Grandier, cure of Saint Peter's of Loudun. Mignon was a zealous and learned ecclesiastic, but belied his name by being cold, suspicious, and, some would have it, unscrupulous. Grandier, on the con- trary, was frank and ardent and generous, and was idolized by the people of Loudun. But he had serious failings. He was most un- clerically gallant, was tactless, was overready to take offense, and, his wrath once fully roused, was unrelenting. Accordingly, little surprise was felt when the choice ultimately fell, not on him but on Mignon. With Mignon the devils entered the Ursu- line convent. Hardly had he been installed when rumors began to go about of strange doings within its quiet walls; and that there was something in these rumors became evi- dent on the night of October 12, 1632, when two magistrates of Loudun, the bailie and the civil lieutenant, were hurriedly summoned to 4 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters the convent to listen to an astonishing story. For upwards of a fortnight, it appeared, sev- eral of the nuns, including Mother Superior Belfiel, had been tormented by specters and frightful visions. Latterly they had given every evidence of being possessed by evil spirits. With the assistance of another priest, Father Barre", Mignon had succeeded in ex- orcising the demons out of all the afflicted save the mother superior and a Sister Claire. In their case every formula known to the ritual had failed. The only conclusion was that they were not merely possessed but be- witched, and much as he disliked to bring notoriety on the convent, the father confessor had decided it was high time to learn who was responsible for the dire visitation. He had called the magistrates, he explained, in order that legal steps might be taken to apprehend the wizard, it being well established that "devils when duly exorcised must speak the truth," and that consequently there could be no doubt as to the identity of the offender, should the evil spirits be induced to name the source of their authority. Without giving the officials time to recover from their amazement, Mignon led them to The Devils o/ Lvudun 5 an upper room, where they found the mother superior and Sister Claire, wan-faced and fragile looking creatures on whose counte- nances were expressions of fear that would have inspired pity in the most stony-hearted. About them hovered monks and nuns. At sight of the strangers, Sister Claire lapsed into a semi-comatose condition; but the mother superior uttered piercing shrieks, and was at- tacked by violent convulsions that lasted until the father confessor spoke to her in a com- manding tone. Then followed a startling dialogue, carried on in Latin between Mignon and the soi-disant demon possessing her. "Why have you entered this maiden's body?" "Because of hatred." "What sign do you bring?" "Flowers." "What flowers?" "Roses." "Who has sent them?" A moment's hesitation, then the single word "Urbain." "Tell us his surname?" "Grandier." In an instant the room was in an uproar. 6 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters But the magistrates did not lose their heads. To the bailie in especial the affair had a sus- picious look. He had heard the devil "speak worse Latin than a boy of the fourth class," he had noted the mother superior's hesitancy in pronouncing Grandier's name, and he was well aware that deadly enmity had long ex- isted between Grandier and Mignon. So he placed little faith in the latter's protestation that the naming of his rival had taken him completely by surprise. Consulting with his colleague, he coldly informed Mignon that be- fore any arrest could be made there must be further investigation, and, promising to return next day, bade them good night. Next day found the convent besieged by townspeople, indignant at the accusation against the popular priest, and determined to laugh the devils out of existence. Grandier himself, burning with rage, hastened to the bailie and demanded that the nuns be sep- arately interrogated, and by other inquisitors than Mignon and Barre. In these demands the bailie properly acquiesced ; but, on attempt- ing in person to enforce his orders to that effect, he was denied admittance to the con- vent. Excitement ran high; so high that, The Devils of Loudun 7 fearful for his personal safety, Mignon con- sented to accept as exorcists two priests ap- pointed, not by the bailie, but by the Bishop of Poitiers who, it might incidentally be mentioned, had his own reasons for disliking Grandier. Exorcising now went on daily, to the dis- gust of the serious-minded, the mystification of the incredulous, the delight of sensation- mongers, and the baffled fury of Grandier. So far the play, if melodramatic, had not ap- proached the tragic. Sometimes it degener- ated to the broadest farce comedy. Thus, on one occasion when the devil was being read out of the mother superior, a crashing sound was heard and a huge black cat tumbled down the chimney and scampered about the room. At once the cry was raised that the devil had taken the form of a cat, a mad chase ensued, and it would have gone hard with pussy had not a nun chanced to recognize in it the pet of the convent. Still, there were circumstances which tended to inspire conviction in the mind of many. The convulsions of the possessed were un- doubtedly genuine, and undoubtedly they manifested phenomena seemingly inexplicable 8 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters on any naturalistic basis. A contemporary writer, describing events of a few months later, when several recruits had been added to their ranks, states that some "when com- atose became supple like a thin piece of lead, so that their body could be bent in every direc- tion, forward, backward, or sideways, till their head touched the ground," and that others showed no sign of pain when struck, pinched, or pricked. Then, too, they whirled and danced and grimaced and howled in a manner impossible to any one in a perfectly normal state.* For a few brief weeks Grandier enjoyed a respite, thanks to the intervention of his friend, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who threatened to send a physician and priests of his own choice to examine the possessed, a threat of itself sufficient, apparently, to put the devils to flight. But they returned with undiminished vigor upon the arrival in Loudun of a powerful state official who, unfortunately * Aubin's "Histoire des Diables de Loudun," a book by a writer who scoffed at the idea that the nuns had actually been bewitched. For an account by a contemporary who firmly believed the charges brought against Grandier, consult Niau's " La Veritable Histoire des Diables de Loudun." This latter work is accessible in an English translation by Edmund Goldsmid. The Devils of Loudun 9 for Grandier, was a relative of Mother Supe- rior Belfiel's. This official, whose name was Laubardemont, had come to Loudun on a singular mission. Richelieu, the celebrated cardinal statesman, in the pursuit of his pol- icy of strengthening the crown and weakening the nobility, had resolved to level to the ground the fortresses and castles of interior France, and among those marked for destruction was the castle of Loudun. Thither, therefore, he despatched Laubardemont to see that his orders were faithfully executed. Naturally, the cardinal's commissioner be- came interested in the trouble that had be- fallen his kinswoman, and the more interested when Mignon hinted to him that there was reason to believe that the suspected wizard was also the author of a recent satire which had set the entire court laughing at Riche- lieu's expense. What lent plausibility to this charge was the fact that the satire had been universally accredited to a court beauty form- erly one of Grandier 's parishioners. Also there was the fact that in days gone by, when Richelieu was merely a deacon, he had had a violent quarrel with Grandier over a question of precedence. Putting two and two together, 10 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters and knowing that it would result to his own advantage to unearth the real author to the satire, Laubardemont turned a willing ear to the suggestion that the woman in question had allowed her old pastor to shield himself behind her name. Back to Paris the commissioner galloped to carry the story to Richelieu. The cardinal's anger knew no bounds. From the King he secured a warrant for Grandier's arrest, and to this he added a decree investing Laubarde- mont with full inquisitorial powers. Events now moved rapidly. Though forewarned by Parisian friends, Grandier refused to seek safety by flight, and was arrested in spectac- ular fashion while on his way to say mass. His home was searched, his papers were seized, and he himself was thrown into an improvised dungeon in a house belonging to Mignon. Witnesses in his favor were in- timidated, while those willing to testify against him were liberally rewarded. To such lengths did the prosecution go that, discov- ering a strong undercurrent of popular in- dignation, Laubardemont actually procured from the King and council a decree prohibit- ing any appeal from his decisions, and gave The Devils of Loudun 11 out that, since King and cardinal believed in the enchantment, any one denying it would be held guilty of lese majesty divine and human. Under these circumstances Grandier was doomed from the outset. But he made a desperate struggle, and his opponents were driven to sore straits to bolster up their case. The devils persisted in speaking bad Latin, and continually failed to meet tests which they themselves had suggested. Sometimes their failures were only too plainly the result of human intervention. For instance, the mother superior's devil promised that, on a given night and in the church of the Holy Cross, he would lift Lau- bardemont's cap from his head and keep it suspended in mid-air while the commissioner intoned a miserere. When the time came for the fulfilment of this promise two of the spec- tators noticed that Laubardemont had taken care to seat himself at a goodly distance from the other participants. Quietly leaving the church, these amateur detectives made their way to the roof, where they found a man in the act of dropping a long horsehair line, to which was attached a small hook, through a hole directly over the spot where Laubarde- 12 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters mont was sitting. The culprit fled, and that night another failure was recorded against the devil. But such fiascos availed nothing to save Grandier. Neither did it avail him that, before sentence was finally passed, Sister Claire, broken in body and mind, sobbingly affirmed his innocence, protesting that she did not know what she was saying when she accused him; nor that the mother superior, after two hours of agonizing torture self- imposed, fell on her knees before Laubarde- mont, made a similar admission, and, passing into the convent orchard, tried to hang her- self. The commissioner and his colleagues remained obdurate, averring that these con- fessions were in themselves evidence of witch- craft, since they could be prompted only by the desire of the devils to save their master from his just fate. In August, 1634, Gran- dier 's doom was pronounced. He was to be put to the torture, strangled, and burned. This judgment was carried out to the letter, save that when the executioner approached to strangle him, the ropes binding him to the stake loosened, and he fell forward among the flames, perishing miserably. The Devils of Loudun 13 It only remains to analyze this medieval tragedy in the light of modern knowledge. To the people of his own generation Grand- ier was either a wizard most foul, or the vic- tim of a dastardly plot in which all concerned in harrying him to his death knowingly par- ticipated. These opinions posterity long shared. But now it is quite possible to reach another conclusion. That there was a con- spiracy is evident even from the facts set down by those hostile to Grandier. On the other hand, it is as unnecessary as it is incredible to believe that the plotters included every one instrumental in fixing on the unhappy cure the crime of witchcraft. Bearing in mind the discoveries of recent years in the twin fields of physiology and psy- chology, it seems evident that the conspirators were actually limited in number to Mignon, Barre, Laubardemont, and a few of their in- timates. In Laubardemont's case, indeed, there is some reason for supposing that he was more dupe than knave, and is therefore to be placed in the same category as the super- stitious monks and townspeople on whom Mignon and Barre so successfully imposed. As to the possessed the mother superior 14 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters and her nuns they may one and all be included in a third group as the unwitting tools of Mignon's vengeance. In fine, it is not only possible but entirely reasonable to regard Mignon as a seventeenth-century fore- runner of Mesmer, Elliotson, Esdaile, Braid, Charcot, and the present day exponents of hypnotism; and the nuns as his helpless "subjects," obeying his every command with the fidelity observable to-day in the patients of the Salpetriere and other centers of hyp- notic practice. The justness of this view is borne out by the facts recorded by contemporary annal- ists, of which only an outline has been given here. The nuns of Loudun were, as has been said, mostly daughters of the nobility, and were thus, in all likelihood, temperamentally unstable, sensitive, high-strung, nervous. The seclusion of their lives, the monotonous rou- tine of their every-day occupations, and the possibilities afforded for dangerous, morbid introspection, could not but have a baneful effect on such natures, leading inevitably to actual insanity or to hysteria. That the possessed were hysterical is abundantly shown by the descriptions their historians give of the The Devils of Loudun 15 character of their convulsions, contortions, etc., and by the references to the anesthetic, or non-sensitive, spots on their bodies. Now, as we know, the convent at Loudun had been in existence for only a few years before Mignon became its father confessor, and so, we may believe, it fell out that he appeared on the scene precisely when sufficient time had elapsed for environment and heredity to do their deadly work and provoke an epidemic of hysteria. In those benighted times such attacks were popularly ascribed to possession by evil spirits. The hysterical nuns, as the chronicles tell us, explained their condition to Mignon by inform- ing him that, shortly before the onset of their trouble, they had been haunted by the ghost of their former confessor, Father Moussaut. Here Mignon found his opportunity. Pic- ture him gently rebuking the unhappy women, admonishing them that such a good man as Father Moussaut would never return to tor- ment those who had been in his charge, and insisting that the source of their woes must be sought elsewhere; in, say, some evil disposed person, hostile to Father Moussaut's successor, and hoping, through thus afflicting them, to 16 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters bring the convent into disrepute and in this way strike a deadly blow at its new father con- fessor. Who might be this evil disposed per- son? Who, in truth, save Urbain Grandier? Picture Mignon, again, observing that his suggestion had taken root in the minds of two of the most emotional and impressionable, the mother superior and Sister Claire. Then would follow a course of lessons designed to aid the suggestion to blossom into open accu- sation. And presently Mignon would make the discovery that the mother superior and Sister Claire would, when in a hysterical state, blindly obey any command he might make, cease from their convulsions, respond intel- ligently and at his will to questions put to them, renew their convulsions, lapse even into seeming dementia. Doubtless he did not grasp the full signifi- cance and possibilities of his discovery had he done so the devils would not have bungled matters so often, and no embarrassing con- fessions would have been forthcoming. But he saw clearly enough that he had in his hand a mighty weapon against his rival, and history has recorded the manner and effectiveness with which he used it. n THE DRUMMER OF TEDWORTH THERE have been drummers a plenty in all countries and all ages, but there surely has never been the equal of the drum- mer of Tedworth. His was the distinction to inspire terror the length and breadth of a kingdom, to set a nation by the ears nay, even to disturb the peace of Church and Crown. When the Cromwellian wars broke out, he was in his prime, a stout, sturdy Englishman, suffering, as did his fellows, from the misrule of the Stuarts, and ready for any desperate step that might better his fortunes. Volun- teering, therefore, under the man of blood and iron, tradition has it that from the first battle to the last his drum was heard inspir- ing the revolutionists to mighty deeds of valor. The conflict at an end, Charles beheaded, and the Fifth Monarchy men creating chaos in their noisy efforts to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, he lapsed into an obscurity 17 18 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters that endured until the Restoration. Then he reemerged, not as a veteran living at ease on laurels well won, but as a wandering beggar, roving from shire to shire in quest of alms, which he implored to the accompaniment of fearsome music from his beloved drum. Thus he journeyed, undisturbed and gain- ing a sufficient living, until he chanced in the spring of 1661 to invade the quiet Wiltshire village of Tedworth. At that time the in- terests of Tedworth were identical with the interests of a certain Squire Mompesson, and he, being a gouty, irritable individual, was little disposed to have his peace and the peace of Tedworth disturbed by the drum- mer's loud bawling and louder drumming. At his orders rough hands seized the unhappy wanderer, blows rained upon him, and he was driven from Tedworth minus his drum. In vain he begged the wrathful Mompesson to restore it to him; in vain, with the tears streaming down his battle-worn, weather- beaten face, he protested that the drum was the only friend left to him in all the world; and in vain he related the happy memories it held for him. " Go," he was roughly told "go, and be thankful thou escapest so lightly!" The Drummer of Tedworth 19 So go he did, and whither he went nobody knew, and for the moment nobody cared. But all Tedworth soon had occasion to wish that his lamentations had moved the Squire to pity. Hardly a month later, when Mompesson had journeyed to the capital to pay his respects to the King, his family were aroused in the middle of the night by angry voices and an incessant banging on the front door. Windows were tried; entrance was vehemently demanded. Within, panic reigned at once. The house was situated in a lonely spot, and it seemed certain that, having heard of its master's absence, a band of highway- men, with whom the countryside abounded, had planned to turn burglars. The occupants, consisting as they did of women and children, could at best make scant resistance; and con- sequently there was much quaking and trem- bling, until, finding the bolts and bars too strong for them, the unwelcome visitors with- drew. Unmeasured was Mompesson's wrath when he returned and learned of the alarm. He only hoped, he declared, that the villains would venture back he would give them a greeting such as had not been known since 20 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters the days of the great war. That very night he had opportunity to make good his boast, for soon after the household had sought repose the disturbance broke out anew. Lighting a lantern, slipping into a dressing-gown, and snatching up a brace of pistols, the Squire dashed down-stairs, the noise becoming louder the nearer he reached the door. Click, clash the bolts were slipped back, the key was turned, and, lantern extended, he peered into the night. The moment he opened the door all became still, and nothing but empty darkness met his eyes. Almost immediately, however, the knocking began at a second door, to which, after making the first fast, he hurried, only to find the same result, and to hear, with mounting anger, a tumult at yet another door. Again silence when this was thrown open. But, stepping outside, as he afterward told the story, Mompesson became aware of "a strange and hollow sound in the air." Forthwith the suspicion entered his mind that the noises he had heard might be of supernatural origin. To him, true son of the seventeenth century, a suspicion of this sort was tantamount to certainty, and an unreason- The Drummer of Tedworth 21 ing alarm filled his soul; an alarm that grew into deadly fear when, safe in the bed he had hurriedly sought, a tremendous booming sound came from the top of the house. Here, in an upper room, for safe-keeping and as an interesting relic of the Civil War, had been placed the beggar's drum, and the terrible thought occurred to Mompesson: "Can it be that the drummer is dead, and that his spirit has returned to torment me?" A few nights later no room for doubt seemed left. Instead of the nocturnal shout- ing and knocking, there began a veritable concert from the room containing the drum. This concert, Mompesson informed his friends, opened with a peculiar "hurling in the air over the house," and closed with "the beating of a drum like that at the breaking up of a guard." The mental torture of the Squire and his family may be easier imagined than described. And before long matters grew much worse, when, becoming emboldened, the ghostly drummer laid aside his drum to play practical, and sometimes exceedingly painful, jokes on the members of the house- hold. Curiously enough, his malice was chiefly 22 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters directed against Mompesson's children, who poor little dears had certainly never worked him any injury. Yet we are told that for a time "it haunted none particularly but them." When they were in bed the coverings were dragged off and thrown on the floor; there was heard a scratching noise under the bed as of some animal with iron claws; some- times they were lifted bodily, "so that six men could not hold them down," and their limbs were beaten violently against the bed- posts. Nor did the unseen and unruly visitant scruple to plague Mompesson's aged mother, whose Bible was frequently hidden from her, and in whose bed ashes, knives, and other articles were placed. As time passed marvels multiplied. The assurance is solemnly given that "chairs moved of themselves." A board, it is insisted, rose out of the floor of its own accord and flung itself violently at a servant. Strange lights, "like corpse candles," floated about. The Squire's personal attendant John, "a stout fellow and of sober conversation," was one night confronted by a ghastly apparition in the form of "a great body with two red and glaring eyes." Frequently, too, when The Drummer of Tedworth 23 John was in bed he was treated as were the children, his coverings removed, his body struck, etc. But it was noticed that when- ever he grasped and brandished a sword he was left in peace. Clearly, the ghost had a healthy respect for cold steel. It had less respect for exorcising, which, of course, was tried, but tried in vain. All went well as long as the clergyman was on his knees saying the prescribed prayers by the bedside of the tormented children, but the moment he rose a bed staff was thrown at him and other articles of furniture danced about so madly that body and limb were en- dangered. Mompesson was at his wits' end. Well might he be! Apart from the injury done to his family and belongings, his house was thronged night and day by inquisitive visitors from all sections of the country. He was denounced on the one hand as a trickster, and on the other as a man who must be guilty of some terrible secret sin, else he would not thus be vexed. Sermons were preached with him as the text. Factions were formed, angrily affirming and denying the super- natural character of the disturbances. News 24 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters of the affair traveled even to the ears of the King, who dispatched an investigating com- mission to Mompesson House, where, greatly to the delight of the unbelieving, nothing untoward occurred during the commissioners* visit. But thereafter, as if to make up for lost time, the most sensational and vexatious phenomena of the haunting were produced. Thus matters continued for many months, until it dawned on Mompesson and his friends that possibly the case was not one of ghosts but one of witchcraft. This suspicion rose from the singular circumstance that voices in the children's room began, "for a hundred times together," to cry "A witch! A witch!" Resolved to put matters to a test, one of the boldest of a company of spectators suddenly demanded, "Satan, if the drummer set .thee to work, give three knocks and no more!" To which three knocks were distinctly heard, and afterward, by way of confirmation, five knocks as requested by another onlooker. Now began an eager hunt for the once despised drummer, who was presently found in jail at Gloucester accused of theft. And with this discovery word was brought to Mompesson that the drummer had openly The Drummer of Tedworth 25 boasted of having bewitched him. This was enough for the outraged Squire. There was in existence an act of King James I. holding it a felony to "feed, employ, or reward any evil spirit," and under its provisions he speedily had his alleged persecutor indicted as a wizard. Amid great excitement the aged veteran was brought from Gloucester to Salisbury to stand trial. But his spirit remained unbroken. Instead of confessing, humbly begging mercy, and promising amends, he undertook to bar- gain with Mompesson, promising that if the latter secured his liberty and gave him em- ployment as a farm hand, he would rid him of the haunting. Perhaps because he feared treachery, perhaps because, as he said, he felt sure the drummer "could do him no good in any honest way," Mompesson rejected this ingenuous proposal. So the drummer was left to his fate, which, for those days, was most unexpected. A packed and attentive court room listened to the tale of the mishaps and misadventures that had made Mompesson House a national center of interest; it was proved that the accused had been intimate with an old vaga- 26 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters bond who pretended to possess supernatural powers; and emphasis was laid on the alleged fact that he had boasted of having revenged himself on Mompesson for the confiscation of his drum. Luckily for him, Mompesson was not the power in Salisbury that he was in Tedworth, and the drummer's eloquent de- fense moved the jury to acquit him and to send him on his way rejoicing. Thereafter he was never again heard of in Wiltshire or in the pages of history, and w T ith his disappear- ance came an end to the knockings, the corpse candles, and all the other uncanny phenomena that had made life a ceaseless nightmare for the Mompessons. Such is the astonishing story of the drummer of Tedworth, still cited by the superstitious as a capital example of the intermeddling of superhuman agencies in human affairs, and still mentioned by the skeptical as one of the most amusing and most successful hoaxes on record. To us of the twentieth century its chief significance lies in the striking resemblance between the tribulations of the Mompesson family and the so-called physical phenomena of modern spiritism. All who have attended The Drummer of Tedworth 27 spiritistic seances are familiar with the in- visible and perverse ghost, which, for no apparent reason other than to mystify, causes furniture to gyrate violently, rings bells, plays tambourines, levitates the "medium," and favors the spectators with sundry taps, pinches, even blows. Precisely thus was it with the doings at Mompesson House, where many of the salient phenomena of modern spirit- ism were anticipated nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. The inference is irresistible that a more or less intimate connection exists between the disturbances at Tedworth and the triumphs of latter-day mediumship, and it thus becomes doubly interesting to examine the evidence for and against the supernatural origin of the performances that so perplexed the English- men of the Restoration. This evidence is presented in far greater detail than is here possible, in a curious document written by the Reverend Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman of the Church of England and an eye witness of some of the phenomena. His point of view is that of an ardent believer in the verity of witchcraft, and his narrative of the Tedworth affair finds place in a treatise designed to dis- 28 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters comfit those irreligious persons who main- tained the opposite.* It is therefore evident that his account of the case is to be regarded as a piece of special pleading, and as such must be received with critical caution. The need for caution is further empha- sized by the important circumstance that of all the phenomena described, only those most susceptible of mundane interpretation were witnessed by Glanvill or Mompesson. All of the more extraordinary the great body with the red and glaring eyes, the levitated chil- dren, etc. came to the narrator from second or third or fourth hand sources not always clearly indicated, and doubtless uneducated and superstitious persons, such as peasants or servants, whose fears would lend wings to their imagination. Keeping these facts before us, what do we * Glanvill's "Sadducismus Triumphatus," a most instructive and entertaining contribution to the literature of witchcraft. Contem- porary opinion of Glanvill is well expressed in Anthony a Wood's statement that "he was a person of more than ordinary parts, of a quick, warm, spruce, and gay fancy, and was more lucky, at least in his own judgment, in his first hints and thoughts of things, than in his after notions, examined and digested by longer and more mature deliberation. He had a very tenacious memory, and was a great master of the English language, expressing himself therein with easy fluency, and in a manly, yet withal a clear style." Glanvill died in 1680 at the early age of forty-four. The Drummer of Tedworth 29 find? We find that, so far from supporting the supernatural view, the evidence points to a systematic course of fraud and deceit carried out, not by the drummer, not by Mompesson and Glanvill (as many of that generation were unkind enough to suggest), not by the Mom- pesson servants, but by the Mompesson chil- dren, and particularly by the oldest child, a girl of ten. It was about the children that the disturb- ances centered, it was in their room that the manifestations ^usually took place, and what should have served to direct suspicion to them at once when, in the hope of afford- ing them relief, their father separated them, sending the youngest to lodge with a neighbor and taking the oldest into his own room, it was remarked that the neighbor's house imme- diately became the scene of demoniac activity, as did the Squire's apartment, which had previously been virtually undisturbed. Here and now developed a phenomenon that places little Miss Mompesson on a par with the cele- brated Fox sisters, for her father's bed cham- ber was turned into a seance room in which messages were rapped out very much as mes- sages have been rapped out ever since the 30 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters fateful night in 1848 that saw modern spirit- ism ushered into the world. Glanvill's personal testimony, the most precise and circumstantial in the entire case, strongly, albeit unwittingly, supports this view of the affair. It appears that he passed only one night in the haunted house, and of his several experiences there is none that cannot be set down to fraud plus imagination, with the children the active agents. Witness the fol- lowing from his story of what he heard and be- held in the oft-mentioned "children's room": "At this time it used to haunt the children, and that as soon as they were laid. They went to bed the night I was there about eight of the clock, when a maid servant, coming down from them, told us that it was come. . . . Mr. Mompesson and I and a gentleman that came with me went up. I heard a strange scratching as I went up the stairs, and when we came into the room I perceived it was just behind the bolster of the children's bed and seemed to be against the tick. It was as loud a scratching as one with long nails could make upon a bolster. There were two modest little girls in the bed, between seven and eight years old, as I guessed. I saw their hands out of The Drummer of Tedworth 31 the clothes, and they could not contribute to the noise that was behind their heads. They had been used to it and still * had somebody or other in the chamber with them, and therefore seemed not to be much affrighted. "I, standing at the bed's head, thrust my hand behind the bolster, directing it to the place whence the noise seemed to come. Whereupon the noise ceased there, and was heard in another part of the bed; but when I had taken out my hand it returned and was heard in the same place as before.-^ I had been told it would imitate noises, and made trial by scratching several times upon the sheet, as five, and seven, and ten, which it followed, and still stopped at my number. I searched under and behind the bed, turned up the clothes to the bed cords, grasped the bolster, sounded the wall behind, and made all the search that possibly I could, to find if there were any trick, contrivance, or common cause of it. The like did my friend, but we could discover nothing. "So that I was then verily persuaded, and am so still, that the noise was made by some demon or spirit." * Used here in the sense of " always." f The Italics are mine. 32 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters Doubtless his countenance betrayed the receptiveness of his mind, and it is not sur- prising that the naughty little girls proceeded to work industriously upon his imagination. He speaks of having heard under the bed a panting sound, which, he is certain, caused "a motion so strong that it shook the room and windows very sensibly"; and it also appears that he was induced to believe that he saw something moving in a "linen bag" hanging in the room, which bag, on being emptied, was found to contain nothing ani- mate. Therefore spirits again ! After bid- ding the children good night and retiring to the room set apart for him, he was wakened from a sound sleep by a tremendous knocking on his door, and to his terrified inquiry, "In the name of God, who is it, and what would you have?" received the not wholly reassuring reply, "Nothing with you." In the morning, when he spoke of the incident and re- marked that he supposed a servant must have rapped at the wrong door, he learned to his profound astonishment that "no one of the house lay that way or had business there- about." This being so, it could not possibly have been anything but a ghost. The Drummer of Tedworth 33 Thus runs the argument of the super- stitious clergyman. And all the while, we may feel tolerably sure, little Miss Mompesson was chuckling inwardly at the panic into which she had thrown the reverend gentleman. If it be objected that no girl of ten could successfully execute such a sustained impos- ture, one need only point to the many instances in which children of equally tender years or little older have since ventured on similar mystifications, with even more startling re- sults. Incredible as it may seem to those who have not looked into the subject, it is a fact that there are boys and girls especially girls who take a morbid delight in playing pranks that will astound and perplex their elders. The mere suggestion that Satan or a discarnate spirit is at the bottom of the mis- chief will then act as a powerful stimulus to the elaboration of even more sensational per- formances, and the result, if detection does not soon occur, will be a full-fledged "polter- geist," as the crockery-breaking, furniture- throwing ghost is technically called. The singular affair of Hetty Wesley, which we shall take up next, is a case in point. So, 34 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters too, is the history of the Fox sisters, who were extremely juvenile when they discovered the possibilities latent in the properly manipu- lated rap and knock. And the spirits who so maliciously disturbed the peace of good old Dr. Phelps in Stratford, Connecticut, a half century and more ago, unquestionably owed their being to the nimble wit and abnor- mal fancy of his two step-children, aged six- teen and eleven. It is to be remembered, further, that con- temporary conditions were exceptionally favor- able to the success of the Tedworth hoax. In all likelihood the children had nothing to do with the first alarm, the alarm that occurred during Mompesson's absence in London; and possibly the second was only a rude practical joke by some village lads who had heard of the first and wished to put the Squire's courage to a test. But once the little Mompessons learned, or suspected, that their father asso- ciated the noises with the vagrant drummer, a wide vista of enjoyment would open before their mischief -loving minds. Entering on a career of mystification, they would find the road made easy by the gullibility of those about them; and the chances are that had they The Drummer of Tedworth 35 been caught in flagrante delicto they would have put in the plea that fraudulent mediums so frequently offer to-day "An evil spirit took possession of me." As it was, the super- stition of the times and doubtless the rats and shaky timbers of Mompesson House did their part was their constant and unfailing support. Everything that happened would be magnified and distorted by the witnesses, either at the moment or in retrospect, until in the end the Rev. Mr. Glanvill, recording honestly enough what he himself had seen, could find material for a history of the most marvelous marvels. In short, the more closely one examines the details of the Tedworth mystery, the more will he find himself in agreement with George Cruikshank's brutally frank opinion: "All this seems very strange, about this drummer and his drum; But for myself I really think this drumming ghost was all a hum." m THE HAUNTING OF THE WESLEYS THE REV. SAMUEL WESLEY is chiefly known to posterity as the father of the famous John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, and of the hardly less famous Charles W T esley. But the Rev. Samuel has further claims to remembrance. If he gave to the world John and Charles Wesley, he was also the sire of seventeen other Wesleys, eight of whom, like their celebrated brothers, grew to maturity and attained varying degrees of distinction. He was himself a man of distinction as preacher, poet, and controversialist. His ser- mons were sermons in the good, old-fashioned sense of the term. His poems were the despair of the critics, but won him a wide reputation. He was an adept in what Whis- tler called the gentle art of making enemies. Though more familiar with the inside of a pulpit, he was not unacquainted with the in- side of a jail. He raised his numerous progeny 86 The Haunting of the Wesleys 37 on an income seldom exceeding one thousand dollars a year. And, what is perhaps the most astonishing fact in a career replete with surprises, he was the hero of one of the best authenticated ghost stories on record. This visitation from the supermundane came as a climax to a series of worldly annoy- ances that would have upset the equanimity of a very Job and the Rev. Samuel, in temper at any rate, was the reverse of Job-like. His troubles began in the closing years of the seventeenth century, when he became rector of the established church at Epworth, Lincoln- shire, a venerable edifice dating back to the stormy days of Edward II., and as damp as it was old. The story goes that this living was granted him as a reward because he dedi- cated one of his poems to Queen Mary. But the Queen would seem to have had punish- ment in mind for him, rather than reward. Located in the Isle of Axholme, in the midst of a long stretch of fen country bounded by four rivers, and for a great part under water, Epworth was at that epoch dreariness itself. The Rev. Samuel's spirits must have sunk within him as the carts bearing his already large family and his few household 38 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters belongings toiled through quagmire and morass; they must have fallen still farther when he gazed down the one straggling street at the rectory of mud and thatch that was to be his home; and they must have touched the zero mark, zealous High Churchman that he was, with the discovery that his peasant parishioners were Presbyterian-minded folk who hated ritualism as cordially as they hated the Pope. Whatever his secret sentiments, he lost no time in endeavoring to stamp the imprint of his vigorous personality on Epworth. For- getful, or unheedful, of the fact that the natives of the Isle of Axholme were notoriously violent and lawless, he began to rule them with a rod of iron. Thus they should think, thus they should do, thus they should go! Above all, the Rev. Samuel never permitted them to forget that in addition to spiritual they owed him temporal obligations. In the matter of tithes always a sore subject in a community hard put to extract a living from the soil he was unrelenting. Necessity may have driven him; but it was only to be expected that murmurings should arise, and from words the angry islanders The Haunting o} the Wesleys 39 passed to deeds. For a time they contented themselves with burning the rector's barn and trying to burn his house. Then, when he was so indiscreet as to become indebted to one of their number, they clapped him into prison. His speedy release, through the inter- vention of clerical friends, and his blunt refusal to seek a new sphere of activity, were followed by more barn burning, by the slaughter of his cattle, and finally by a fire that utterly destroyed the rectory and all but cost the lives of several of its inmates, who by that time included the future father of Methodism. The bravery with which the Rev. Samuel met this crowning disaster, and the energy with which he set about the task of rebuilding his home not in mud and thatch, but in substantial brick seem to have shamed the villagers into giving him peace, seem even to have inspired them with a genuine regard for him. He for his part, if we read the difficult pages of his biographers aright, appears to have grown less exacting and more diplomatic. In any event, he was left in quiet to prepare his sermons, write his poems, and assist his devoted wife (who, by the way, he is said to 40 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters have deserted for an entire year because of a little difference of opinion respecting the right of William of Orange to the English crown) in the upbringing of their children. Thus his life ran along in comparative smooth- ness until the momentous advent of the ghost. This unexpected and unwelcome visitor made its first appearance early in December, 1716. At the time the Wesley boys were away from home, but the household was still sufficiently numerous, consisting of the Rev. Samuel, Mrs. Wesley, seven daughters, Emilia, Susannah, Maria, Mehetabel, Anne, Martha, and Kezziah, a man servant named Robert Brown, and a maid servant known as Nanny Marshall. Nanny was the first to whom the ghost paid its respects, in a series of blood-curdling groans that "caused the upstarting of her hair, and made her ears prick forth at an unusual rate." In modern parlance, she was greatly alarmed, and has- tened to tell the Misses Wesley of the ex- traordinary noises, which, she assured them, sounded exactly like the groans of a dying man. The derisive laughter of the young women left her state of mind unchanged; The Haunting of the Wesley s 41 and they too gave way to alarm when, a night or so later, loud knocks began to be heard in different parts of the house, accompanied by sundry "groans, squeaks, and tinglings." Oddly enough, the only member of the family unvisited by the ghost was the Rev. Samuel, and upon learning that he had heard none of the direful sounds his wife and children made up their minds that his death was im- minent; for a local superstition had it that in all such cases of haunting the person undis- turbed is marked for an early demise. But the worthy clergyman continued hale and hearty, as did the ghost, whose knockings, indeed, soon grew so terrifying that "few or none of the family durst be alone." It was then resolved that, whatever the noises por- tended, counsel and aid must be sought from the head of the household. At first the Rev. Samuel listened in silence to his spouse's re- cital; but as she proceeded he burst into a storm of wrath. A ghost? Stuff and non- sense! Not a bit of it! Only some mis- chief-makers bent on plaguing them. Possibly, and his choler rose higher, a trick played by his daughters themselves, or by their lovers. Now it was the turn of the Wesley girls to 42 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters become angry, and we read that they forth- with showed themselves exceedingly "desirous of its continuance till he was convinced." Their desire was speedily granted. The very next night paterfamilias had no sooner tumbled into bed than there came nine resounding knocks "just by his bedside." In an instant he was up and groping for a light. "You heard it, then ?" we may imagine Mrs. Wesley anxiously asking, and we may also imagine the robust Anglo-Saxon of his response. Another night and more knockings, fol- lowed by "a noise in the room over our heads, as if several people were walking." This time, to quote further from Mrs. Wesley's narrative as given in a letter to her absent son Samuel, the tumult "was so outrageous that we thought the children would be fright- ened; so your father and I rose, and went down in the dark to light a candle. Just as we came to the bottom of the broad stairs, having hold of each other, on my side there seemed as if somebody had emptied a bag of money at my feet; and on his, as if all the bottles under the stairs (which were many) had been dashed in a thousand pieces. We passed through the hall into the kitchen, and The Haunting of the Wesleys 43 got a candle and went to see the children, whom we found asleep." With this the Rev. Samuel seems to have come round to the family's way of thinking; for in the morning he sent a messenger to the nearby village of Haxey with the request that the vicar of Haxey, a certain Mr. Hoole, would ride over and assist him in "conjuring" the evil spirit out of his house. Burning with curiosity, Mr. Hoole made such good time to Epworth that before noon he was at the rectory and eagerly listening to an account of the marvels that had so alarmed the Wesleys. In addition to the phenomena already set forth, he learned that while the knocks were heard in all parts of the house, they were most frequent in the children's room; that at prayers they almost invariably interrupted the family's devotions, especially when Mr .Wes- ley began the prayers for King George and the Prince of W T ales, from which it was inferred that the ghost was a Jacobite; that often a sound was heard like the rocking of a cradle, and another sound like the gobbling of a turkey, and yet another "something like a man, in a loose nightgown trailing after him"; and that if one stamped his foot, "Old 44 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters Jeffrey," as the younger children had named the ghost, would knock precisely as many times as there had been stampings. None of these major marvels was vouch- safed to Mr.Hoole; but he heard knockings in plenty, and, after a night of terror, made haste back to Haxey, having lost all desire to play the role of exorcist. His fears may possibly have been increased by the violence of Mr. Wesley, who, after vainly exhorting the ghost to speak out and tell his business, flourished a pistol and threatened to discharge it in the direction whence the knockings came. This was too much for peace-loving, spook-fearing Mr. Hoole. "Sir," he protested, "y u are con- vinced this is something preternatural. If so, you cannot hurt it; but you give it power to hurt you." The logic of Mr. Hoole's argu- ment is hardly so evident as his panic. Off he galloped, leaving the Rev. Samuel to lay the ghost as best he could. After his departure wonders grew apace. Thus far the manifestations had been wholly auditory; now visual phenomena were added. One evening Mrs. Wesley beheld something dart out from beneath a bed and quickly disappear. Sister Emilia, who was present, The Haunting of the Wesleys 45 reported to brother Samuel that this some- thing was "like a badger, only without any head that w r as discernible." The same ap- parition came to confound the man servant, Robert Brown, once in the badger form, and once in the form of a white rabbit which "turned round before him several times." Robert was also the witness of an even more peculiar performance by the elusive ghost. "Being grinding corn in the garrets, and happening to stop a little, the handle of the mill was turn [sic] round with great swift- ness." It is interesting to note that Robert subsequently declared that "nothing vexed him but that the mill was empty. If corn had been in it, Old Jeffrey might have ground his heart out for him; he would never have disturbed him." More annoying was a habit into which the ghost fell of rattling latches, jingling warming pans and other metal uten- sils, and brushing rudely against people in the dark. "Thrice," asserted the Rev. Samuel, "I have been pushed by an invisible power, once against the corner of my desk in the study, a second time against the door of the matted chamber, a third time against the right side of the frame of my study door." 46 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters On at least one occasion Old Jeffrey in- dulged in a pastime popular with the spirit- istic mediums of a later day. John Wesley tells us, on the authority of sister Nancy, that one night, when she was playing cards with some of the many other sisters, the bed on which she sat was suddenly lifted from the ground. "She leapt down and said, * Surely Old Jeffrey would not run away with her.' However, they persuaded her to sit down again, which she had scarce done when it was again lifted up several times successively, a con- siderable height, upon which she left her seat and would not be prevailed upon to sit there any more." Clearly, the Wesley family were in a bad way. Entreaties, threats, exorcism, had alike failed to banish the obstinate ghost. But though they knew it not, relief was at hand. Whether repenting of his misdoings, or desirous of seeking pastures new, Jeffrey, after a visitation lasting nearly two months, took his departure almost as unceremoniously as he had arrived, and left the unhappy Wesleys to resume by slow degrees their wonted ways of life. The Haunting of the Wesleys 47 Such is the story unfolded by the Wesleys themselves in a series of letters and memo- randa, which, taken together, form, as was said, one of the best authenticated narratives of haunting extant. But before endeavoring to ascertain the source of the phenomena credited to the soi-disant Jeffrey, another and fully as important inquiry must be made. What, it is necessary to ask, did the Wesleys actually hear and see in the course of the two months that they had their ghost with them ? The answer obviously must be sought through an analysis of the evidence for the haunting. This chronologically falls into three divisions. The first consists of letters addressed to young Samuel Wesley by his father, mother, and two of his sisters, and written at the time of the disturbances; the second, of letters written by Mrs. Wesley and four of her daughters to John Wesley in the summer and autumn of 1726 (that is to say, more than nine years after the haunting), of an account written by the senior Samuel Wesley, and of state- ments by Hoole and Robert Brown; the third, of an article contributed to "The Arminian Magazine" in 1784 (nearly seventy years after the event) by John Wesley. v 48 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters Now, the most cursory examination of the various documents shows remarkable dis- crepancies between the earlier and later ver- sions. Writing to her son Samuel, when the ghost was still active, and she would not be likely to minimize its doings, Mrs. Wesley thus describes the first occurrences: "On the first of December, our maid heard, at the door of the dining-room, several dismal groans like a person in extremes, at the point of death. We gave little heed to her relation and endeavored to laugh her out of her fears. Some nights (two or three) after, several of the family heard a strange knocking in divers places, usually three or four knocks at a time, and then stayed a little. This continued every night for a fortnight; sometimes it was in the garret, but most commonly in the nursery, or green chamber." Contrast with this the portion of John Wesley's "Arminian Magazine" article refer- ring to the same period: "On the second of December, 1716, while Robert Brown, my father's servant, was sitting with one of the maids, a little before ten at night, in the dining-room which opened into the garden, they both heard one knocking The Haunting of the Wesleys 49 at the door. Robert rose and opened it, but could see nobody. Quickly it knocked again and groaned. . . . He opened the door again twice or thrice, the knocking being twice or thrice repeated; but still seeing nothing, and being a little startled, they rose and went up to bed. When Robert came to the top of the garret stairs, he saw a handmill, which was at a little distance, whirled about very swiftly. . . . When he was in bed, he heard as it were the gobbling of a turkey cock close to the bed- side; and soon after, the sound of one stum- bling over his shoes and boots ; but there were none there, he had left them below. . . . The next evening, between five and six o'clock, my sister Molly, then about twenty years of age, sitting in the dining-room reading, heard as if it were the door that led into the hall open, and a person walking in, that seemed to have on a silk nightgown, rustling and trailing along. It seemed to walk round her, then to the door, then round again; but she could see nothing." As a matter of fact, the contemporary records are silent respecting the extraordinary happenings that overshadow all else in the records of 1726 and 1784. In the former, for 50 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters example, we find no reference to the affair of the mill handle, the levitation of the bed, the rude bumpings given to Mr. Wesley. There is much talk of knockings and groanings, of sounds like footsteps, rustling silks, falling coals, breaking bottles, and moving latches; allusion is made to the badger like and rabbit like apparition; and there is mention of a peculiar dancing of father's "trencher" with- out "anybody's stirring the table"; but the sum total makes very tame reading compared with the material to be found in the accounts written in after years and commonly utilized as it has been utilized here to form the narrative of the haunting. Not only this, but a rigorous division of the contemporary evi- dence into first hand and second hand still further eliminates the element of the marvel- ous. Admitting as evidence only the fact set forth as having been observed by the rela- tors themselves, the haunting is reduced to a matter of knocks, groans, tinglings, squeaks, creakings, crashings, and footsteps. We are, therefore, justified in believing that in this case, like so many others of its kind, the fallibility of human memory has played an overwhelming part in exaggerating the The Haunting of the Wesley s 51 experiences actually undergone; that, in fine, nothing occurred in the rectory at Epworth, between December 1, 1716, and January 31, 1717, that may not be attributed to human agency. Who, then, was the agent ? Knowing what we do of Wesley's previous relations with the villagers, the first impulse is to place the re- sponsibility at their door. But for this there is no real warrant. Years had elapsed since the culminating catastrophe of the burning of the rectory, and in the interim matters had been put on an amicable basis. Moreover, the evidence as to the haunting itself goes to show that the phenomena could not possibly have been produced by a person, or persons, op- erating from outdoors; but must, on the contrary, have been the work of some one intimately acquainted with the arrangements of the house and enjoying the full confidence of its master. Thus our inquiry narrows to the inmates of the rectory. Of these, Mr. and Mrs. Wesley, may at once be left out of considera- tion, as also may the servants, all accounts agreeing that from the outset they were genu- inely alarmed. There remain only the Wesley 52 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters girls, and our effort must be to discover which of them was the culprit. At first blush this seems an impossible task; but let us scan the evidence carefully. We find, to begin with, that only four of the seven sisters are represented in the correspondence relating to the haunting. Two of the others, Kezziah and Martha, were mere children and not of letter-writing age, and their silence in the matter is thus satisfactorily accounted for. But that the third, Mehetabel, should likewise be silent is distinctly puzzling. Not only was she quite able to give an account of her experiences (she was at least between eighteen and nineteen years of age), but it is known that she had a veritable passion for pen and ink, a passion which in after years won her no mean reputation as a poetess. And, more than this, she seems to have enjoyed a far greater share of Jeffrey's atten- tions than did any other member of the family. "My sister Hetty, I find," remarks the observing Samuel, "was more particularly troubled." And Emilia declares, almost in the language of complaint, that "it was never near me, except two or three times, and never followed me as it did my sister Hetty." The Haunting of the Wesleys 53 Manifestly, it may be worth while to in- quire into the history and characteristics of this young woman, Her biographer, Dr. Adam Clarke, informs us that "from her childhood she was gay and sprightly; full of mirth, good humor, and keen wit. She in- dulged this disposition so much that it was said to have given great uneasiness to her parents ; because she was in consequence often betrayed into inadvertencies which, though of small moment in themselves, showed that her mind was not under proper discipline; and that fancy, not reason, often dictated that line of conduct which she thought proper to pursue." This information is the more interesting, in the present connection, since it contrasts strongly with the unqualified commendation Dr. Clarke accords the other sisters. From the same authority we learn that as a child Miss Mehetabel was so precocious that at the age of eight she could read the Greek Testa- ment in the original; that she was from her earliest youth emotional and sentimental ; that despite her intellectual tastes and attain- ments she gave her hand to an illiterate journeyman plumber and glazier; and that 54 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters when the fruit of this union lay dying by her side she insisted on dictating to her husband a poem afterward published under the moving caption of "A Mother's Address to Her Dying Infant." Another of her poems, by the way, is significantly entitled, "The Lucid Interval." There can, then, be little question that Hetty Wesley was precisely the type of girl to derive amusement by working on the super- stitious fears of those about her. We find, too, in the evidence itself certain fugitive refer- ences directly pointing to her as the creator of Old Jeffrey. It seems that she had a prac- tice of sitting up and moving about the house long after all the other inmates, except her father, had retired for the night. The ghost was especially noisy and malevolent when in her vicinity, knocking boisterously on the bed in which she slept, and even knock- ing under her feet. And what is most sug- gestive, two witnesses, her father and her sister Susannah, testify that on some occasions the noises failed to wake her, but caused her "to tremble exceedingly in her sleep." It must, indeed, have been a difficult matter to restrain laughter at the spectacle of the night- gowned, night-capped, much bewildered par- The Haunting of the Wesley s 55 son, candle in one hand and pistol in the other, peering under and about the bed in quest of the invisible ghost. To be sure, it is impossible to adduce posi- tive proof that Hetty Wesley and Old Jeffrey were one and the same. But the evidence supports this view of the case as it supports no other, and, taken in conjunction with the facts of her earlier and later life, leaves little doubt that had the Rev. Samuel paid closer attention to the comings and goings of this particular daughter the ghost that so sorely tried him would have taken its flight much sooner than it did. Her motive for the decep- tion must be left to conjecture. In all proba- bility it was only the desire to amaze and terrorize, a desire as was said before, not in- frequently operative along similar lines in the case of young people of a lively disposition and morbid imagination. IV THE VISIONS OF EMANUEL SWEDENBORG IN mid April of the memorable year 1745, two men, hastening through a busy Lon- don thoroughfare, paused for a moment to follow with their eyes a third, whom they had greeted but who had passed without so much as a glance in their direction. The face of one betrayed chagrin; but the other smiled amusedly. "You must not mind, dear fellow," said he; "that is only Swedenborg's way, as you will discover when you know him better. His feet are on the earth; but for the moment his mind is in the clouds, pondering some solution to the wonderful problems he has set himself, marvelous man that he is." "Yet," objected the other, "he seems such a thorough man of the world, so finely dressed, so courtly as a rule in speech and manner." "He is a man of the world, a true cosmo- politan," was the quick response. "I war- rant few are so widely and so favorably known. 56 The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 57 He is as much at home in London, Paris, Berlin, Dresden, Amsterdam, or Copenhagen as in his native city of Stockholm. Kings and Queens, grand dames and gallant wits, states- men and soldiers, scientists and philosophers, find pleasure in his society. He can meet all on their own ground, and to all he has some- thing fresh and interesting to say. But he is nevertheless, and above everything else, a dreamer." "A dreamer?" "Aye. They tell me that he will not rest content until he has found the seat of the soul in man. Up through mathematics, mechanics, mineralogy, astronomy, chemistry, even phys- iology, has he gone, mastering every science, in turn, until he is now perhaps the most '* learned man in Europe. But his learning satisfies him not a whit, since the soul still eludes him, and eludes him, mark you, despite month upon month of toil in the dis- secting room. If the study of anatomy fail him, I know not where he will next turn. For my part, I fancy he need not look beyond the stomach. The wonder is that his own stomach has not given him the clue ere this; for, metaphysician though he be, he enjoys 58 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters the good things of earth. Let me tell you a story " Thus, chatting and laughing, the friends continued on their way, every step taking them farther from the unwitting subject of their words. He, for his part, absorbed in thought, pressed steadily forward to his desti- nation, a quiet inn in a sequestered quarter of the city. The familiar sounds of eighteenth- century London the bawling of appren- tices shouting their masters' wares, the crying of fishwives, the quarreling of drunkards, the barking of curs, the bellowing of cattle on their way to market and slaughter house broke unheeded about him. He was, as the gossip had put it, in the clouds, intent on the riddles his learning had rendered only the more complex, riddles having to do with the nature of the universe and with man's place in the universe. Nor did he rouse himself from his meditations until the door of the inn had closed behind him and he found himself in its common room. Then he became the Emanuel Sweden- borg of benignity, geniality, and courtesy, the Swedenborg whom all men loved. "I am going to my room," said he to the The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 59 innkeeper, in charming, broken English, "and I wish to be served there. I find I am very hungry; so see that you spare not." While he is standing at the window, waiting for his dinner, and gazing abstractedly into the ill-paved, muddy street illumined by a transitory gleam of April sunshine, let us try to gain a closer view of him than that afforded by the brief account of his unrecognized acquaintance. The attempt will be worth while; for at this very moment he has, all unconsciously, reached the great crisis of his life, and is about to leave behind him the achievements of his earlier years, setting him- self instead to tasks of a very different nature. We see him, then, a man nearing the age of sixty, of rather more than average height, smooth shaven, bewigged, bespectacled, and scrupulously dressed according to the fashion of the day. Time in its passing has dealt gently with him. There is no stoop to his shoulders, no tremor in the fingers that play restlessly on the window-pane. Not a wrinkle mars the placid features. Well may he feel at peace with the world. His whole career has been a steady progress, his record that of one who has attempted 60 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters many things and failed in few. Before he was twenty-one his learning had gained for him a doctorate in philosophy. Then, en- thusiastic, open-minded, and open-eyed, he had hurried abroad, to pursue in England, Hol- land, France, and Germany his chosen studies of mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy. Returning to Sweden to assume the duties of assessor of mines, he speedily proved that he was no mere theorizer, his inventive genius enabling the warlike Charles XII. to trans- port overland galleys and sloops for the siege of Frederikshald, sea passage being barred by hostile fleets. Ennobled for this feat, he plunged with ardor into the complicated problems of statecraft, problems rendered the more difficult by the economic distress in which Charles's wars had involved his King- dom. Here again he attained distinction. Yet always the problems of science and philosophy claimed his chief devotion. From the study of stars and minerals he passed to the contemplation of other marvels of nature as revealed in man himself. And now behold him turned chemist, anatomist, physiologist, and psychologist, and repeating in these fields of research his former triumphs. Still, in- The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 61 domitable man, he refused to stop. He would press on, far beyond the confines of what his generation held to be the knowable. "The end of the senses," to quote his own words, "is that God may be seen." He would peer into the innermost recesses of man's being, to discern the soul of man, mayhap to discern God himself. But, if he were scientist and metaphysician, he was also human, and that pleasant April afternoon the humanity in him bulked large when he finally turned from the window and took his seat at the bountifully heaped table. He was, as he had told the innkeeper, very hungry, and he ate with a zest that abundantly confirmed his statement. How pleasant the odors from this dish and that how agreeable the flavor of everything! Surely he had never enjoyed meal more, and surely he was no longer "in the clouds"; but was instead recall- ing pleasant reminiscences of his doings in one and another of the gay capitals of Europe! There would be not a little to bring a twinkle of delight to his beaming eyes, not a little to soften his scholastic lips into a gentle smile. And so, in solitary state, he ate and drank, with nothing to warn him of the impending 62 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters and momentous change that was to shape anew his career and his view-point. Conceive his astonishment, therefore, when, his dinner still unfinished, he felt a strange languor creeping over him and a mysterious obscurity dimming his eyes. Conceive, further, his horror at sight of the floor about him covered with frogs and toads and snakes and creeping things. And picture, finally, his amazement when, the darkness that enveloped him suddenly clearing, he beheld a man sit- ting in the far corner of the room and eying him, as it seemed, reproachfully, even dis- dainfully. In vain, he essayed to rise, to lift his hand, to speak. Invisible bonds held him in his chair, an unseen power kept him mute. For an instant he fancied that he must be dreaming; but the noises from outdoors and the sight of the table and food before him brought conviction that he was in full posses- sion of his senses. Now his visitor spoke, and spoke only four words, which astonished no less than alarmed him. "Eat not so much." Only this then utter silence. Again the enveloping darkness frogs, toads, snakes, faded in its depths and with The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 63 returning light Swedenborg was once more alone in the room. Small wonder that the remaining hours of the day were spent in fruitless cogitation of this weird and disagreeable experience which far transcended metaphysician's normal ken. Nor is it surprising to find him naively ad- mitting that "this unexpected event hastened my return home." Imagination can easily round out the picture, the rising in terror, the overturning of the chair, the seizing of cocked hat and gold-headed cane, the few explanatory words to the astonished inn- keeper, the hurried departure, and the pro- gress, perchance at a more rapid gait than usual, to the sleeping quarters in another section of the town. Arrived there, safe in the refuge of his commodious bed -room, sage argument would follow in the effort to attain persuasion that the terrifying vision had been but "the effect of accidental causes." Be sure, though, that our philosopher, dreading a return of the specter if he permitted food to pass his lips, would go hungry to bed that night. That night more visions. To the wake- ful, restless, perturbed Swedenborg the same 64 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters figure appeared, this time without snakes or frogs or toads, and not in darkness, but in the midst of a great white light that filled the bed chamber with a wonderful radiance. Then a voice spoke: "I am God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer of the world. I have chosen thee to lay before men the spiritual sense of the Holy Word. I will teach thee what thou art to write." Slowly the light faded, the figure dis- appeared. And now the astounded philoso- pher, his amazement growing with each passing moment, found himself transported as it seemed to another world, the world of the dead. Men and women of his acquaintance greeted him as they had been wont to do when on earth, pressed about him, eagerly ques- tioned him. Their faces still wore the familiar expressions of kindliness, anxiety, sincerity, ill will, as the case might be. In every way they appeared to be still numbered among the living. They were clad in the clothes they had been accustomed to wear, they ate and drank, they lived in houses and towns. The philosophers among them continued to dispute, the clergy to admonish, the authors to write. The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 65 But, his perception enlarging, Swedenborg presently discovered that this was in reality only an intermediate state of existence; that beyond it at the one end was heaven and at the other hell, to one or the other of which the dead ultimately gravitated according to their desires and conduct. For, as he was to learn later, the spiritual world was a world of law and order fully as much as was the natural world. Men were free to do as they chose; but they must bear the consequences. If they were evil-minded, it would be their wish to consort with those of like mind, and in time they must pass to the abode of the wicked; if pure-minded, they would seek out kindred spirits, and, when finally purged of the dross of earth, be translated to the realm of bliss. To heaven, then, voyaged Sweden- borg, on a journey of discovery; and to hell likewise. What he saw he has set down in many bulky volumes, than which philosopher has written none more strange.* * The most complete enumeration of the writings of Swedenborg will be found in the Rev. James Hyde's "A Bibliography of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg," published in 1906 by the Sweden- borg Society of London. Including books on Swedenborg, this bibli- ography contains no fewer than thirty-five hundred items. For a detailed account of Swedenborg's life the reader may consult Dr. 66 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters With the return of daylight it might seem that he would be prompt to dismiss all memory of these peculiar experiences as fantasies of sleep. But he was satisfied that he had not slept; that on the contrary he had been pre- ternaturally conscious throughout the long, eventful night. In solemn retrospect he re- traced his past career. He remembered that for some years he had had symbolic dreams and symbolic hallucinations as of a golden key, a tongue of flame, and voices which had at the time baffled his understanding, but which he now interpreted as premonitory warnings that God had set him apart for a great mission. He remembered too that when still a child his mind had been engrossed by thoughts of God, and that in talking with his parents he had uttered words which caused them to declare that the angels spoke through his mouth. Remembering all these things, he could no longer doubt that Divinity had actually visited him in his humble London boarding house, and he made up his mind that he must bestir himself to carry out the R. L. Tafel's "Documents concerning the Life and Character of Swedenborg," or the biographies by William White, Benjamin Worcester, James J. G. Wilkinson, and Nathaniel Hobart. Of these, the White biography is the most critical. The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 67 divine command of expounding to his fellow men the hidden meaning of Holy Writ. Forthwith, being still fired with the true scientist's passion for original research, he set himself to the task of learning Hebrew. He was, it will be remembered, approaching sixty, an age when the acquisition of a new language is exceedingly difficult and rare. Yet such progress did he make that within a very few months he was writing notes in ex- planation of the book of Genesis. And thus he continued not for months but years, patiently traversing the entire Bible, and at the same time carefully committing to paper everything "seen and heard" in the spiritual world; for his London excursion beyond the borderland which separates the here from the hereafter had been only the first of similar journeys taken not merely by night but in broad daylight. To use his own phraseology: "The Lord opened daily, very often, my bodily eyes; so that in the middle of the day I could see into the other world, and in a state of perfect wakefulness converse with angels and spirits." His increasing absorption absent- mindedness, his friends would call it his 68 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters habit of falling into trances, and his claim to interworld communication, could not fail to excite the surprise of all who had known him as scientist and philosopher. But these vagaries, as people deemed them, met the greater toleration because of the evident fact that they did not dim his intellectual powers and did not interfere with his activities in behalf of the public good. True, in 1747 he resigned his office of assessor of mines in order to have more leisure to prosecute his adventures into the unknown; but as a mem- ber of the Swedish Diet he continued to play a prominent part in the affairs of the King- dom, giving long and profound study to the critical problems of administration, economics, and finance with which the nation's leaders were confronted during the third quarter of the century. So that bearing in mind the further fact that he was no blatant advocate of his opinions it seems altogether likely his spiritistic ideas would have gained no great measure of attention, had it not been for a series of singular occurrences that took place between 1759 and 1762. Toward the end of July in the first of these years, Swedenborg (whose fondness for travel The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 69 ceased only with his death) arrived in Gotten- burg homeward bound from England, and on the invitation of a friend decided to break his journey by spending a few days in that city. Two hours after his arrival, while attending a small reception given in his honor, he elec- trified the company by abruptly declaring that at that moment a dangerous fire had broken out at Stockholm, three hundred miles away, and was spreading rapidly. Becoming excited, he rushed from the room, to reenter with the news that the house of one of his friends was in ashes, and that his own house was threatened. Anxious moments passed, while he restlessly paced up and down, in and out. Then, with a cry of joy, he ex- claimed, "Thank God the fire is out, the third door from my house!" Like wild the tidings spread through Gottenburg, and the greatest commotion pre- vailed. Some were inclined to give credence to Swedenborg's statements; more, who did not know the man, derided him as a sensation monger. But all had to wait with what patience they could, for those were the days before steam engine and telegraph. Forty- eight anxious hours passed. Then letters 70 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters were received confirming the philosopher's announcement, and, we are assured, showing that the fire had taken precisely the path described by him, and had stopped where he had indicated. No peace now for Swedenborg. His home at Stockholm, with its quaint gambrel roof, its summer houses, its neat flower beds, its curious box trees, instantly became a Mecca for the inquisitive, burning to see the man who held converse with the dead and was instructed by the latter in many portentous secrets. Most of those who gained admission, and through him sought to be put into touch with departed friends, received a courteous but firm refusal, accompanied by the explana- tion: "God having for wise and good purposes separated the world of spirits from ours, a communication is never granted without cogent reasons." When, however, his visitors satisfied him that they were imbued with something more than curiosity, he made an effort to meet their wishes, and occasionally with astonishing results. It was thus in the case of Madam Marte- ville, widow of the Dutch Ambassador to Sweden. In 1761, some months after her The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 71 husband's death, a goldsmith demanded from her payment for a silver service the Ambassa- dor had bought from him. Feeling sure that the bill had already been paid, she made search for the receipt, but could find none. The sum involved was large, and she sought Swedenborg and asked him to seek her hus- band in the world of spirits and ascertain whether the debt had been settled. Three days later, when she was entertaining some friends, Swedenborg called, and in the most matter of fact way stated that he had had a conversation with Marteville, and had learned from him that the debt had been canceled seven months before his death, and that the receipt would be found in a certain bureau. "But I have searched all through it," pro- tested Madam Marteville. "Ah," was Swedenborg's rejoinder; "but it has a secret drawer of which you know nothing." At once all present hurried to the bureau, and there, in the private compartment which he quickly located, lay the missing receipt. In similar fashion did Swedenborg relate to the Queen of Sweden, Louisa Ulrica, the substance of the last interview between her 72 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters and her dead brother, the Crown Prince of Prussia, an interview which had been strictly private, and the subject of which, she affirmed, was such that no third person could possibly have known what passed between them. More startling still was his declaration to a merry company at Amsterdam that at that same hour, in far away Russia, the Emperor Peter III. was being foully done to death in prison. Once more time proved that the spirit seer, as Swedenborg was now popularly known, had told the truth. A decade more, and again we meet him in London, his whole being, at eighty-four, animated with the same energy and enthu- siasm that had led him to seek and attain in his earlier manhood such a vast store of knowledge. And here, as Christmas drew near, he found lodging with two old friends, a wig maker and his wife. But ere Christmas dawned he lay a helpless victim of that dread disease paralysis. Not a word, not a move- ment, for full three weeks. Then, with returning consciousness, a call for pen and paper. He would, he muttered with thickened speech, send a note to inform a certain John Wesley that the spirits had The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 73 made known to him Wesley's desire to meet him, and that he would be glad to receive a visit at any time. In reply came word that the great evangelist had indeed wished to make the great mystic's acquaintance, and that after returning from a six months' circuit he would give himself the pleasure of waiting upon Swedenborg. "Too late," was the aged philosopher's comment as the story goes, "too late; for on the 29th of March I shall be in the world of spirits never more to return." March came and wentf and with it went his soul on the day predicted, if prediction there were. They buried him in London, and there in early season, out of his grave blos- somed the religion that has preserved his name, his fame, his doctrines. To the dead Swedenborg succeeded the living Sweden- borgianism. But what shall those of us who are not Swedenborgians think of the master? Shall we accept at face value the story of his life as gathered from the documents left behind him and as set forth here; and, accepting it, believe that he was in reality a man set apart by God 74 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters and granted the rare favor of insight into that unknown world to which all of us must some day go ? The true explanation, it seems to me, can be had only when we view Swedenborg in the light of the marvelous discoveries made dur- ing the last few years in the field of abnormal psychology. Beginning in France, and con- tinuing more recently in the United States and other countries, investigations have been set on foot resulting in the solution of many human problems not unlike the riddle of Swedenborg, and occasionally far more com- plicated than that presented in his case. All these solutions, in the last analysis, rest on the basic discovery that human personality is by no means the single indivisible entity it is commonly supposed to be, but is instead singularly unstable and singularly complex. It has been found that under some unusual stimulus such as an injury, an illness, or the strain of an intense emotion there may result a disintegration, or, as it is technically termed, a dissociation, of personality, giving rise it may be to hysteria, it may be to hallu- cinations, it may even be to a complete dis- appearance of the original personality and its The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 75 replacement by a new personality, sometimes of radically different characteristics.* It has also been found, by another group of investigators working principally in Eng- land, that side by side with the original, the waking, personality of every-day life, there coexists a hidden personality possessing facul- ties far transcending those enjoyed by the waking personality, but as a rule coming into play only at moments of crisis, though by some favored mortals invocable more fre- quently. To this hidden personality, as dis- tinguished from the secondary personality of dissociation, has been given the name of the subliminal self, and to its operation some attribute alike the productions of men of genius and the phenomena of clairvoyance and thought transference that have puzzled mankind from time immemorial. Now, arguing by analogy from the cases scattered through the writings of Janet, Sidis, Prince, Myers, Gurney, and many others whose works the reader may consult for himself in any good public library, it is * Illustrative cases will be cited in the discussion of "The Watseka Wonder" on a later page. For a detailed explanation of "dissocia- tion" the reader is referred to Dr. Morton Prince's "The Dissocia- tion of a Personality," or Dr. Boris Sidis's "Multiple Personality." 76 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters my belief that in Swedenborg we have a preeminent illustration both of dissociation and of subliminal action, and that it is therefore equally unnecessary to stigmatize him as insane or to adopt the spiritistic hy- pothesis in explanation of his utterances. The records show that from his father he in- herited a tendency to hallucinations, checked for a time by the nature of his studies, but fostered as these expanded into pursuit of the absolute and the infinite. They further show that for a long time before the London visions he was in a disturbed state of health, his nervous system unstrung, his whole being so unhinged that at times he suffered from attacks of what was probably hystero-epi- lepsy. It seems altogether likely, then, that in Lon- don the process of dissociation, after this period of gradual growth, suddenly leaped into activity. Thereafter his hallucinations, from being sporadic and vague, became habitual and definite, his hystero-epileptic attacks more frequent. But, happily for him, the dissociation never became complete. He was left in command of his original personality, his mental powers continued unabated; and The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 77 he was still able to adjust himself to the en- vironment of the world about him. But, it may be objected, how explain his revelations in the matter of the fire at Stock- holm, the missing receipt, the message to Queen Ulrica, and the death of Peter III. ? This brings us to the question of subliminal action. Swedenborg himself, far in advance of his generation in this as in much else, ap- pears to have realized that there was no need of invoking spirits to account for such transac- tions. "I need not mention," he once wrote, "the manifest sympathies acknowledged to exist in this lower world, and which are too many to be recounted; so great being the sympathy and magnetism of man that com- munication often takes place between those who are miles apart." Here, in language that admits of no mis- interpretation, we see stated the doctrine of telepathy, which is only now beginning to find acceptance among scientific men, but which, as I view it, has been amply demonstrated by the experiments of recent years and by the thousands of cases of spontaneous occur- rence recorded in such publications as the "Proceedings of the Society for Psychical 78 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters Research." And if these experiments and spontaneous instances prove anything, they prove that telepathy is distinctively a faculty of the subliminal self; and that a greater or less degree of dissociation is essential, not to the receipt, but to the objective realization, of telepathic messages. Thus, the entranced "medium" of modern days extracts from the depths of his sitter's subconsciousness facts which the sitter has consciously forgotten, facts even of which he may never have been consciously aware, but which have been transmitted telepathically to his subliminal self by the subliminal self of some third person.* So with Swedenborg. Admitting the au- thenticity of the afore-mentioned anecdotes none of which, it is as well to point out, reaches us supported by first-hand evidence it is quite unnecessary to appeal to spirits as his purveyors of knowledge. In every in- stance telepathy or clairvoyance, which is after all explicable itself only by telepathy will suffice. In the Marteville affair, for ex- ample, it is not unreasonable to assume that * This point is more fully discussed in my earlier book, "The Riddle of Personality." The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 79 before his death the Ambassador telepathically told his devoted wife of the existence of the secret drawer and its contents ; if, indeed, she had not known and forgotten. It would then be an exceedingly simple matter for the dis- sociated Swedenborg to acquire the desired information from the wife's subconsciousness. Nor does this reflect on his honesty. Doubt- less he believed, as he represented, that he had actually had a conversation with the dead Marteville, and had learned from him the whereabouts of the missing receipt. In the form his dissociation took he could no more escape such a hallucination than can the twentieth-century medium avoid the belief that he is a veritable intermediary between the visible and the invisible world. Not that I would put Swedenborg on a par with the ordinary medium. He was un- questionably a man of gigantic intellect, and he was unquestionably inspired, if by inspira- tion be understood the gift of combining sub- liminal with supraliminal powers to a degree granted to few of those whom the world counts truly great. If his fanciful and fantastic pictures of life in heaven and hell and in our neighboring planets welled up from the depths 80 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters of his inmost mind, far more did the noble truths to which he gave expression. It is by these he should be judged; it is in these, not in his hallucinations nor in his telepathic ex- hibitions, that lies the secret of the command- ing, if not always recognized, influence he has exercised on the thought of posterity. A solitary figure? True: but a grand figure, even in his saddest moment of delusion. V THE COCK LANE GHOST THE quaint old London church of St. Sepulchre's could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a fashionable place of worship. It stood in a crowded quar- ter of the city, and the gentry were content to leave it to the small tradesfolk and humble working people who made up its parish. Now and again a stray antiquarian paid it a fleeting visit; but, speaking generally, the coming of a stranger was so rare as to be accounted an event. It is easy, then, to understand the sensation occasioned by the appearance at prayers one morning, in the year of grace, 1759, of a young and well dressed couple whose natural habitat was obviously in quite other surroundings. As they waited in the aisle the man tall, erect, and easy of bearing, the woman fair and graceful there was an instant craning of necks and vast nudging of one's neighbor; and long after they had seated themselves a 81 82 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters subdued whispering bore further, if unneces- sary, testimony to the curiosity they had aroused. Probably no one felt a more lively interest than did the parish clerk, who, in showing them to a pew, had noted the tenderness with which they regarded each other. It needed nothing more to persuade him that they were eloping lovers, and that a snug gratuity was as good as in his pocket. All through the service he fidgeted impatiently in the shadows near the door, and as soon as the congrega- tion was dismissed and he perceived that the visitors were lingering in their places, he hurried forward and accosted them. His name, he volubly explained, was Parsons; he was officiating clerk of the parish; likewise master in the charity school nearby. No doubt they would like to inspect the church, perhaps to visit the school; it might even be they were desirous of meeting the pastor ? He would be delighted if he could serve them in any way. "Possibly you can," said the man, "for you doubtless know the neighborhood like a book. My name is Knight, and this lady is my wife. We He stopped short at sight of the The Cock Lane Ghost 83 changed expression on the other's face, and breesquely demanded, "How now, man? What are you gaping at?" "No offense, sir, no offense," stammered the disappointed and embarrassed clerk. "I beg your pardon, sir and madam." There was an awkward pause before the man began again. "As I was saying, my name is Knight and this lady is my wife. We have only recently come to London and are in search of lodgings. If you know of any good place to which you can recom- mend us, we shall be heartily obliged to you." Whatever he was, Clerk Parsons was not a fool, and these few words showed him plainly that he was face to face with a mystery. Elopers or no, such a well born couple would not from choice bury themselves in this for- bidding section of London. With a cunning fostered by long years of precarious livelihood, he at once resolved to profit if he could from their need. "I fear, sir," said he, "that I know of no lodgings that would be at all suitable for you. We are poor folk, all of us, and " "If you are honest folk," interrupted the 84 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters lady, with an enchanting smile, "we ask no more." Her husband checked her with a gesture and a look that was not lost on the now all- observing clerk, though it was long before he understood its significance. "We are willing to pay a reasonable charge, and shall require only a bed-room and a sitting- room. If possible, we should prefer to be where there are no other lodgers." "In that case," responded the clerk, with an eagerness he could scarcely veil, "I can accommodate you in my own house. It is simple but commodious, and I can answer that my wife will deal fairly by you." "What think you, Fanny?" asked the man, turning to his wife. "We can at least go and see." This they immediately did, and to Clerk Parsons's joy decided to make their home with him. Nor did their coming gladden the clerk alone. His wife and children, two little girls of nine and ten, from the moment they saw the "beautiful lady" conceived a warm attach- ment for her. Her geniality, her kindliness, her manifest love for her husband, appealed to their sympathies, as did the sadness which The Cock Lane Ghost 85 from time to time clouded her face. If, like Parsons himself, they soon became convinced that she and her husband shared some mo- mentous secret, they could not bring them- selves to believe that it involved her in wrong- doing. For the husband too they entertained the friendliest feelings. He was of a blunt, outspoken disposition and perhaps a trifle quick tempered, but he was frank and liberal and sincerely devoted to his wife. For all in the household, therefore, the days passed pleasantly; and when Mrs. Parsons one fine spring morning discovered her fair guest in tears she felt that time had established be- tween them relations sufficiently confidential to warrant her motherly intervention. "Come, my dear," said she, "I have long seen that something is troubling you. Tell me what it is, that I may be able to comfort, per- haps aid you." "It is nothing, good Mrs. Parsons, nothing. I am very foolish. I was thinking of what would become of me if anything should happen to my husband." "Dear, dear! and nothing will. But you could then turn to your relatives." "I have no relatives." 86 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters "What, my dear, are they all dead?" "No," in a solemn tone, "but I am dead to them." In a voice shaken by sobs, she now unfolded her story, and pitiful enough it was. She was, it appeared, the sister of Knight's first wife, who had died in Norfolk leaving a new born child that survived its mother only a few hours. At Knight's request she then went to keep house for him, and presently they found themselves very much in love with each other. But in the canon law they discovered an insuperable obstacle to marriage. Had the wife died without issue, or had her child not been born alive, the law would have permitted her, even though a "deceased wife's sister," to wed the man of her choice. As things stood, a legiti- mate union was out of the question. Learning this, they resolved to separate; but separation brought only increased longing. Thence grew a rapid and mutual persuasion that, under the circumstances, it would be no sin to bid defi- ance to the canon law and live together as man and wife. This view not finding favor with their relatives, and becoming apprehen- sive of arrest and imprisonment, they had fled to London and had hidden themselves in its The Cock Lane Ghost 87 depths. Surely, she concluded, with a des- perate intensity, surely fair-minded people would not condemn them ; surely all who knew what true love was would feel that they could not have acted otherwise? This confession, though it did not in the least diminish her landlady's regard for her, worked indirectly in a most disastrous way. Whether driven by necessity, or emboldened by the belief that his lodgers were at his mercy, the clerk soon afterward approached Knight for a small loan; and, obtaining it, repeated the request on several other occasions, until he had borrowed in all about twelve pounds. Payment he postponed on one pretext and another, until the lender finally lost all patience and informed him roundly that he must settle or stand suit. Then followed an interchange of words that in an instant terminated the pleasant connection of the preceding months. Parsons was described as "an impudent scoundrel who would be taught what honesty meant." Parsons described himself as "know- ing what honesty meant full well, and needing no lessons from a fugitive from justice." White with rage, Knight bundled his belong- ings together, called a hackney coach, and 88 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters within the hour had shaken the dust of Cock Lane from his feet, finding new lodgings in Clerkenwell and at once haling his whilom landlord to the debtors' court. A little time, and all else was forgotten in the serious illness of his beloved Fanny. At first the physician declared that the malady would prove slight; but she herself seemed to feel that she was doomed. "Send for a lawyer," she urged; "I w r ant to make my will. It is little enough I have, God knows; but I wish to be sure you will get it all, dear hus- band." To humor her, the will was drawn, and now it developed that the disease which had at- tacked her was smallpox in its worst form. No need to dwell on the fearful hours that fol- lowed, the fond farewells, the lapsing into a merciful unconsciousness, the death. They buried her in the vaults of St. John's Clerken- well, and from her tomb her husband came forth to give battle to the relatives who, shun- ning her while alive, did not disdain to seek possession of the small legacy she had left him. In this they failed, but scarcely had the smoke of the legal canonading cleared away, before he was called upon to meet a The Cock Lane Ghost 89 new issue so unexpected and so mysterious that history affords no stranger sequel to tale of love. The first intimation of its coming and of its nature was revealed to him, as to the public generally, by a brief paragraph printed in a mid January, 1762, issue of The London Ledger: "For some time past a great knocking hav- ing been heard in the night, at the officiat- ing parish clerk's of St. Sepulchre's, in Cock Lane near Smithfield, to the great terror of the family, and all means used to discover the meaning of it, four gentlemen sat up there last Friday night, among whom was a clergy- man standing withinside the door, who asked various questions. On his asking whether any one had been murdered, no answer was made; but on his asking whether any one had been poisoned, it knocked one and thirty times. The report current in the neighbor- hood is that a woman was some time ago poisoned, and buried at St. John's Clerken- well, by her brother-in-law." Instantly the city was agog, and for the next fortnight The Ledger, The Chronicle, and other newspapers gave much of their space to 90 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters details of the pretended revelations, though they were careful to refer to names by blanks or initials only.* These accounts informed their readers that the knocking had first been heard in the life time of the deceased when, during the absence of her supposed husband, she had shared her bed with Clerk Parsons's oldest daughter; that she had then pronounced it an omen of her early death; that it did not occur again until after she had died; that, if the soi-disant spirit could be believed, the earlier knocking had been due to the agency of her dead sister; and that, in her own turn, she had come back to bring to justice the villain who had murdered her for the little she possessed. In commenting on this amazing story, the papers were prompt to point out that the knocking was heard only in the pres- ence of the afore-mentioned daughter, now a girl of twelve; and while one or two, like The * It is proper to observe that the name Knight given to the leading actor in this singular drama rests on inference merely. Doubtless from a fear of libel suits, the contemporary newspapers and maga- zines speak of him only as Mr. , or Mr. K , there being, so far as the present writer has been able to discover, only one pub- lication (The Gentleman's Magazine) so bold as to refer to him as Mr. K t. Nowhere is his identity made clear. Judging from the prominence of those who rushed to his defense, he would seem to have been a person of considerable importance. The Cock Lane Ghost 91 Ledger, inclined to credence, the majority fol- lowed The Chronicle in denouncing the affair as an "imposture." The outraged husband, as may be imagined, lost not a moment in demanding admission to the seances which were proceeding merrily under the direction of a servant in the Par- sons family and a clergyman of the neighbor- hood. He found that the method practised was to put the girl to bed, wait until the knock- ing should begin, and then question the alleged spirit; when answers were received according to a code of one knock for an affirmative and two knocks for a negative. It was in his presence, then, though not at a single sitting, that the following dialogue was in this way carried on: "Are you Miss Fanny ?" "Yes." "Did you die naturally ?" "No." "Did you die by poison?" "Yes." " Do you know what kind of poison it was ? " "Yes." "Was it arsenic?" "Yes." "Was it given to you by any person other than Mr. Knight?" "No." "Do you wish that he be hanged?" "Yes." 92 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters "Was it given to you in gruel?" "No." "In beer?" -"Yes." Here a spectator interrupted with the re- mark that the deceased was never known to drink beer, but had been fond of purl, and the question was hastily put : "Was it not in purl?" - "Yes." "How long did you live after taking it ?" Three knocks, held to mean three hours. "Did Carrots" (her maid) "know of your being poisoned ?" "Yes." "Did you tell her?" "Yes." "How long was it after you took it before you told her ?" One knock, for one hour. Here was something tangible, and Knight went to work with a will to refute the terrible charge brought by the invisible accuser. As reported in The Daily Gazetteer, which had promised that "the reader may expect to be enlightened from time to time to the utmost of our power in this intricate and dark affair," the maid Carrots was found, and from her was procured a sworn statement that Mrs. Knight had said not a word to her about being poi- soned; that, indeed, she had become uncon- scious twelve hours before her death and remained unconscious to the end. The The Cock Lane Ghost 93 physician and apothecary who had attended her made affidavit to the same effect, and de- scribed the fatal nature of her illness. It was further shown that her death at most bene- fited Knight by not more than a hundred pounds, of which he had no need, as he was of independent means. Altogether, he would seem to have cleared himself effectually. Still the knocking con- tinued, and night after night the accusation was repeated. He now resorted, therefore, to a radical step to convince the public that he was the victim of a monstrous fraud. Asserting that little Miss Parsons herself produced the mysterious sounds, and that she did so at the instigation of her father, he se- cured an order for her removal to the house of a friend of his, a Clerkenwell clergyman. Here a decisive failure was recorded against the ghost. It had promised that it would knock on the coffin containing Mrs. Knight's re- mains; and about one o'clock in the morning, after hours of silent watching, during which the spirit gave not a sign of its presence, the entire company adjourned to the church. Only one member was found of sufficient boldness to plunge with Knight into the gloomy depths 94 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters where the dead lay entombed; and that one bore out his statement that never a knock had been heard. The girl was urged to confess, but persisted in her assertions that the ghost was in nowise of her making. Afterward, when the knocking had been resumed under more favorable auspices, word came from the unseen world that the fiasco in the church was ascribable to the very good reason that Knight had caused his wife's coffin to be secretly removed. "I will show them ! " cried the desperate man. With clergy- man, sexton, and undertaker, he visited the vaults once more and not only identified but opened the coffin. Meanwhile all London was flocking to Cock Lane as to a raree-show, on foot, on horseback, in vehicles of every description. Some, like the celebrated Dr. Johnson who took part in the coffin opening episode in Clerkenwell, were animated by scientific zeal ; but idle curi- osity inspired the great majority. The gossip- ing Walpole, in a letter to his friend Montagu, has left a graphic picture of the stir created by the newspaper reports. "I went to hear it," he writes; "for it is not an apparition but an audition. We set out The Cock Lane Ghost 95 from the opera, changed our clothes at North- umberland House, the Duke of York, Lady Northumberland, Lady Mary Coke, Lord Hertford, and I, all in one hackney coach, and drove to the spot; it rained in torrents; yet the lane was full of mob, and the house so full we could not get in ; at last they discovered it was the Duke of York, and the company squeezed themselves into one another's pock- ets to make room for us. The house, which is borrowed, and to which the ghost has ad- journed, is wretchedly small and miserable; when we opened the chamber, in which were fifty people with no light but one tallow candle at the end, we tumbled over the bed of the child to whom the ghost comes, and whom they are murdering by inches in such insuffer- able heat and stench. At the top of the room are clothes to dry. I asked if we were to have rope dancing between the acts. We heard nothing; they told us (as they would at a puppet show) that it would not come that night till seven in the morning, that is, when there are only prentices and old women. We stayed, however, till half an hour after one." The skepticism patent in this letter was shared by all thinking men. Letter after 96 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters letter of criticism, even of abuse, was poured into the newspapers. No less a personage than Oliver Goldsmith wrote, under the title of " The Mystery Revealed," a long pamphlet which was intended both to explain away the disturbances and to defend the luckless Knight. The actor Garrick dragged into a prologue a riming and sneering reference to the mystery; the artist Hogarth invoked his genius to deride it. Yet there were believers in plenty, and there even seem to have been some who thought of preying on the credulous by opening up a business in "knocking ghosts." "On Tuesday last," one reads in The Chronicle, "it was given out that a new knock- ing ghost was to perform that evening at a house in Broad Court near Bow Street, Covent Garden; information of which being given to a certain magistrate in the neighborhood, he sent his compliments with an intimation that it should not meet with that lenity the Cock Lane ghost did, but that it should knock hemp in Bridewell. On which the ghost very discreetly omitted the intended exhibition." Whether or no he took a hint from this publication, it is certain that, finding all other means failing, Knight now resolved to try to The Cock Lane Ghost 97 lay by legal process the ghost that had rendered him the most unhappy and the most talked of man in London. Going before a magistrate, he brought a charge of criminal conspiracy against Clerk Parsons, Mrs. Parsons, the Parsons servant, the clergyman who had aided the servant in eliciting the murder story from the talkative ghost, and a Cock Lane tradesman. All of these, he alleged, had banded themselves together to ruin him, their malice arising from the quarrel which had led him to remove to Clerkenwell and enter a lawsuit against Parsons. The girl herself he did not desire punished, because she was too young to understand the evil that she wrought. Warrants were forthwith issued, and, protesting their innocence frantically, the accused were dragged to prison. Their conviction soon followed, after a trial of which the only obtainable evidence is that it was held at the Guildhall before a special jury and was presided over by Lord Mans- field. Then, "the court desiring that Mr. K , who had been so much injured on this occasion, should receive some reparation,"* sentence was deferred for several months. * The Annual Register for 1762. 98 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters This enabled the clergyman and the tradesman "to purchase their pardon" by the payment of some five hundred or six hundred pounds to Knight. But the clerk either would not or could not pay a farthing, and on him and his, sentence was now passed. "The father," to quote once more from the meager account in The Annual Register, "was ordered to be set in the pillory three times in one month, once at the end of Cock Lane, and after that to be imprisoned two years; Elizabeth his wife, one year ; and Mary Frazer, six months to Bridewell, and to be kept there to hard labor." Thus, in wig and gown, did the law solemnly and severely place the seal of disbelief on the Cock Lane ghost; which, it is worth observing, seems to have vanished forever the moment the arrests were made. But, looking back at the case from the vantage point of chronological distance and of recent research into kindred affairs, it is difficult to accept as final the verdict reached by the "special jury" and concurred in by the public opinion of the day. It is prepos- terous to suppose that for so slight a cause as a dispute over twelve pounds Clerk Parsons The Cock Lane Ghost 99 and his associates would conspire to ruin a man's reputation and if possible to take his life; and still more preposterous to imagine that they would adopt such a means to attain this end. Of course, they may have had stronger reasons for being hostile to Knight than appears from the published facts. Yet it is significant that when the clerk was placed in the pillory he seemed to "be out of his mind," and so evident was his misery that the assembled mob "instead of using him ill, made a handsome collection for him." The more likely, nay the only defensible solution of the problem, is that he, his fellow sufferers, and Knight himself were one and all the victims of the uncontrollable impulses of a hysterical child. The case bears too strong a resemblance to the Tedworth and Epworth disturbances to admit of any other hypothesis. Not that the Parsons girl is to be placed on exactly the same footing as the Mompes- son children and Hetty Wesley, and held to some extent responsible for the mischievous phenomena she produced. On the contrary, the more one studies the evidence the stronger grows the conviction that in her we have a striking and singular in- 100 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters stance of "dissociation." She was, it is very evident, strongly attached to the unfortunate Mrs. Knight, doubtless felt keenly the separa- tion from her, and, whether consciously or subconsciously, would cherish a grudge against Knight as the cause of that separation. The news of Mrs. Knight's death would come as a great shock, and might easily act, so to speak, as the fulcrum of the lever of mental disintegra- tion. Then, dimly enough at first but soon with portentous rapidity, her disordered con- sciousness would conceive the idea that her friend had been murdered and that it was her duty to bring the slayer to justice. From this it would be an easy step to the development, in the neurotic child, of a full fledged second- ary personality, akin to that found in the spiritistic mediums of later times. Now, for the first time, her faculties would seem to her astonished parents to be in the keeping and under the control of an extraneous being, a departed, discarnate spirit; and in this error she and they would be confirmed by the suggestions and foolish questions of those who came to marvel. It needed another great shock there being in those days no Janet or Prince or Sidis to take charge of the case The Cock Lane Ghost 101 the shock of the arrest and imprisonment of her parents, to effect at least partial reintegra- tion and the consequent disappearance of the secondary self, the much debated, malevolent Cock Lane ghost. VI THE GHOST SEEN BY LORD BROUGHAM IT is comparatively easy, when seated before a roaring fire in a well-lighted room, to sneer ghosts out of existence, and roundly affirm that they are without exception the fanciful products of a heated imagination. But the matter takes on a very different com- plexion, when in that same room and without so much as the opening of a door, one is unex- pectedly confronted by the figure of an absent friend, who, it subsequently appears, is about that time breathing his last in another part of the world. Especially would it seem impos- sible to remain skeptical if there existed be- tween oneself and the friend in question a compact, drawn up years before in an access of youthful enthusiasm, binding whichever should die first to appear to the other at the moment of death. This, as all students of ghostology are aware, has frequently been the case; and it was pre- cisely the case with the ghost seen by the 102 The Ghost Seen by Lord Brougham 103 famous Lord Brougham, the brilliant and versatile Scotchman, whose astonishingly long and successful career in England as statesman, judge, lawyer, man of science, philanthropist, orator, and author won him a place among the immortals both of the Georgian and of the Victorian era. At the time he saw the ghost he was still a young man, thinking far less of what the future might hold than of the pleasures of the present. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a more unlikely subject for a ghostly experience. From his earliest youth, his father, a most matter of fact person, sedulously endeavored to impress him with the belief that the only spirits deserving of the name were those which came in oddly labeled bottles; and in support of this view the elder Brougham frequently related the adventures of sundry persons of his acquaintance who had engaged in the mischievous pastime of ghost hunting. Added to the natural effect of such tales as these was the inherent exuberance of Brougham's dis- position and the bent of his mind to mathe- matics and kindred exact sciences. It was at the Edinburgh high school that he first met his future ghost, who at the time 104 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters was a youngster like himself, and became and long remained his most intimate friend. The two lads were graduated together from the high school, and together matriculated into the university, where, in the intervals Broug- ham could spare from his favorite studies and recreations, and from the company of the daredevil students with whom he soon began to associate, they continued their old time walks and talks. On one of these walks, the conversation happened to turn to the perennial problem of life beyond the grave and the possibility of the dead communicating with the living Brougham, mindful of the views maintained by his father, doubtless treated the subject lightly, if not scoffingly; but one word led to another, until finally, in what he afterward described as a moment of folly, he covenanted with his friend that whichever of them should happen to pass from earth first would, if it were at all possible, show himself in spirit to the other, and thus prove beyond peradven- ture that the soul of man survived the death of the body. So far as Brougham was concerned, this undertaking was speedily forgotten in the The Ghost Seen by Lord Brougham 105 pressure of the many activities into which he plunged with all the ardor of his impetuous nature. His days were given wholly to the pursuit of knowledge; his nights to the pur- suit of pleasure, as pleasure was then counted by the roystering young Scotchmen, whose favorite resort was the tavern, and whose most popular pastime was filching signs, bell handles, and knockers, and stirring the city guard to unwonted energy. Under such conditions neither the death pact nor the solemn minded youth with whom he had made it could remain long in his memory; and it is not surprising to find that with the end of college life and the re- moval of his boyhood's friend to India, where he entered the civil service, they soon became as strangers to each other. Brougham himself remained in Edinburgh to read for the law, and incidentally to develop with the aid of an amateur debating society the oratorical talents that were in time to make him the logical successor of Pitt, Fox, and Burke in the House of Commons. He con- tinued none the less a lover of pleasure, some of which, however, he now took in the healthy form of long walking trips through the High- lands. In this way he acquired a desire for 106 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters travel, and when, in the autumn of 1799, an opportunity came for an extended tour of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, he grasped it eagerly. Together with the future diplomat, Lord Stuart of Rothsay, then plain Charles Stuart and the boon companion of many a pedestrian excursion, he sailed for Copen- hagen late in September, and by leisurely stages made his way thence to Stockholm, alive to all the varied interests of the novel scenes in which he found himself; but en- countering little that was exciting or adven- turous, until, after a prolonged sojourn in the Swedish capital and a brief visit to Goteborg, he started for Norway. By this time the weather had turned so cold that the travelers resolved to bring their tour to a sudden end, and to press on as rapidly as the bad roads would permit to some Nor- wegian port, where they hoped to find a ship that would carry them back to Scotland. Ac- cordingly, leaving Goteborg early in the morn- ing of December 19, they journeyed steadily until after midnight, when they came to an inn that seemed to promise comfortable sleeping accommodations. Stuart lost no time in going to bed; but Brougham decided The Ghost Seen by Lord Brougham 107 to wait until a hot bath could be prepared for him. Plunging into it, and forgetful of everything save the warmth that was doubly welcome after the cold of the long drive, he suddenly became aware that he was not alone in the room. No door had opened, not a footstep had been heard ; but in the light of the flicker- ing candles he plainly saw the figure of a man seated in the chair on which he had carelessly thrown his clothes. And this figure he in- stantly recognized as that of his early playmate, the forgotten chum who, as he well knew, had years before gone from the land of the heather to the land of the blazing sun. Yet here he sat, in the quaintly furnished sleeping chamber of a Swedish roadside inn, gazing composedly at his astounded friend. At once there flashed into Brougham's mind remembrance of the death pact, and he leaped from the bath, only to lose all consciousness and fall headlong to the floor. When he revived, the apparition had disappeared. There was little sleep for the hard headed Scotchman that night. The vision had been too definite, the shock too intense. But, dressing, he sat down and strove to debate the 108 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters matter in the light of cold reason. He must, he argued, have dozed off in the bath and ex- perienced a strange dream. To be sure, he had not been thinking of his old comrade, and for years had had no communication with him. Nor had anything taken place during the tour to bring to memory either him or any member of his family, or to turn Brougham's mind to thoughts of India. Still, he found it impossible to believe that he had seen a ghost. At most, he reiterated to himself, it could have been nothing more than an exceptionally clear cut dream. And to this opinion he stubbornly adhered, notwithstanding the receipt, soon after his return to Edinburgh, of a letter from India announcing the death of the friend who had been so mysteriously recalled to his recol- lection, and giving December 19 as the date of death. More than sixty years later we find him, in his autobiography commenting, on the experience anew, granting that it was a strange coincidence but refusing to admit that it was anything more than the coincidence of a dream. It was in his autobiography, by the way, that he first referred to the confirmatory letter. This fact, taken in connection with his repu- The Ghost Seen by Lord Brougham 109 tation for holding the truth in light esteem and with several vague and puzzling state- ments contained in the detailed account of the experience itself as set forth in his journal of the Scandinavian tour, has led some critics to make the suggestion that his narrative par- takes of the nature of fiction rather than of a sober recital of facts. Against this, however, must be set Brougham's complete and in- vincible repugnance to accept at face value anything bordering on the supernatural. He took no pleasure in the thought that he had possibly been the recipient of a visit from a departed spirit. On the contrary, it annoyed him, and he sought earnestly to find a natural explanation for an occurrence which remained unique throughout his long life. No one would have been readier to point out the futility of the apparition if the absent friend had really continued hale and hearty after December 19. And it is therefore reasonable to assume that had he wished to falsify at all, he would have given an altogether different sequel to the story of his vision or dream, as he preferred to call it, though the evidence which he himself furnishes shows that he was not asleep. 110 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters The question still remains, of course, whether he was justified in dismissing it as a sheer chance coincidence. If it stood by itself, it would obviously be permissible to accept this explanation as all sufficient. But the fact is that it is only one of many similar in- stances. This was strikingly brought out only a few years ago through a far reaching inquiry, a "census of hallucinations," instituted by a special committee of the Society for Psychical Research. Enlisting the services of some four hundred "collectors," the committee instructed each of these to address to twenty-five adults, selected at random, the query, "Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice ; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?" In all, seventeen thousand people were thus questioned, and almost ten per cent, of the answers received proved to be in the affirmative. More than this, it appeared that out of a total of three hundred and fifty recognized apparitions of living per- sons, no fewer than sixty-five were "death The Ghost Seen by Lord Brougham 111 coincidences," in which the hallucinatory ex- perience occurred within from one hour to twelve hours after the death of the person seen. Sifting these death coincidences carefully, the committee for various reasons rejected more than half, and at the same time raised the total of recognized apparitions of living persons from three hundred and fifty to thirteen hundred. This was done in order to make generous allowance for the number of such apparitions forgotten by those to whom the question had been put, investigation show- ing that the great majority of hallucinations reported were given as of comparatively re- cent occurrence, and that there was a rapid decrease as the years of occurrence became more remote. As a final result, therefore, the committee found about thirty death coincidences out of thirteen hundred cases, or a proportion of one in forty-three. Computing from the average annual death-rate for England and Wales, it was calculated that the probability that any one person would die on a given day was about one in nineteen thousand; in other words, out of every nineteen thousand appari- tions of living persons, there should occur, 112 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters by chance alone, one death coincidence. The actual proportion, however, as established by the inquiry, was equivalent to about four hundred and forty in nineteen thousand, or four hundred and forty times the most prob- able number, and this when the apparitions reported were considered merely collectively as having been seen at any time within twelve hours after death. Not a few, as a matter of fact, were reported as having been seen within one hour after death, and for these the im- probability of occurrence by chance alone was manifestly twelve times four hundred and forty. In view of these considerations the committee felt warranted in declaring that "between deaths and apparitions of dying persons a connection exists which is not due to chance."* Had Lord Brougham lived to study the statistics of this remarkable census of hallucina- tions, he might have formed a higher opinion of his ghost; but he would also have been in a better position to deny its supernatural attri- butes. For, if the Society for Psychical Re- search has made it impossible to doubt the * The committee's report will be found in the tenth volume of the "Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research." The Ghost Seen by Lord Brougham 113 existence of such ghosts as that which he be- held during his travels in Sweden, it has like- wise made discoveries which afford a really substantial reason for asserting that they no more hail from the world beyond than do ghosts that are unmistakably the creations of fancy or fraud. This results from the so- ciety's investigations of thought transference or telepathy, to use the term now commonly employed. At an early stage of the experiments under- taken to determine the possibility of trans- mitting thought from mind to mind without the intervention of any known means of com- munication, it was found that when success attended the efforts of the experimenters the telepathic message was frequently received not in the form of pure thought but as a hallucinatory image; and what is still more important in the present connection, it was further found possible so to produce not merely images of cards, flowers, books, and other inanimate objects, but also images of living persons. Thus, as chronicled with corroborative evi- dence in the society's "Proceedings," an English clergyman named Godfrey telepathi- 114 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters cally caused a distant friend to see an appa- rition of him one night; the same result was achieved by a Mr. Sinclair of New Jersey, who, during a visit to New York, succeeded in projecting a phantasm of himself which was clearly seen by his wife in Lake wood ; and similarly a Mr. Kirk, while seated in his Lon- don office, paid a telepathic visit to the home of a young woman, who saw him as distinctly as though he had gone there in the flesh. In all of these, as in other cases recorded by the so- ciety, the persons to whom the apparitions were vouchsafed had no idea that any experi- ment of the kind was being attempted. Indeed, there is on record an apparently well authenticated instance of the experimental production of an apparition not of the living but of the dead. This occurred in Germany many years ago, when a certain Herr Weser- mann undertook to "will" a military friend into dreaming of a woman who had long been dead. The sequel may be related in Herr Wesermann's own words: "A lady, who had been dead five years, was to appear to Lieutenant N. in a dream at 10.30 P.M., and incite him to good deeds. At half -past ten, contrary to expectation, Herr The Ghost Seen by Lord Brougham 115 N. had not gone to bed but was discussing the French campaign with his friend Lieutenant S. in the ante-room. Suddenly the door of the room opened, the lady entered dressed in white, with a black kerchief and uncovered head, greeted S. with her hand three times in a friendly manner; then turned to N., nodded to him, and returned again through the door- way. "As this story, related to me by Lieutenant N., seemed to be too remarkable from a psychological point of view for the truth of it not to be duly established, I wrote to Lieuten- ant S., who was living six miles away, and asked him to give me his account of it. He sent me the following reply : '"On the thirteenth of March, 1817, Herr N. came to pay me a visit at my lodgings about a league from A . He stayed the night with me. After supper, and when we were both undressed, I was sitting on my bed and Herr N. was standing by the door of the next room on the point also of going to bed. This was about half -past ten. We were speaking partly about indifferent subjects and partly about the events of the French campaign. Sud- denly the door of the kitchen opened without 116 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters a sound, and a lady entered, very pale, taller than Herr N., about five feet four inches in height, strong and broad of figure, dressed in white, but with a large black kerchief which reached to below the waist. "'She entered with bare head, greeted me with the hand three times in complimentary fashion, turned round to the left toward Herr N., and waved her hand to him three times; after which the figure quietly, and again with- out any creaking of the door, went out. We followed at once in order to discover whether there were any deception, but found nothing. The strangest thing was this, that our night- watch of two men whom I had shortly found on the watch were now asleep, though at my first call they were on the alert; and that the door of the room, which always opens with a good deal of noise, did not make the slightest sound when opened by the figure.'"* It is also significant that, as was made evident by the census of hallucinations, by far the larger number of apparitions re- ported are those of persons still alive and well. In these cases, nobody being dead, it * Translation from the " Journal of the Society for Psychical Research," Vol. IV. p. 218. The Ghost Seen by Lord Brougham 117 is absurd * to raise the cry of spirits, and the only tenable hypothesis is that, through one of the several causes which seem to quicken tele- pathic action, a spontaneous telepathic hal- lucination has been produced. Now, the experiments conducted by the society and by independent investigators have shown that telepathic messages often lie dormant for hours beneath the threshold of the receiver's consciousness, being consciously apprehended only when certain favoring conditions arise; as, for example, when the receiver has fallen asleep, or into a state of reverie, or when, tired out after a long day's work, he has utterly relaxed mentally. This is technically * I had originally written " impossible," but a critic of my " Riddle of Personality," in which this point was taken up, has convinced me that " absurd " is the better word. The critic in question writes : " what evidence has the author that an apparition of the living is not a spirit? Why may not the spirit of the living person have left his body and appeared to his friend ? Such is the view of many people, and it coincides with certain phenomena in dreams." But, to raise only one objection: If the apparition appear at a moment when the person seen is actively engaged elsewhere it may be in writing a book, or preaching a sermon what is it that is seen, and what is it that is writing or preach- ing ? Is the " spirit " present in both places at the same time in the shadowy apparition, and in the living, breathing, busily- occupied human entity? Assuredly, if it be not "impossible" to raise the cry of spirits in such a case, it would at all events seem " absurd " to do so. 118 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters known as "deferred percipience," and, con- sidered in conjunction with the discoveries mentioned, it is amply sufficient to dislodge from the realm of the supernatural the ghost seen by Lord Brougham, and every ghost that is not a mere imposter. In the Brougham case the exciting cause of the hallucination seems to have been the death pact. As he lay dying in India, the mind of the whilom schoolboy would, con- sciously or unconsciously, revert to that agree- ment with the friend of his youth, and thence would arise the desire to let him know that the plighted word had not been forgotten. Across the vast intervening space, by what mechanism we as yet do not know, the mes- sage would flash instantaneously, to remain unapprehended, perhaps for hours after the death of the sender, until, in the quiet of the Swedish inn and resting from the fatigues of the journey, Brougham's mental faculties passed momentarily into the condition neces- sary for its objective realization. Then, precisely as in experimental tele- pathy the receiver sees a hallucinatory image of the trinket or the book; with a suddenness and vividness that could not fail to shock him, The Ghost Seen by Lord Brougham 119 the message would find expression by the creation before Brougham's startled eyes of a hallucinatory image of the friend who, as he was to learn later, had died that same day thousands of miles from Sweden. Knowing nothing of the possibilities of the human mind, as revealed, if only faintly, by the labors of a later generation, it was inevitable he should believe he had no alternative between dis- missing the experience as a peculiar dream or admitting that in very truth he had looked upon a ghost. vn THE SEERESS OF PREVORST MODERN spiritism, as every student of that fascinating if elusive subject is aware, dates from the closing years of the first half of the nineteenth century. But the celebrated Fox sisters, whose revelations at that time served to crystallize into an organized religious system the idea of the possibility of communication between this world and the world beyond, were by no means the first of spiritistic mediums. Long before their day there were those who professed to have cognizance of things unseen and to act as intermediaries between the living and the dead; and although lost to sight amid the throng of latter-day claimants to similar powers, the achievements of some of these early adventurers into the unknown have not been surpassed by the best performances of the Fox girls and their long line of successors. Especially is this true of the mediumship of a young German woman, Frederica Hauffe, 120 The Seer ess of Prevorst 121 who in the course of her short, pitiful, and tragic career is credited with having displayed more varied and picturesque supernatural gifts than the most renowned wonder-worker of to-day. Like many modern mediums she was of humble origin, her birthplace being a forester's hut in the Wiirtemberg mountain village of Prevorst; and here, among wood- cutters and charcoal-burners, she passed the first years of her life. Even while still a child she seems to have attracted wide-spread attention on account of certain peculiarities of temperament and conduct. It was noticed that though naturally gay and playful she occasionally assumed a strangely intent and serious manner; that in her happiest moments she was subject to unaccountable fits of shud- dering and shivering; and that she seemed keenly alive not merely to the sights and sounds of every-day life but to influences unfelt by those about her. This last trait re- ceived a sudden and unexpected development when, at the age of twelve or thirteen, she was sent to the neighboring town of Lowenstein to be educated under the care of her grand- parents, a worthy couple named Schmidgall. Grandfather Schmidgall was an exceed- Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters ingly superstitious old man, with a singular fondness for visiting solitary and gloomy places, particularly churchyards; and he soon began to take the little girl with him on such strolls. But he discovered, much to his amazement, that though she listened with avidity to the tales he told her of the romantic and mysterious events that had occurred within the somber ruins with which the countryside was liberally endowed, she was reluctant to explore those ruins or wander among the graves where he delighted to resort. At first he was inclined to ascribe her reluct- ance to weak and sentimental timidity, but he speedily found reason to adopt an alto- gether different view. He noticed that when- ever he took her to graveyards or to churches in which there were graves, her frail form became greatly agitated, and at times she seemed rooted to the ground; and that there were certain places, especially an old kitchen in a nearby castle, which he could not persuade her to enter, and the mere sight of which caused her to quake and tremble. "The child," he told his wife, * 'feels the presence of the dead, and, mark you, she will end by seeing the dead." The Seer ess of Prevorst 123 He was, therefore, more alarmed than sur- prised when one midnight, long after he had fancied her in bed and asleep, she ran to his room and informed him that she had just be- held in the hall a tall, dark figure which, sigh- ing heavily, passed her and disappeared in the vestibule. With awe, not unmixed with satis- faction, Schmidgall remembered that he had once seen the self -same apparition; but he prudently endeavored to convince her that she had been dreaming and sent her back to her room, which, thenceforward, he never allowed her to leave at night. In this way Frederica HauflVs mediumship began. But several years were to pass before she saw another ghost or gave evidence of possessing supernormal powers other than by occasional dreams of a prophetic and revela- tory nature. In the meanwhile she rejoined her parents and moved with them from Pre- vorst to Oberstenfeld, where, in her nineteenth year, she was married. It w T as distinctly a marriage of convenience, arranged without regard to her wishes, and the moment the engagement was announced she secluded her- self from her friends and passed her days and nights in weeping. For weeks together she 124 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters went without sleep, ate scarcely anything, and became thin, pale, and feeble. It was rumored that she had set her affections in another quarter: but her relatives angrily denied this and asserted that once married she would soon become herself again. They w r ere mistaken. From her wedding day, which she celebrated by attending the funeral of a venerable clergyman to whom she had been warmly attached, her health broke rapidly. One morning she awoke in a high fever that lasted a fortnight and was followed by convulsive spasms, during which she beheld at the bedside the image of her grandmother Schmidgall, who, it subsequently developed, was at that moment dying in dis- tant Lowenstein. The spasms continuing, despite the application of the customary rude remedies of the time, it was decided to send for a physician with some knowledge of mes- merism, which was then becoming popular in Germany. To the astonishment of those who thronged the sick room, the first touch of his hand on her forehead brought relief. The convulsions ceased, she became calm, and presently she fell asleep. But on awaking she was attacked as before, and try as he The Seeress of Prevorst 125 might the physician could not effect a perma- nent cure. To all his " passes " she responded with gratifying promptitude, only to suffer a relapse the moment she was released from the mesmeric influence. At this juncture aid was received from a most extraordinary source, according to the story Frederica told her wondering friends. With benign visage and extended hand, the spirit of her grandmother appeared to her for seven successive nights, mesmerized her, and taught her how to mesmerize herself. The re- sults of this visitation, if not altogether fortu- nate, were at least to some extent curative. There were periods when she was able not merely to leave her bed but to attend to house- hold duties and indulge in long walks and drives. But it was painfully apparent that she was still in a precarious condition. From her infancy she had always been powerfully affected by the touch of different metals, and now this phenomenon was inten- sified a thousand -fold. The placing of a mag- net on her forehead caused her features to be contorted as though by a stroke of paralysis; contact with glass and sand made her catalep- tic. Once she was found seated on a sand- 126 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters stone bench, unable to move hand or foot. About this time also she acquired the faculty of crystal-gazing; that is to say, by looking into a bowl of water she could correctly de- scribe scenes transpiring at a distance. More than this, she now declared that behind the persons in whose company she was she per- ceived ghostly forms, some of which she recognized as dead acquaintances. Unlike her grandmother, these new visitants from the unknown world did not provide her with the means of regaining her lost health. On the contrary, from the time they first put in their appearance she grew far worse, suffer- ing not so much from convulsive attacks as from an increasing lassitude. She complained that eating was a great tax on her strength, and that rising and walking were out of the question. Unable to comprehend this new turn of affairs, her attendants lost all patience, declared that if she had made up her mind to die she might as well do so as at once, and tried to force her to leave her bed. Finally her parents intervened, and at their request she was brought back to Oberstenfeld. Here she found an altogether congenial environment, and for a while showed marked The Seeress of Prevorst 127 improvement. Here too, and in a most sen- sational way, her mediumship blossomed into full fruition. She had been home for only a short time when the family began to be dis- turbed by mysterious noises for which they could find no cause. A sound like the ring- ing of glasses was frequently heard, as were footsteps and knockings on the walls. Her father, in particular, asserted that sometimes he felt a strange pressure on his shoulder or his foot. The impression grew that the house, which was part of the ancient, picturesque, and none too well preserved cathedral of Oberstenfeld, was haunted by the spirits of its former occupants. One night, shortly after retiring to the room which they shared in common, Frederica, her sister, and a maid servant saw a lighted candle, apparently of its own volition, move up and down the table on which it was burning. The sister and the servant saw nothing more; but Frederica the next instant beheld a thin, grayish cloud, which presently resolved into the form of a man, about fifty years old, attired in the costume of a medieval knight. Approaching, this strange apparition gazed steadfastly at her, and in a low but clear tone 128 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters urged her to rise and follow it, saying that she alone could loosen its bonds. Overcome with terror, she cried out that she would not follow, then ran across the room and hid herself in the bed where her sister and the servant lay panic-stricken. That night she saw no more of the apparition: but the maid, whom they sent to sleep in the bed she had so hurriedly vacated, declared that the coverings were forcibly drawn off her by an unseen hand. The next night the apparition appeared to Frederica again, and to her alone. This time it seemed not sorrowful but angry, and threatened that if she did not rise and follow she would be hurled out of the window. At her bold retort, "In the name of Jesus, do it!" the apparition vanished, to return a few nights later, and after that to show itself to her by day as well as by night. It now informed her that it was the ghost of a nobleman named Weiler, who had slain his brother and for that crime was condemned to wander ceaselessly until it recovered a cer- tain piece of paper hidden in a vault under the cathedral. On hearing this, she solemnly assured it that by prayer alone could its sins be forgiven and pardon obtained, and The Seeress of Prevorst 129 thereupon she set herself to teach it to pray. Ultimately, with a most joyous countenance, the ghost told her that she had indeed led it to its Redeemer and won its release; and at the same time seven tiny spirits the spirits of the children it had had on earth appeared in a circle about it and sang melodiously. Nor did they leave her until the protecting apparition of her grandmother interrupted their thanksgivings and bade them be gone. Whether or no the happy ghost notified others in kindred plight of the success that had attended her efforts, it is certain that, if the contemporary records are to be accepted, the few short years of life remaining to her were largely occupied in ministering to the wants of distressed spirits. Phantom monks, nobles, peasants, pressed upon her with terrible tales of misdeeds unatoned, and begged her to instruct them in the prayers which were essential to salvation. There was one specially importunate group, the apparitions of a young man, a young woman, and a new-born child wrapped in ghostly rags, which gave her no peace for months. The child, they said, was theirs and had been murdered by them, and the young woman in her turn had been mur- 130 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters dered by the young man. Naturally, they were in an unhappy frame of mind, and until she was able to send them on their way re- joicing their conduct and language were so extravagant that they appalled her more than did any other of the numerous seekers for grace and rest. The dead were not the only ones to whom she ministered. Side by side with the gift of ghost-seeing and ghost-conversing, and with the no less remarkable gift of speaking in an unknown tongue and of setting forth the mysteries of the hereafter, she developed the peculiar faculty of peering into the innermost being of spirits still in the flesh, detecting the obscure causes of disease, and prescribing remedies. Strange to say, her own health remained poor, and gradually she became so feeble that from day to day her death seemed imminent. But her parents were resolved to do all they could for her, and at last be- thought themselves of placing her in the hands of the much talked of physician, Justinus Kerner, who lived in the pleasant valley town of Weinsberg and was said to be an adept in every branch of the healing art, notably in the mesmerism which alone appeared to benefit The Seeress of Prevorst 131 her. To Kerner, therefore, she was sent; and it is not difficult to imagine the delight with which she exchanged the gloomy moun- tain forests for the verdant meadows and fragrant vineyards of Weinsberg. Kerner, who is better known to the present generation as mystic and poet than as physi- cian, was justly accounted one of the celebri- ties of the day. Eccentric and visionary, he was yet a man of solid learning and an intense patriot. It was owing to him, as his biogra- phers fondly recall, that Weinsberg's most glorious monument, the well named Weiber- trube, was not suffered to fall into utter neglect, but was instead restored to remind all Germans of that distant day, in the long gone twelfth century, when the women of Weinsberg, securing from the conqueror the promise that their lives would be spared, and that they might take with them from the doomed city their most precious belongings, staggered forth under the burden not of jewels and treasure but of their husbands, whom they carried in their arms or on their backs. Thus was a massacre averted, and thus did the name of "Woman's Faithfulness" attach itself to the castle in the shadow of 132 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters which Kerner spent his days. But at the time of which we write neither the castle nor poetry held first place in his thoughts; instead, he was absorbed in the practice of his profession. And so, with the ardor of the enthusiast and the sympathy of the true physician, he wel- comed to Weinsberg the sufferer of whom he had heard much and of whom he was to become both doctor and biographer.* It was in November, 1826, that he first met her. She was then twenty-five, and thus had been for six years in a state of almost constant ill health. Her very appearance moved him profoundly. Her fragile body, he relates in the graphic word picture he drew, enveloped her spirit but as a gauzy veil. She was extremely small, with Oriental features and dark-lashed eyes that were at once penetra- ting and "prophetic." When she spoke his conviction deepened that he was looking on one who belonged more to the world of the dead than to the world of the living; and he speedily became persuaded that she actually * Kerner's account of Frederica Hauffe is found in his "Die Seherin von Prevorst," accessible in an English translation by Mrs.Catharine Crowe. Students of the supernatural, it may be added, will find a great deal of interesting material in Mrs. Crowe's "The Night Side of Nature." The Seeress of Prevorst 133 did, as she claimed, commune with the dead. Less than a month after her arrival at Weins- berg, and being in the trance condition that was now frequent with her, she announced to him that she had been visited by a ghost, which insisted on showing her a sheet of paper covered with figures and begged her to give it to his wife, who was still alive and would understand its significance and the duty de- volving upon her of making restitution to the man he had wronged in life. Kerner was thunderstruck at recognizing from her description a Weinsberg lawyer who had been dead for some years and was thought to have defrauded a client out of a large sum of money. Eagerly he plied Frederica with questions, among other things asking her to endeavor to locate the paper of which the ghost spoke. "I see it," said she, dreamily. "It lies in a building which is sixty paces from my bed. In this I see a large and a smaller room. In the latter sits a tall gentleman, who is work- ing at a table. Now he goes out, and now he returns. Beyond these rooms there is one still larger, in which are some chests and a 134 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters long table. On the table is a wooden thing I cannot name it and on this lie three heaps of paper; and in the center one, about the middle of the heap, lies the sheet which so torments him." Knowing that this was an exact account of the office of the local bailiff, Kerner hastened to that functionary with the astonishing news, and was still more astonished when the bailiff told him that he had been occupied precisely as she said. Together they searched among the papers on the table; but could find none in the lawyer's handwriting. Frederica, how- ever, was insistent, adding that one corner of the paper in question was turned down and that it was enclosed in a stout brown envelope. A second search proved that she was right, and on opening the paper it was found to contain not only figures but an explicit reference to a private account book of which the lawyer's widow had denied all knowledge. Still more striking was the fact, according to Kerner 's narrative, that when the bailiff, as a test, placed the paper in a certain position on his desk and went to Frederica, pretending that he had it with him, she correctly informed him where it was and read it off to him word by word. The Seer ess of Prevorst 135 Although the sequel was rather unsatis- factory, inasmuch as the widow persisted in asserting that she knew nothing of a private account book and refused to yield a penny to the injured client, Kerner was so impressed by this exhibition of supernatural power that, in order to study his patient more closely, he had her removed from her lodgings to his own house. Thither also, as soon as he learned that their presence seemed to increase her suscepti- bility to the occult influences by which she was surrounded, he brought her sister and the maid servant of the dancing candle episode. Then ensued greater marvels than had ever bewitched the family at Oberstenfeld. In- visible hands threw articles of furniture at the enthusiastic doctor and his friends ; ghostly fingers sprinkled lime and gravel on the floor- ing of his halls and rooms; spirit knuckles beat lively tattoos on walls, tables, chairs, and bedsteads. And all the w T hile ghosts with criminal pasts flocked in and out, seeking con- solation and advice. Only once or twice, however, did the physician himself see any- thing even remotely resembling a ghost. On one occasion a cloudy shape floated past his window; and on another he saw at Frederica's 136 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters bedside a pillar of vapor, which she afterward told him was the specter of a tall old man who had visited her twice before. But if he neither saw the ghosts nor heard them speak, it was sufficiently demonstrated to him that they were really in evidence. The knocking, furniture throwing, and gravel sprinkling were the least of the wonders of which it was permitted him to be a witness. Once, when Frederica was taking an after- noon nap, a spirit that was evidently solicitous for her comfort drew off her boots, and in his presence carried them across the room to where her sister was standing by a window. Again at midnight, after a preliminary knock- ing on the walls, he observed another spirit, or possibly the same, open a book she had been reading which was lying on her bed. Most marvelous of all, when her father died she herself enacted the role of ghost, the news of his death being conveyed to her super- naturally and her cry of anguish being super- naturally conveyed back to the room where his corpse lay, in Oberstenfeld, and where it was distinctly heard by the physician who had attended him in his last moments. After this crowning piece of testimony the good The Seeress of Prevorst 137 Kerner felt that no doubt of her unheard of powers could remain in the most skeptical mind. Judge, then, of his dismay and grief when he saw her visibly fading away, daily growing more ethereal of form and feature, more weak in body and spirit. It was his belief that the ghosts were robbing her of her vitality, and earnestly but vainly he strove to banish them. She herself declared, with a tone of inde- scribable relief, that she knew the end was near, and that she welcomed it, as she longed to attain the quiet of the grave with her father and Grandfather and Grandmother Schmid- gall. When Kerner sought to cheer her by the assurance that she yet had many years to live, she silenced him with the tale of a grue- some vision. Three times, she said, there had appeared to her at dead of night a female figure, wrapped in black and standing beside an open and empty coffin, to which it beckoned her. But before she died she wished to see again the mountains of her childhood; and to the mountains Kerner carried her. There, on August 5, 1829, peacefully and happily, to the singing of hymns and the sobbing utterance of prayers, her soul took its flight. 138 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters But, unlike Kerner, who hastened back to Weinsberg to write the biography of this "delicate flower who lived upon sunbeams," we must shake off the spell of her strange per- sonality and ask seriously what manner of mortal she was. This inquiry is the more imperative since the doings of the tambourine players and automatic writers, of whom so much is made in certain quarters to-day, pale into insignificance beside the story of her remarkable career. Now, in point of fact, the evidence bearing out the claim that she saw and talked with the dead is practically confined to the account written by the mourning Kerner, whom no one would for a moment call an unprejudiced witness. Already deeply immersed in the study of the marvelous, his mind absorbed in the weird phenomena of the recently dis- covered science of animal magnetism, she came to him both as a patient and as a living embodiment of the mysteries that held for him a boundless fascination, and once he found reason to believe in her alleged super- normal powers, there was nothing too fantastic or extravagant to which he would not give ready credence and assent. The Seeress of Prevorst 139 His lengthy record of "facts" includes not only what he himself saw or thought he saw, but every tale and anecdote related to him by the seeress and her friends, and also includes so many incidents of supernaturalism on the part of others that it would well seem that half the peasant population of Wiirtemberg were ghost seers. Besides this, detailed as his narrative is, it is lacking in precisely those details which would give it evidential value; so lacking, indeed, that even such a spiritistic advocate as the late F. W. H. Myers pro- nounced it "quite inadequate" for citation in support of the spiritistic theory. Nevertheless, taking his extraordinary docu- ment for what it is worth, careful considera- tion of it leads to the conclusion that it contains the story not so much of a great fraud as of a great tragedy. It is obvious that there was frequent and barefaced trickery, par- ticularly on the part of Frederica's sister and the ubiquitous servant girl; but it is equally certain that Frederica herself was a wholly abnormal creature, firmly self-deluded, one might say self -hypnotized, into the belief that the dead consorted with her. And it is hardly less certain that in her singular 140 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters state of body and mind she gave evidence not indeed of supernatural but of telepathic and clairvoyant powers on which she and those about her, in that unenlightened age, could not but put a supernatural interpretation. It is not difficult to trace the origin of the nervous and mental disease from which she suffered. Kerner's account of her childhood shows plainly that she was born tempera- mentally imaginative and unstable and that she was raised in an environment well calcu- lated to exaggerate her imaginativeness and instability. Ghosts and goblins were favorite topics of conversation among the peasantry of Prevorst, while the children with whom she played were many of them unstable like her- self, neurotic, hysterical, and the victims of St. Vitus's dance. The weird and uneasy ideas and feelings which thus early took pos- session of her were given firmer lodgment by her unfortunate sojourn with grave-haunting Grandfather Schmidgall. After this, it seems, she suffered for a year from some eye trouble, and every physician knows how close the con- nection is between optical disease and hallu- cinations. Then came a brief period of seeming normality, the lull before the storm The Seeress of Prevorst 141 which burst in full force with her marriage to a man she did not love. From that time, the helpless victim of hysteria in its most deep- seated and obstinate form, she gave herself unreservedly to the delusions which both arose from and intensified her physical ills ills which after all had a purely mental basis. "If I doubted the reality of these apparitions," she once told Kerner, "I should be in danger of insanity; for it would make me doubt the reality of everything I saw." It does not affect this view of the case that she unquestionably cooperated with her con- scienceless sister and the servant girl in the production of the fraudulent phenomena to which Kerner testifies. Their cheating was probably done for the sole purpose of making sure of the comfortable berth in which the physician's credulity had placed them. Hers, on the other hand, was the deceit of an irre- sponsible mind, of one living in such an at- mosphere of unreality that she could readily persuade herself that the knockings, candle dancings, book openings, and similar acts were the work not of her own hands but of the ghosts which tormented her. Indeed, researches of recent years in the field of abnormal psychology 142 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters show it is quite possible that she was absolutely ignorant of any personal participation in the movements and sounds which caused such wide-spread mystification. Sympathy and pity, therefore, should take the place of condemna- tion when we follow the course of her eventful and unhappy life. VIII THE MYSTERIOUS MR. HOME you've brought the devil to my house, have you?" "No, no, aunty, no! It's not my fault." With an angry gesture the woman, tall, large boned, harsh visaged, pushed back her chair and advanced threateningly toward the pale, anemic looking youth of seventeen, who sat cowering at the far end of the breakfast table. "You know this is your doing. Stop it at once!" The other gazed helplessly about him, while from every side of the room came a volley of raps and knocks. "It is not my doing," he muttered. "I cannot help it." "Begone then! Out of my sight!" Left to herself and to silence, for with her nephew's departure the noise instantly ceased, she fell into gloomy meditation. She was an exceedingly ignorant, but a pro- foundly religious woman. She had heard 143 144 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters much of the celebrated Fox sisters, with tales of whose strange actions in the neighboring State of New York the countryside was then ringing, and she recognized, or imagined she recognized, a striking similarity between their performances and the tumult of the last few minutes. It was her firm belief that the Fox girls were victims of demoniac influence, and no less surely did she deem it impossible to attribute the recent disturbance to human agency. Her nephew was not given to prac- tical jokes; there had been nothing unusual in his manner; he had greeted her cheerily as usual, and quietly taken his seat. But with his advent, and she shuddered at the remem- brance, the knockings had begun. There could be only one explanation the boy, however unwittingly, had placed himself in the power of the devil. What to do, however, she knew not, and fumed and fretted the entire morning, until upon his reappearance at noon the knockings broke out again. Then her mind was quickly made up. "Look you!" said she to him. "We must rid you of the evil that is in you. I will have the ministers reason with you and pray for you, and that at once." The Mysterious Mr. Home 145 True to her word, she despatched a mes- senger to the three clergymen of the litttle Connecticut village in which she made her home, and all three promptly responded to her request. But their visits and their prayers proved fruitless. Indeed, the more they prayed the louder the knocks became; and presently, to their astonishment and dismay, the very furniture appeared bewitched, dancing and leaping as though alive. " Verily," said one to his irate aunt, "the boy is possessed of the devil." To make matters worse, the neigh- bors, hearing of the weird occurrences, besieged the house day and night, their curi- osity whetted by a report that, exactly as in the case of the Fox sisters, communications from the dead were being received through the knockings. Incredible as it seemed, this report found speedy confirmation. Before the week was out the lad told his aunt: "Last night there came raps to me spelling words, and they brought me a message from the spirit of my mother." "And what, pray, was the message?" "My mother's spirit said to me, * Daniel, fear not, my child. God is with you, and who shall be against you ? Seek to do good. Be 146 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters truthful and truth loving, and you will prosper, my child. Yours is a glorious mission you will convince the infidel, cure the sick, and console the weeping.'" "A glorious mission," mocked the aunt, her patience utterly exhausted, "a glorious mis- sion to bedevil and deceive, to plague and tor- ment! Away, away, and darken my doors no more!" "Do you mean this, aunty?" "Mean it, Daniel? Never shall it be said of me that I gave aid and comfort to Satan or child of Satan's. Pack, and be off!" In this way was Daniel Dunglas Home launched on a career that was to prove one of the most marvelous, if not the most marvelous, in the annals of mystification. But at the time there was no reason to anticipate the re- markable achievements which the future held in store for him. He was fitted for no calling. Ever since his aunt had adopted him in far- away Scotland, where he was born of obscure parentage in 1833, he had led a life of com- plete dependence, not altogether cheerless but deadening to initiative and handicapping him terribly for the task of making his way in the world. His health was broken, his pockets The Mysterious Mr. Home 147 were empty, he was without friends. Cast upon his own resources under such conditions, it seemed but too probable that failure and an early death would be his portion. Two things only were in his favor. The first was his native determination and optimism; the second, the interest aroused by published reports of the phenomena that had led to his expulsion from his aunt's house. Already, although only a few days had elapsed since the knockings were first heard, the newspapers had given the story great publicity, and their accounts were greedily devoured by an ever- widening circle of readers, quite willing to regard such happenings as evidence of the intervention of the dead in the affairs of the living. It was, it must be remembered, an era of wide-spread enthusiasm and credulity, the heyday period of spiritism. So soon, there- fore, as it became known that young Home was at liberty to go where he would, invitations were showered on him. Among these was one from the nearby town of Willimantic, and thither Home journeyed in the early spring of 1851. It was determined that an attempt should be made to demon- strate his mediumship by the table tilting 148 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters process then coming into vogue among spirit- ists, and the result exceeded all expectations. The table, according to an eye-witness of the first seance, not only moved without physical contact, but on request turned itself upside down, and overcame a spectator's efforts to prevent its motion. True, when this specta- tor "grasped its leg and held it with all his strength" the table "did not move so freely as before." Still, it moved, and Home's fame mounted apace. From town to town he traveled, holding seances at which, if con- temporary accounts are to be believed, he gave exhibitions of supernatural power far and away ahead of all other of the numerous mediums who were by this time springing up throughout the Eastern States. On one occa- sion, we are told, the spirits communicated through him the whereabouts of missing title deeds to a tract of land then in litigation; on another, they enabled him to prescribe suc- cessfully for an invalid for whom no hope w T as entertained ; and time after time they conveyed to those in his seance room messages of more or less vital import, besides vouchsafing to them "physical" phenomena of the greatest variety. The Mysterious Mr. Home 149 What was most remarkable was the fact that the young medium steadfastly refused to accept payment for his services. " My gift," he would solemnly say, "is free to all, without money and without price. I have a mission to fulfil, and to its fulfilment I will cheerfully give my life." Naturally this attitude of itself made for converts to the spiritistic beliefs of which he was such a successful exponent, and its influence was powerfully reinforced by the result of an investigation conducted in the spring of 1852 by a committee headed by the poet, William Cullen Bryant, and the Harvard professor, David G. Wells. Briefly, these declared in their report that they had at- tended a seance with Home in a well lighted room, had seen a table move in every direc- tion and with great force, " when we could not perceive any cause of motion," and even "rise clear of the floor and float in the atmosphere for several seconds"; had in vain tried to inhibit its action by sitting on it; had occasionally been made "con- scious of the occurrence of a powerful shock, which produced a vibratory motion of the floor of the apartment in which we were seated"; and finally were absolutely certain 150 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters that they had not been "imposed upon or deceived." The report, to be sure, did not specify what, if any, means had been taken to guard against fraud, its only reference in this connection being a statement that "Mr. D. D. Home fre- quently urged us to hold his hands and feet." But it none the less created a tremendous sen- sation, public attention being focused on the fact that an awkward, callow, country lad had successfully sustained the scrutiny of men of learning, intelligence, and high repute. No longer, it would seem, could there be doubt of the validity of his claims, and greater demands than ever were made on him. As before, he willingly responded, adding to his repertoire, if the term be permissible, new feats of the most startling character. Thus, at a seance in New York a table on which a pencil, two candles, a tumbler, and some papers had been placed, tipped over at an angle of thirty degrees without disturbing in the slightest the position of the movable objects on its surface. Then at the medium's bidding the pencil was dis- lodged, rolling to the floor, while the rest re- mained motionless ; and afterward the tumbler. A little later occurred the first of Home's The Mysterious Mr. Home 151 levitations when at the house of a Mr. Cheney in South Manchester, Connecticut, he is said to have been lifted without visible means of support to the ceiling of the seance room. To quote from an eye- witness's narrative: "Sud- denly, and without any expectation on the part of the company, Mr. Home was taken up in the air. I had hold of his feet at the time, and I and others felt his feet they were lifted a foot from the floor. . . . Again and again he was taken from the floor, and the third time he was carried to the lofty ceiling of the apart- ment, with which his hand and head came in gentle contact." A far cry, this, from the simple raps and knocks that had ushered in his mediumship. Now, however, an event occurred that threatened to cut short alike his "mission" and his life. Never of robust health, he fell seriously ill of an affection that developed into tuberculosis. The medical men whom he con- sulted unanimously declared that his only hope lay in a change of climate, and, taking alarm, his spiritistic friends generously subscribed a large sum to enable him to visit Europe. Inci- dentally, no doubt, they expected him to serve as a missionary of the new faith, and it may be 152 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters said at once that in this expectation they were not deceived. No one ever labored more earnestly and successfully in behalf of spirit- ism than did Daniel Dunglas Home from the moment he set foot on the shores of England in April, 1855; and no one in all the history of spiritism achieved such individual renown, not in England alone but in almost every country of the Continent. It is from this point that the mystery of his career really becomes conspicuous. Hitherto, with the exception of the Bryant- Wells inves- tigation, which could hardly be called scientific, his pretensions had not been seriously tested, and operating as he did among avowed spirit- ists he had enjoyed unlimited opportunities for the perpetration of fraud. But henceforth, skeptics as well as believers having ready access to him, he found himself not infre- quently in a thoroughly hostile environment, and subjected to the sharpest criticism and most unrestrained abuse. Nevertheless, he was able not simply to maintain but to aug- ment the fame of his youth, and after a me- diumship of more than thirty years, could claim the unique distinction of not once having had a charge of trickery proved against him. The Mysterious Mr. Home 153 Besides this, overcoming with astounding ease the handicaps of his humble birth and lack of education, his life was one continued round of social triumphs of the highest order; for he speedily won and retained to the day of his death the confidence and friendship of leaders of society in every European capital. With them, in castle, chateau, and mansion, he made his home, always welcome and al- ways trusted ; and in his days of greatest stress, days of ill health, vilification, and legal en- tanglements, they rallied unfailingly to his aid. Add again that Kings and Queens vied with one another in entertaining and reward- ing him, and it is possible to gain some idea of the heights scaled by this erstwhile Con- necticut country boy. He began modestly enough by taking rooms at a quiet London hotel, where, his fame hav- ing spread through the city, he soon had the pleasure of giving a seance to two such dis- tinguished personages as Lord Brougham and Sir David Brewster. Both retired thoroughly mystified, though the latter some months later asserted that while he "could not account for all" he had witnessed, he had seen enough to satisfy himself "that they could all be pro- 154 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters duced by hands and feet," a statement which, by the way, was at variance from one he had made at the time, and involved him in a most unpleasant controversy. After Broug- ham and Brewster came a long succession of other notables, including the novelist Sir Bul- wer Lytton, to whom a most edifying experi- ence was granted. Rapping away as usual, the table suddenly indicated that it had a mes- sage for him, and the alphabet being called over in the customary spiritistic style, it spelled out: "I am the spirit who influenced you to write Zanoni." "Indeed!** quoth Lytton, with a skeptical smile. " Suppose you give me a tangible proof of your presence?" "Put your hand under the table." No sooner done, than the invisible being gave him a hearty handshake, and proceeded : "We wish you to believe in the " It stopped. "In what? In the medium?" "No." At that moment there came a gentle tapping on his knee, and looking down he found on it a small cardboard cross that had been lying The Mysterious Mr. Home 155 on another table. Lytton, the story goes, begged permission to keep the cross as a souvenir, and promised that he would remem- ber the spirit's injunction. For Home, of course, the incident was a splendid advertise- ment, as were the extravagant reports spread broadcast by other visitors. Consequently, when he visited Italy in the autumn as the guest of one of his English patrons, he gained in- stant recognition and was enabled to embark with phenomenal ease on his Continental crusade. In order to reach the most striking mani- festations of his peculiar ability, we must pass hurriedly over the events of the next few years, although they are perhaps the most picturesque of his career, including as they do seances with the third Napoleon and his Empress, with the King of Prussia, and with the Emperor of Russia. In Russia he was married to the daughter of a noble Russian family, and for groomsmen at his wedding had Count Alexis Tolstoi, the famous poet, and Count Bobrinski, one of the Emperor's cham- berlains. This was in 1858, and shortly after- ward he returned to England to repeat his spiritistic triumphs of 1855, and increase the 156 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters already large group of influential and titled friends whose doors were ever open to him. Had it not been for their generosity, it is diffi- cult, indeed, to see how he could have lived, for his time was almost altogether devoted to the practice of spiritism, and he was never known to accept a fee for a seance. As it was, he lived very well, now the guest of one, now of another, and the frequent recipient of costly presents. From England he fared back to the Continent, again traversing it by leisurely stages. Thus nearly a decade passed before the occurrence of the first of the several phe- nomena that have won Home an enduring place among the greatest lights of spiritism. At that time his English patrons included the Viscount Adare and the Master of Lind- say, who have since become respectively the Earl of Dunraven and the Earl of Crawford. They were sitting one evening (December 16, 1868) in an upper room of a house in London with Home and a Captain Wynne, when Home suddenly left the room and entered the adjoin- ing chamber. The opening of a window was then heard, and the next moment, to the amaze- ment of all three, they perceived Home's form floating in the dim moonlight outside the win- The Mysterious Mr. Home 157 dow of the room in which they were seated. For an instant it hovered there, at a height of fully seventy feet above the pavement, and then, smiling and debonnair, Home was with them again. Another marvel immediately fol- lowed. At Home's request Lord Dunraven closed the window out of which the medium was supposed to have been carried by the spirits, and on returning observed that the window had not been raised a foot, and he did not see how a man could have squeezed through it. " Come," said Home, "I will show you." Together they went into the next room. "He told me," Lord Dunraven reported, "to open the window as it was before. I did so. He told me to stand a little distance off; he then went through the open space, head first, quite rapidly, his body being nearly horizontal and apparently rigid. He came in again feet foremost, and we returned to the other room. It was so dark I could not see clearly how he was supported oustide. He did not appear to grasp, or rest upon the balus- trade, but rather to be swung out and in." To Lord Dunraven and Lord Crawford again was given the boon of witnessing an- other of Home's most sensational perform- 158 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters ances, and on more than one occasion. This may best be described in Lord Crawford's own words, as related in his testimony to the London Dialectical Society's committee which in 1869 undertook an inquiry into the claims of spiritism. "I saw Mr. Home," declared Lord Craw- ford, "in a trance elongated eleven inches. I measured him standing up against the wall, and marked the place; not being satisfied with that, I put him in the middle of the room and placed a candle in front of him, so as to throw a shadow on the wall, which I also marked. When he awoke I measured him again in his natural size, both directly and by the shadow, and the results were equal. I can swear that he was not off the ground or standing on tiptoe, as I had full view of his feet, and, moreover, a gentleman present had one of his feet placed over Home's insteps. ... I once saw him elongated horizontally on the ground. Lord Adare was present. Home seemed to grow at both ends, and pushed myself and Adare away." The publication of this evidence and of the details of the mid-air excursion provoked, as may be imagined, a heated discussion, and The Mysterious Mr. Home 159 doubtless had considerable influence in induc- ing the famous scientist, Sir William Crookes, to engage in the series of experiments which he carried out with Home two years later. This was at once the most searching investigation to which Home was ever subjected, and the most signal triumph of his career. Sir Wil- liam's proposal was hailed with the greatest satisfaction by the critics of spiritism in gen- eral and of Home in particular. Here, it was said, was a man fully qualified to expose the archimpostor who had been so justly pilloried in Browning's "Mr. Sludge the Medium"; here was a scientist, trained to exact knowl- edge and close observation, who would not be deceived by the artful tricks of a conjurer. It was pleasant too to learn that in order to circumvent any attempts at sleight of hand, Sir William intended using instruments spe- cially designed for test purposes, and which he was confident could not be operated fraudu- lently. But Home, or the spirits proved too strong for even Sir William Crookes and his instru- ments. In Sir William's presence, in fact, there was a multiplication of mysteries. The instruments registered results which seemed 160 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters inexplicable by any natural law; a lath, cast carelessly on a table, rose in the air, nodded gravely to the astonished scientist, and pro- ceeded to tap out messages alleged to come from the world beyond; chairs moved in ghostly fashion up and down the room; in- visible beings lifted Home himself from the floor; spirit hands were seen and felt; an ac- cordeon, held by Sir William, played tunes apparently of its own volition, and afterward floated about the room, still playing. And all this, according to the learned investigator, "in a private room that almost up to the com- mencement of the seance has been occupied as a living room, and surrounded by private friends of my own, who not only will not countenance the slightest deception, but who are watching narrowly everything that takes place." In the end, so far from announcing that he had convicted Home of fraud, Sir William published an elaborate account of his seances, and gave it as his solemn belief that with Home's assistance he had succeeded in demon- strating the existence of a hitherto unknown force. This was scarcely what had been ex- pected by the scientific world, which had The Mysterious Mr. Home 161 eagerly awaited his verdict, and loud was the tumult that followed. But Sir William stood manfully by his guns, and Home bland, in- scrutable, mysterious Home figuratively shrugging his shoulders at denunciations to which he had by this time become perfectly accustomed, added another leaf to his spiritis- tic crown of laurels, and betook himself anew to his friends on the Continent, where, despite increasing ill health, he continued to prose- cute his "mission" for many prosperous years. As a matter of fact, throughout the period of his mediumship, that is to say, from 1851 to 1886, the year of his death, he experienced only one serious reverse, and this did not involve any exposure of the falsity of his claims. But it was serious enough, in all con- science, and calls for mention both because it emphasizes the contrast between his earlier and his later life, and because it throws a luminous sidelight on the methods by which he achieved his unparalleled success. When he was in London in 1867 he made the ac- quaintance of an elderly, impressionable Eng- lish-woman named Lyon, who immediately conceived a warm attachment for him and 16 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters stated her intention of adopting him as her son. Carrying out this plan, she settled on him the snug little fortune of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, which she subse- quently increased until it amounted to no less than three hundred thousand dollars. Home at the time was a widower, and it was his belief, as he afterward stated in court, that the woman desired him to marry her. In any event her affection cooled as rapidly as it had begun, and the next thing he knew he was being sued for the recovery of the three hundred thousand dollars. The trial was a celebrated case in English law. Lord Dun- raven, Lord Crawford, and other of Home's titled and influential friends hurried to his assistance, and many were the affidavits forth- coming to combat the contentions of Mrs. Lyon, who swore that she had been influenced to adopt Home by communications alleged to come through him from her dead husband. Home himself denied that there were any manifestations whatever relating to Mrs. Lyon, whose story, in fact, was so discredited on cross-examination that the presiding judge, the vice-chancellor, caustically declared that her testimony was quite unworthy of belief. The Mysterious Mr. Home 163 Notwithstanding which, he did not hesitate to give judgment in her favor, on the ground that, however worthless her evidence, it had not been satisfactorily shown that her gifts to Home were "acts of pure volition," the presumption being that no reasonable man or woman would have pursued the course she did unless under the pressure of undue influ- ence by the party to be benefited. If for "undue influence" we read "hyp- notism," we shall have a sufficient, and what seems to me the only satisfactory, explana- tion of the Lyon episode and of the most baffling of Home's feats, his levitations, elon- gations, and the like. For the rest, bearing in mind the fate of other dealers in turning tables and dancing chairs, he may fairly be regarded in the light Browning regarded him, that is to say as an exceptionally able conjurer who enjoyed the singular good fortune of never being found out.* It must be remembered that not once was there applied to him the test which is now recognized as absolutely indispensable in the investigation of mediums * But a "conjurer " who in all probability should not be held to strict account for his deceptions. On this point, see below. 164 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters who, like Home, are specialists in the produc- tion of " physical" phenomena. This test is the demand that the phenomena in question be produced under conditions doing away with the necessity for constant observation of the medium himself. Even Sir William Crookes, who appreciated to the full the extreme fallibility of the human eye and the ease with which the most careful observer may be deceived by a clever pres- tidigitator, failed to apply this test to Home; and by so failing laid himself open on the one hand to deception and on the other to the flood of criticism let loose by his scientific colleagues. Thus, the apparatus used in the experiment on which he seems to have laid greatest stress, is described as follows : "In another part of the room an apparatus was fitted up for experimenting on the altera- tions in the weight of a body. It consisted of a mahogany board thirty-six inches long by nine and one-half inches wide and one inch thick. At each end a strip of mahogany one and one-half inches wide was screwed on, forming feet. One end of the board rested on a firm table, whilst the other end was sup- ported by a spring balance hanging from a The Mysterious Mr. Home 165 substantial tripod stand. The balance was fitted with a self-registering index, in such a manner that it would record the maximum weight indicated by the pointer. The appara- tus was adjusted so that the mahogany board was horizontal, its foot resting flat on the sup- port. In this position its weight was three pounds, as marked by the pointer of the bal- ance. Before Mr. Home entered the room the apparatus had been arranged in position, and he had not seen the object of some parts explained before sitting down." Now, to give this "test" evidential value, the disembodied spirit supposed to be acting through Home should have caused the register- ing index to record a change in weight without necessitating, on the spectators' part, con- stant scrutiny of the medium's movements. But, in point of fact, a change in weight was recorded only when Home placed his fingers on the mahogany board. It is true, that he placed them on the end furthest from the balance, and the evidence seems sufficient that he did not cause the pointer to move by exert- ing a downward pressure. But as one critic, Mr. Frank Podmore, has suggested there is no proof that he did not find opportunity to 166 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters tamper with the pointer itself or with some other part of the apparatus by attaching there- to a looped thread or hair. To quote Mr. Podmore : "It is by the use of such a thread, I venture to suggest, that the watchful observation of Mr. Crookes and his colleagues was evaded. Given a subdued light and opportunity to move about the room and from detailed notes of later seances it seems probable that Home could do as he liked in both respects the loop could be attached without much risk of detection to some part of the apparatus, preferably the hook from which the distal end of the board was suspended, the ends [of the thread] being fastened to some part of Home's dress, e.g., the knees of his trousers, if his feet and hands were under effectual observation." * Moreover, it must not be forgotten that, barring the Crookes investigation, Home's manifestations for the most part occurred in the presence of men and women who, if not spiritists themselves, had implicit confidence in his good faith and could by no stretch of the imagination be called trained investigators. * " Modern Spiritualism," Vol. U, p. 242. The Mysterious Mr. Home 167 Indeed, it seems safe to say that had present day methods of inquiry been employed, as they are employed by the experts of the So- ciety for Psychical Research, Home, so far at any rate as concerned the great bulk of his phenomena, would quickly have been placed in the same gallery as Madam Blavatsky, Eusapia Paladino, and those other wonder workers whom the society has discredited. In the matter of the levitations and elonga- tions, however, it is not so easy to raise the cry of sheer fraud. Here the only rational explanation, short of supposing that Home availed himself if not of the aid of "spirits" at least of the aid of some unknown physical force, seems to be, as was said, the exercise of hypnotic power. The accounts given by Lord Dunraven, Lord Crawford, and Sir Will- iam Crookes show that he had ample scope for the employment of suggestion as a means of inducing those about him to imagine they had seen things which they actually had not seen. In this connection, it seems to me, con- siderable significance attaches to the following bit of evidence contributed by Lord Crawford with regard to the London levitation: " I saw the levitations in Victoria Street when 168 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters Home floated out of the window. He first went into a trance and walked about uneasily; he then went into the hall. While he was away I heard a voice whisper in my ear 'He will go out of one window and in at another.' I was alarmed and shocked at the idea of so dangerous an experiment. I told the com- pany what I had heard and we then waited for Home's return." After it is stated that Lord Crawford, not long before, had fancied he beheld an appa- rition of a man seated in a chair, it is easy to imagine the attitude of credulous expectancy with which he, at all events, would "wait for Home's return" via the open window. And the others were doubtless in the same expectant frame of mind. "Expectancy" and "sug- gestibility" will, indeed, work marvels. I shall never forget how the truth of this was borne home to me some years ago. A friend of mine now a physician in Maryland, but at that time a medical student in Toronto occasionally amused himself by giving table- tipping seances, in which he enacted the role of medium. There was no suspicion on his sitters' part that he was a "fraud." One evening he invoked the "spirit" of a little The Mysterious Mr. Home 169 child, who had been dead a couple of years, and proceeded to "spell out" some highly edifying messages. Suddenly the seance was interrupted by a shriek and a lady present, not a relative of the dead child, fell to the floor in a faint. When revived, she declared that while the messages were being delivered she had seen the head of a child appear through the top of the table. With such an instance before us, it can hardly be deemed surprising that Home should be able to play on the imagination of sitters so sympathetic and receptive as Lords Dun- raven and Crawford unquestionably were. To tell the truth, Home's whole career, with its scintillating, melodramatic, and uniformly successful phases is altogether inexplicable unless it be assumed that he possessed the hypnotist's qualities in a superlative degree. It may well be, however, that in the last analysis he not only deceived others but also deceived himself that his charlatanry was the work of a man constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between reality and fiction in so far as related to the performance of feats contributing to the success of his "mission." In other words, that he was, like other historic 170 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters personages whom we have already encoun- tered, a victim of dissociation. There is no gainsaying the fact that he was of a distinctly nervous temperament; and it is equally cer- tain that he chose a vocation, and placed himself in an environment, which would tend to make a dissociated state habitual with him. But this is bringing us to the considera- tion of a psychological problem which would itself require a volume for adequate discussion. Enough to add that, when all is said, and viewed from whatever angle, Daniel Dunglas Home, was, and remains, a fascinating human riddle. IX THE WATSEKA WONDER WHEN the biography of the late Richard Hodgson is written one of its most interesting chapters will be the story of his investigation into the strange case of Lurancy Vennum. Archinquisitor of the Society for Psychical Research, the Sherlock Holmes of professional detectives of the supernatural, in this instance Hodgson was forced to con- fess himself beaten and to acknowledge that in his belief the only satisfactory solution of the problem before him was to be had through recourse to the hypothesis that the dead can and do communicate with the living. As is well known, subsequent inquiries, and notably his experiences with the famous Mrs. Piper, led him to the enthusiastic indorse- ment of this hypothesis ; but at the time of the Vennum affair, with the recollection of his triumphs in Europe and Asia fresh in his mind, he was still a thoroughgoing if open minded skeptic; and to Lurancy Vennum must 171 172 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters accordingly be given the credit of having brought him, so to speak, to the turning of the ways. Oddly enough too, scarce an effort has been made to assemble evidence in dis- proof of his findings in that case and to develop a purely naturalistic explanation of a mystery which his verdict went far to establish in the minds of many as a classic illustration of supernatural action. Yet, while it must be admitted that until recently such a task would have been extremely difficult, it may safely be declared that the phenomena manifested through Lurancy Vennum were not a whit more other-worldly than the phenomena pro- duced by the tricksters whom Hodgson him- self so skilfully and mercilessly exposed. To refresh the reader's memory with regard to the facts in the case, it will be recalled that Lurancy Vennum was a young girl, between thirteen and fourteen years old, the daughter of respectable parents living at Watseka, Illinois, a town about eighty-five miles south of Chicago and boasting at the time a popu- lation of perhaps fifteen hundred. On the afternoon of July 11, 1877, while sitting sew- ing with her mother, she suddenly complained of feeling ill, and immediately afterward fell The Watseka Wonder 173 to the floor unconscious, in which state she remained for five hours. The next day the same thing happened; but now, while still apparently insensible to all about her, she began to talk, affirming that she was in heaven and in the company of numerous spirits, whom she described, naming among others the spirit of her brother who had died when she was only three years old. Her parents, deeply religious people of an orthodox de- nomination, feared that she had become in- sane, and their fears were increased when, with the passage of time, her "fits," as they called her trances, became more frequent and of longer duration, lasting from one to eight hours and occurring from three to twelve times a day. Physicians could do nothing for her, and by January, 1878, it was decided that she was beyond all hope of cure and that the proper place for her was an insane asylum. At this juncture her father was visited by Mr. Asa B. Roff, also a resident of Watseka, but having no more than a casual acquaint- anceship with the Vennums. He had be- come interested in the case, he explained, through hearing reports of the intercourse 174 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters Lurancy claimed to have with the world of the dead, the possibility of which, being a devout spiritist, he did not in the slightest doubt. Moreover, he himself had had a daughter, Mary, long dead, who had been subject to conditions exactly like Lurancy's and had given incontrovertible evidence of possessing supernatural powers of a clairvoy- ant nature. In her time she too had been deemed insane, but Mr. Roff was confident that she had really been of entirely sound mind, and equally confident that the present victim of "spirit infestation," to use the singu- lar term employed by a later spiritistic eulo- gist of Lurancy, was also of sound mind. He therefore begged Mr. Vennum not to immure his daughter in an asylum; and Mrs. Roff adding her entreaties, it was finally resolved as a last resort to call in a physician from Janes ville, Wisconsin, who was himself a spiritist and would, the Roffs felt sure, be able to treat the case with great success. This physician, Dr. E. Winchester Stevens, paid his first visit to Lurancy in Mr. Roff's company on the afternoon of January 31. He found the girl, as he afterward related, sitting "near a stove, in a common chair, her elbows The Watseka Wonder 175 on her knees, her hands under her chin, feet curled up on the chair, eyes staring, looking every way like an old hag." She was evi- dently in an ugly mood, for she refused even to shake hands, called her father "Old Black Dick" and her mother "Old Granny," and at first kept an obstinate silence. But presently, brightening up, she announced that she had discovered that Dr. Stevens was a "spiritual" doctor and could help her, and that she was ready to answer any questions he might put. Now followed a strange dialogue. In reply to his queries she said that her name was not Lurancy Vennum but Katrina Hogan, that she was sixty-three years old, and had come from Germany "through the air" three days before. Changing her manner quickly, she confessed that she had lied and was in reality a boy, Willie Canning, who had died and "now is here because he wants to be." More than an hour passed in this "insane talk," as her weeping parents accounted it, and then, flinging up her hands, she fell headlong in a state of cataleptic rigidity. Dr. Stevens promptly renewed his question- ing, at the same time taking both her hands in his and endeavoring to " magnetize " her, 176 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters to quote his own expression. It soon devel- oped, according to the replies she made, that she was no longer on earth but in heaven and surrounded by spirits of a far more beneficent character than the so-called Katrina and Willie. With all the earnestness of an ardent spiritist, the doctor immediately suggested that she allow herself to be controlled by a spirit who would prevent those that were evil and insane from returning to trouble her and her family, and would assist her to regain health. To which she answered that she would gladly do so, and that among the spirits around her was one that the angels strongly recommended for this very purpose. It was, she said, the spirit of a young girl who on earth had been named Mary Roff. "Why," cried Mr. Roff, "that is my daugh- ter, who has been in heaven these twelve years. Yes, let her come. We'll be glad to have her come." Come she did, as the greatly bewildered Mr. Vennum testified next morning during a hasty visit to Mr. Roff s office. "My girl," said he, "had a sound night's sleep after you and Dr. Stevens left us; but to-day she asserts that she is Mary Roff, re- The Watseka Wonder 177 fuses to recognize her mother or myself, and demands to be taken to your house." At this amazing information, Mrs. Roff and her surviving daughter Minerva, who since Mary's death had married a Mr. Alter, promptly went to see Lurancy. From a seat at the window she beheld them approaching down the street, and with an exultant cry ex- claimed, "Here comes my ma, and 'Nervie'!" the name by which Mary Roff had been accus- tomed to call her sister in girlhood. Running to the door and throwing her arms about them as they entered, she hugged and kissed them with expressions of endearment and with whispering allusions to past events of which she as Lurancy could in their opinion have had absolutely no knowledge. Mr. Roff who came afterward, she greeted in the same affectionate way, while treating the members of her own family as though they were entire strangers. To her father and mother it seemed that this must be only a new phase of her insanity, but to the Roffs there remained no doubt that in her they be- held an actual reincarnation of the girl whom they had buried twelve years before that is to say, when Lurancy herself was a puny, 178 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters wailing infant. Eagerly they seconded her entreaties to be allowed to return with them; and, Mrs. Vennum being completely pros- trated by this unexpected development, it was soon decided that the little girl should for the time being take up her residence under the Roff roof. She removed there February 11, and on the way an event occurred that vastly strength- ened belief in the reality of her claims. The Vennums and the Roffs lived at opposite ends of Watseka; but the latter family, at the time of Mary's death in 1865, had been occupying a dwelling in a central section of the town. Arrived at this house, Lurancy unhesitatingly turned to enter it, and seemed much aston- ished when told that her home was elsewhere. "Why," said she, in a positive tone, "I know that I live here." It was indeed with some difficulty that she was persuaded to continue her journey; but once at its end all signs of disappointment vanished and she passed gaily from room to room, identifying objects which she had never seen before but which had been well-known to Mary Roff. Her pseudo-parents were in ecstacies of joy. "Truly," they said to each other, "our daughter who was dead The Watseka Wonder 179 has been restored to us," and anxiously they inquired of her how long they might hope to have her with them. "The angels," was her response, "will let me stay till some time in May and oh how happy I am!" Happy and contented she proved herself and, which was remarked by all who saw her, entirely free from the maladies that had so sorely beset both the living Lurancy and the dead Mary. For her life as Lurancy she appeared to have no remembrance; but she readily and unfailingly recollected everything connected with the career of Mary. She was well aware also that she was masquerading, as it were, in a borrowed body. "Do you re- member," Dr. Stevens asked her one day, "the time that you cut your arm?" "Yes, indeed. And," slipping up her sleeve, "I can show you the scar. It was She paused, and quickly added, "Oh, this is not the arm; that one is in the ground," and pro- ceeded to describe the spot where Mary had been buried and the circumstances attending her funeral. Old acquaintances of Mary's were greeted as though they had been seen only the day before, although in one or two cases there was lack of recognition, due, it was in- 180 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters f erred, to physical changes in the visitor's ap- pearance since Mary had known her on earth. Tests, suggested and carried out by Dr. Stevens and Mr. Roff, only reinforced the view that they were really dealing with a visi- tant from the unseen world. For instance, while the little girl was playing outdoors one afternoon, Mr. Roff suggested to his wife that she bring down-stairs a velvet hat that their daughter had worn the last year of her life, place it on the hat stand, and see if Lurancy would recognize it. This was done, and the recognition was instant. With a smile of de- light Lurancy picked up the hat, mentioned an incident connected with it, and asked, "Have you my box of letters also?" The box was found, and rummaging through it the child presently cried, " Oh, ma, here is a collar I tatted! Ma, why did you not show me my letters and things before?" One by one she picked out and identified relics dating back to Mary's girlhood, long before Lurancy Vennum had come into the world. She displayed, too, not a little of the clairvoy- ant ability ascribed to Mary. The story is told that on one occasion she affirmed that her supposed brother, Frank Roff, would be The Watseka Wonder 181 taken seriously ill during the night; and when, about two o'clock in the morning, he was actually stricken with what is vaguely said to have been "something like a spasm and con- gestive chill," she directed Mr. Roff to hurry next door where he would find Dr. Stevens. "But," protested Mr. Roff, "Dr. Stevens is in quite another part of the city to-night." "No," she calmly said, "he has come back, and you will find him where I say." Quite incredulous, Mr. Roff gave his neigh- bor's door-bell a lusty pull, and the next moment was talking to the doctor, who, un- known to the Roffs, was spending the night there. With his aid, it is perhaps worth add- ing, brother Frank was soon relieved of the "spasm and congestive chill." In this way, continually surprising but constantly delighting the happy Roffs, Lu- rancy Vennum remained with them for more than three months, professing complete igno- ance of her identity and enacting with the greatest fidelity the role of the spirit who was supposed to have taken possession of her. Early in May, however, she called Mrs. Roff to one side and informed her in a voice broken by sobs that Lurancy was "coming back" 182 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters and that they would soon have to take another farewell of their Mary. This said, a change became apparent in her. She glared wildly around, and in an agitated tone demanded, "Where am I? I was never here before. I want to go home." Mrs. Roff, heartbroken, explained that she had been under the con- trol of Mary's spirit for the purpose of "curing her body," and told her that her parents would be sent for. But within five minutes she had again lost all knowledge of her true identity, and seemingly was Mary Roff once more, overjoyed that she had been permitted to return. For some days she continued in this state, with only occasional lapses into her original self; then, on the morning of May 21, she an- nounced that the time for definite leave-taking had at last arrived, and with evident grief went about among the neighbors bidding them good-by. It was arranged that "sister Ner- vie" should take her to Mr. Roff' s office, and that Mr. Roff should thence escort her home. En route there were sharp interchanges of personality, with the spirit control dominant; but when the office was reached it became evident that she had fully come into her own The Watseka Wonder 183 again. The night before she had wept bitterly at the thought of leaving her "father." Now she addressed him calmly as "Mr. Roff," called herself Lurancy, and said that her one wish was to see her parents as soon as pos- sible. Nor, as the Vennums were quickly to discover, did she return to torment and alarm them by the weird actions of the preceding months. On the contrary, they found her healthy and normal in mind and body, com- pletely cured, as a result, the Roffs emphat- ically declared, of the intervention of the spirit of their beloved daughter. Needless to say, the people of Watseka and the surrounding country had watched with breathless interest the progress of this curious affair; but it was not until three months after the "possession" had ended that the public at large obtained any knowledge of it. The first intimation, outside of unnoticed reports in local newspapers, came through the me- dium of two articles contributed by Dr. Stevens to the August 3 and 10, 1878, issues of The Religio-Philosophical Journal, one of the leading spiritist organs of the United States. Traversing the case in the fullest detail, and emphasizing the fact that up to the moment 184 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters of writing the principal actor had had no re- turn of the ills from which she had previously suffered, Dr. Stevens gave it as his unqualified conviction that the spirit of Mary Roff had actually revisited earth in the person of Lu- rancy Vennum, and had been the instrument of her cure. This view naturally commended itself to spiritists, but by the unbelieving it was vigorously combatted, not a few insinu- ating or openly alleging that Dr. Stevens's narrative was a work of fiction. The veracity of the Roffs was also attacked. "Can the truthfulness of the narrative," one skeptical inquirer wrote Mr. Roff, "be substantiated outside of yourself and those immediately in- terested ? Can it be shown that there was no collusion between the parties?" And an- other asked him, "Is it a fact, or is it a story made up to see how cunning a tale one can tell?" Waxing indignant, Mr. Roff wrote a long letter to The Religio-Philosophical Journal de- nouncing the imputation of fraud, giving the names of a number of men who would vouch for his integrity, and concluding with the statement: "I am now sixty years old; have resided in Iroquois county thirty years; and The Watseka Wonder 185 would not now sacrifice what reputation I may have by being party to the publication of such a narrative, if it was not perfectly true." Following this there appeared in The Re- ligio-Philosophical Journal several letters from well-known Illinois professional men warmly indorsing Mr. Roff's character, and an an- nouncement to the effect that the editor, Colonel J. C. Bundy, himself of undoubted honesty, "has entire confidence in the truth- fulness of the narrative and believes from his knowledge of the witnesses that the account is unimpeachable in every particular." As for Dr. Stevens, Colonel Bundy declared that he had been personally acquainted with the physician for years, and had '.'implicit confi- dence in his veracity." After all this, accusa- tions of perjury and deception were obviously futile, and, no adequate non-spiritistic inter- pretation being forthcoming, there was an increasing tendency to accept the view ad- vanced by those who had participated in the affair. Such was the situation at the time of Rich- ard Hodgson's advent. Primarily, as will be remembered by all who have followed the 186 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters work of the Society for Psychical Research, Dr. Hodgson had come to this country to in- vestigate the trance mediumship of Mrs. Leonora Piper. But his attention having been called to the Vennum mystery, he visited Watseka in April, 1890, and instituted a rigorous cross-examination of the surviving witnesses. Dr. Stevens was dead, and Lu- rancy herself had married and moved with her husband to Kansas, but Dr. Hodgson was able to interview Mr. and Mrs. Roff, Mrs. Alter, and half a dozen neighbors who had personal knowledge of the "possession." All answered his questions freely and fully, re- iterating the facts as given in Dr. Stevens's narrative, and adding some interesting in- formation hitherto not made public. In the main this bore on the question of identity and tended to vindicate the reincarnation theory. It also developed that while Lurancy had grown to be a strong, healthy woman, she had had occasional returns of Mary's spirit in the years immediately following the chief visita- tion; but that these had ceased with her marriage to a man who, Roff regretfully ob- served, had never made himself acquainted with spiritism and therefore "furnished poor The Watseka Wonder 187 conditions for further development in that direction." Appreciating the fact that Mr. Roff and his family would furnish the best possible con- ditions for such development, and that he must be on his guard against unconscious exaggeration and misstatement, Dr. Hodgson nevertheless deemed the evidence presented to him too strong to be explained away on naturalistic grounds. Contributing to The Religio-Philosophical Journal an account of his inquiry and of the additional data it had brought to light, he described the case as "unique among the records of supernormal occurrences," and frankly admitted that he could not "find any satisfactory interpreta- tion of it except the spiritistic." Yet, as was said at the outset, it may now be affirmed that another interpretation is pos- sible, and one far more satisfactory than the spiritistic ; this, too, without impeaching in any way the truthfulness of the testimony given by Dr. Stevens, the Roffs, and the numerous other witnesses. To begin: apart from the supernatural implications forced into it by the appearance of the so-called spirit control, it 188 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters is clear that the affair bears a striking resem- blance to the instances of "secondary" or "multiple" personality which recent research has discovered in such numbers, and which are due to perfectly natural, if often obscure, causes. In these, it has already been pointed out, as the result of an illness, a blow, a shock, or some other unusual stimulus, there is a partial or complete effacement of the original personality of the victim and its replacement by a new personality, sometimes of radically different characteristics from the normal self. A sufficient example is the case of the Rev. Thomas C. Hanna, for knowledge of which the scientific world is indebted to Dr. Boris Sidis.* Following a fall from his carriage, Mr. Hanna, a Connecticut clergyman, lost all consciousness of his identity, had no memory for the events of his life prior to the accident, recognized none of his friends, could not read or write, nor so much as walk or talk, was, in fact, like a child new born. On the other hand, as soon as the rudiments of education were acquired by him once more, he showed himself the possessor of a vigorous, independ- ent, self-reliant personality, lacking all knowl- * In his " Multiple Personality." The Watseka Wonder 189 edge of the original personality, but still able to adapt himself readily to his environment and make headway in the world. Ultimately, through methods which are distinctively mod- ern, Dr. Sidis was able to recall the vanished self, and, fusing the secondary self with it, restore the clergyman to his former sphere of usefulness. This, of course, is an extreme example. The usual procedure is for the secondary per- sonality to retain some of the characteristics of the original self as the ability to read, write, etc. and give itself a name. In this way Ansel Bourne, the Rhode Island itinerant preacher, became metamorphosed into A. J. Brown, and, without any recollection of his former career or relationships, drifted to Penn- sylvania and began an entirely new existence as a shopkeeper in a small country town. Similarly with Dr. R. Osgood Mason's patient, Alma Z., in whom the secondary personality assumed the odd name of "Twoey," spoke, as Dr. Mason phrased it, "in a peculiar child- like and Indianlike dialect," and announced that her mission was to cure the broken down physical organism of the original self, which remained completely in abeyance so long as 190 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters "Twoey" was in evidence. Here, as is appar- ent, we have a case almost identical with that of Lurancy Vennuni, the sole difference being that "Twoey" - who, by the way, is credited with having exercised seemingly supernormal powers did not pose as a returned visitant from the world of spirits. Thus far, then, depending on the argument from analogy, the presumption is strong that Lurancy 's case belongs to the same category as the cases just mentioned. In the one, as in the others, we have loss of the original self, development of a new self, and the enactment by the latter of a role conspicuously alien from that played by the former. The one diffi- culty in the way of unreserved acceptance of this view is the character of the secondary personality which replaced Lurancy's original personality. Here the positive claim was made that the secondary personality was in reality the personality of a girl long dead, and by way of proof vivid knowledge of the life, cir- cumstances, and conduct of that girl was offered. But on this point considerable light is shed by the discovery that in a number of instances of secondary personality in which no supernatural pretensions are advanced there The Watseka Wonder 191 is a notable sharpening of the faculties, knowl- edge being obtained telepathically or clairvoy- antly; and by the further discovery that it is quite possible to create experimentally second- ary selves assuming the characteristics of real persons who have died. In this the creative force is nothing more or less than suggestion. There is on record, in- deed, an instance of mediumship in which the medium, an amateur investigator of the phe- nomena of spiritism, clearly recognized that his various impersonations were suggested to him by the spectators. This gentleman, Mr. Charles H. Tout, of Vancouver, records that after attending a few seances with some friends he felt a strong impulse to turn me- dium himself, and assume a foreign person- ality. Yielding to the impulse, he discovered, much to his amazement, that without losing complete control of his consciousness, he could develop a secondary self that would impose on the beholders as a discarnate spirit. On one occasion he thus acted in a semi-con- scious way the part of a dead woman, the mother of a friend present, and the impersona- tion was accepted as a genuine case of spirit control. On another, having given several 192 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters successful impersonations, he suddenly felt weak and ill, and almost fell to the floor. At this point, he stated, one of the sitters "made the remark, which I remember to have overheard, 'It is father controlling him,' and I then seemed to realize who I was and whom I was seeking. I began to be distressed in my lungs, and should have fallen if they had not held me by the hands and let me back gently upon the floor. ... I was in a measure still conscious of my actions, though not of my surroundings, and I have a clear memory of seeing myself in the character of my dying father lying in the bed and in the room in which he died. It was a most curious sensa- tion. I saw his shrunken hands and face, and lived again through his dying moments; only now I was both myself, in an indistinct sort of way, and my father, with his feelings and appearance." All of this Tout explained correctly as "the dramatic working out, by some half conscious stratum of his personality, of suggestions made at the time by other members of the circle, or received in prior experiences of the kind." In most instances, however, the original self is completely effaced, and no consciousness is The Watseka Wonder 193 retained of the performances of the secondary self; but that an avenue of sense is still open is sufficiently demonstrated by the readiness with which, in hypnotic experiments, seem- ingly insensible subjects respond to the sug- gestions of the operator. Here, therefore, we find our clue to the solution of the mystery of Lurancy Vennum. A victim of a psychic catastrophe, the cause of which must be left to conjecture in the absence of knowledge of her previous history, she was placed in pre- cisely the position of the adventurous Mr. Tout and of the inert subjects of the hypno- tist's art. That is to say, having lost momen- tarily all knowledge and control of her own personality, the character her new personality would assume depended on the suggestions received from those about her. Yet not altogether. Dr. Stevens's detailed record contains a reference which indicates strongly that the spiritistic tendency manifest from the onset of her trouble was to some extent predetermined. A few days before the first attack she informed the family that "there were persons in my room last night, and they called 'Rancy, Rancy!' and I felt their breath on my face"; and the next night, repeating 194 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters the same story, she sought refuge in her mother's bed. These fanciful notions, symp- tomatic of the coming trouble and possibly provocative of it, would act in the way of a powerful autosuggestion, and would of them- selves explain why there resulted an inchoate, tentative, vague personality, instead of the robust, definite personality that assumes con- trol in most cases. At first, the reader will remember, she sought vainly and wildly and wholly subcon- sciously it cannot be made too clear that she was no longer consciously responsible for her acts for a satisfactory self of ghostly origin. The aged Katrina, the masculine Willie, and other imaginary beings were tried and rejected; principally, no doubt, because her thirteen-year-old imagination was unequal to the task of investing them with satisfactory attributes. From her relatives she obtained no assistance in the strange quest. They, disbelieving in "spirits," persisted in calling her insane a comfortless and far from beneficial suggestion. But with the interven- tion of the Roffs and Dr. Stevens every- thing changed. Not questioning the truth of her assertions, they confirmed her in them, The Watseka Wonder 195 and offered her into the bargain a ready- made personality. Here at last was something tangible, a starting-point, a foundation-stone. Mary Roff had had a real existence, had had thoughts, feelings, desires, a life of flesh and blood. And Mary, they assured the poor, perturbed, disintegrated self, could help her regain all that she had lost. Very well, let Mary come, and the sooner she came the better. For knowledge of Mary, of her char- acteristics, her relationships, her friends, her earthly career, it was necessary only to tap telepathically the reservoir of information pos- sessed by Mary's family; and there would be available besides a wealth of data in chance remarks, unconscious hints, unnoticed prompt- ings. She had been too long in search of a personality not to grasp at the opening now afforded. Focused thus by suggestion, that subtle, all-pervasive influence which man is only now beginning to appreciate, the basic delusional idea promptly took root, blossomed, and burst into an amazing fruition. Banished were the spurious Katrinas and Willies. In their stead reigned Mary, no less spurious in point of fact, but so cunningly counterfeiting 196 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters the true Mary that the deception was not once detected. Mark too how suggestion sufficed not only to create the Mary personality but to expel it and restore the hapless Lurancy to perfect health. If the responsibility for the creation rests on Dr. Stevens and the Roffs, to them likewise belongs the credit for the cure. Their insistence on the fact that Mary's spirit could and would be of assistance, was itself as power- ful a suggestion as could be hit upon by the most expert of modern practitioners of psy- chotherapeutics ; and in unconsciously per- suading the spirit to set a limit to its time of "possession" they made another suggestion of rare curative value. To the suggestionally in- spired fixed idea that she was not Lurancy Vennum but Mary Roff was thus added the fixed idea, derived from the same source, that in May she would become Lurancy Vennum again, and a perfectly well Lurancy. It was as though the Roffs had actually hypnotized her and given her commands that were to be obeyed with the fidelity characteristic of the obedience hypnotized subjects render to the operator. When the time came the transformation was The Watseka Wonder 197 duly effected, though, as has been seen, not without a struggle, a period of alternating per- sonality, with Mary at one moment supreme and Lurancy at another. But this is a phe- nomenon that need give us no concern. Ex- actly the same thing happened in the last stages of the Hanna case. Nor do the fugitive recurrences of the Mary personality signify aught than that Lurancy was still unduly sug- gestionable. Note that these recurrences, ac- cording to the available evidence, developed only when the Roffs paid her visits ; and that they ceased entirely upon her marriage to a man not interested in spiritism, and her re- moval to a distant part of the country.* * It is proper to add that since the recent publication of this paper as a contribution to The Associated Sunday Magazine, the charge of fraud has been revived in connection with the "Watseka Wonder." It is asserted by a resident of Watseka that although Lurancy Vennum unquestionably was a sufferer from "nervous trouble," she consciously impersonated the "spirit" of Mary Roff, her motive being a desire to be near one of the Roff boys, with whom she imagined herself in love. X A MEDIEVAL GHOST HUNTER name of Dr. John Dee is scarcely A known to-day, yet Dr. Dee has some exceedingly well-defined claims to remem- brance. He was one of the foremost scien- tists of the Tudor period in English history. He was famed as a mathematician, astrono- mer, and philosopher not only in his native land but in every European center of learn- ing. Before he was twenty he penned a re- markable treatise on logic, and he left behind him at his death a total of nearly a hundred works on all manner of recondite subjects. He was the means of introducing into Eng- land a number of astronomical instruments hitherto unused, and even unknown, in that country. His lectures on geometry were the delight of all who heard them. In Elizabeth's reign he was frequently consulted by the highest ministers of the crown with regard to affairs of State, and was the confidant of the queen herself, who more than once employed A Medieval Ghost Hunter 199 him on secret missions. He was interested in everyday affairs as well as in questions of theoretical importance. The reformation of the calendar long engaged his attention. He charted for Elizabeth her distant colonial dominions. He preached the doctrine of sea- power, and, like Hakluyt, advocated the up- building of a strong navy. He was, in some sort, a participant in Sir Humphrey Gilbert's scheme for New World colonization. In a word, Dr. John Dee was a phenome- nally many-sided man in an age that was pecu- liarly productive of many-sided men. Even yet, the catalogue of his interests and accom- plishments is by no means exhausted. Indeed, his chief claim to fame and, para- doxically enough, the great reason why his reputation practically died with him lies in the fact that he was one of the earliest of psychical researchers. At a time when all men unhesitatingly entertained a belief in the overshadowing presence of spirits and their constant intervention in human affairs, Dr. Dee resolved to prove, if possible, the actual existence of these mysterious and unseen beings. To encourage him in his ghost- hunting zeal was the hope that the spirits, if 200 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters actually located by him, might reward his enterprise by unfolding a secret that had long been the despair of all medieval scientists the secret of the philosopher's stone, of the precious formula whereby the baser metals could be transmuted into shining gold. With the heartiest enthusiasm, therefore, Dr. Dee went to work, and although the spirits with whom he ultimately came into constant com- munication brought him no gold but many tribulations, he remained an ardent psychical researcher to the day of his death. Just when he began his explorations of the invisible world it is impossible to say. But it must have been at a very early age, for he was barely twenty-five when a rumor spread that he was dabbling in the black arts. Two years later, in 1554, he was definitely accused of trying to take the life of Queen Mary by en- chantments, and on this charge was thrown into prison. For cellmate he had Barthlet Green, who parted from him only to meet an agonizing death in the flames, as an arch- heretic. Dee himself was threatened with the stake, and was actually placed on trial for his life before the dread Court of the Star Cham- ber. But he seems to have had, throughout A Medieval Ghost Hunter 201 his entire career, a singularly plausible manner, and a magnetic, winning personality. He succeeded in convincing his judges both of his innocence of traitorous designs and his re- ligious orthodoxy, and was allowed to go scot free. Elizabeth, on her accession to the throne, naturally looked on him with favor, as one who had been persecuted by her sister; and with the more favor since it was widely reported that he was on the eve of making the grand discovery for which other alchemists had ever labored in vain. A man who might some day make gold at will was certainly not to be despised; rather, he should be cultivated. Nor was her esteem for Dee lessened by the success with which, by astrological calcula- tions, he named a favorable day for her coronation; and, a little later, by solemn dis- enchantment warded off the ill effects of the Lincoln's Inn Fields incident, when a puppet of wax, representing Elizabeth, was found lying on the ground with a huge pin stuck through its breast. As a matter of fact, however, Dee was making headway neither in his quest for the philosopher's stone nor in his efforts to prove the existence of a spiritual world. In vain 202 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters he pored over every work of occultism upon which he could lay his hands, and tried all known means of incantation. Year after year passed without result, until at last he hit on the expedient of crystal-gazing. As every student of things psychical is aware, if one takes a crystal, or glass of water, or other body with a reflecting surface, and gaze at it steadily, he may possibly perceive, after a greater or less length of time, shadowy images of persons or scenes in the substance that fixes his attention. It was so with Dr. Dee, and not having any understanding of the laws of subconscious mental action he soon came to the conclusion that the shadowy figures he saw in the crystal were veritable spirits. From this it was an easy step to imagine that they really talked to him and sought to convey to him a knowledge of the great secrets of this world and the next. The only difficulty was that he could not understand what they said or, rather, what he fancied they said. The obvious thing to do was to find a crystal-gazer with the gift of the spirit language, and induce him to inter- pret for Dr. Dee's benefit the revelations of the images in the glass. Such a crystal-gazer A Medieval Ghost Hunter 203 was ready at hand in the person of a young man named Edward Kelley. Among the common people, as Dee well knew, Kelley had the reputation of being a bold and wicked wizard. He had been born in Worcester, and trained in the apothecary's business, but, tempted by the prospect of securing great wealth at a minimum of trouble, he had turned alchemist and magician. It was rumored that on at least one occasion he had disinterred a freshly buried corpse, and by his incanta- tions had compelled the spirit of the dead man to speak to him. There was more truth in the report that the reason he always wore a close-fitting skull-cap was to conceal the loss of his ears, which had been forfeited to the Government of England on his conviction for forgery. Of this last unpleasant incident Dr. Dee seems to have known nothing. At any rate, with child-like confidence, he sent for Kelley, told him of the properties of his magic crystal which the now thoroughly infatuated doctor represented as having been bestowed on him by the angel Uriel and asked Kelley if he would interpret for him the wonderful words of the spirits. Kelley, as shrewd and unscrupulous a man 204 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters as any in the annals of imposture, readily consented, but on pretty hard terms. He was to be taken in as a member of Dr. Dee's family, retained on a contract, and paid an annual stipend of fifty pounds, quite a large sum in those times. On this understanding he went to work, and day after day, for years, regaled the credulous Dee with monologues purport- ing to be delivered by the spirits in the crystal. Everything Kelley told him, Dr. Dee faithfully noted down, and many years later, long after both Dee and Kelley had been carried to their graves, these manuscript notes of the seances were published. The volume containing them a massive, closely printed folio entitled "A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits" is one of the great curiosi- ties of literature. A copy of the original edi- tion is before me as I write, and I will quote from it just enough to show the character of the "revelations" vouchsafed to Dee through the mediumship of the cunning Kelley. "Wednesday, 19 Junii, I made a prayer to God and there appeared one, having two gar- ments in his hands, who answered, *A good praise, with a wavering mind.' A Medieval Ghost Hunter 205 "God made my mind stable, and to be seasoned with the intellectual leaven, free of all sensible mutability. "E. K. [said] 'One of these two garments is pure white: the other is speckled of divers colors; he layeth them down before him, he layeth also a speckled cap down before him at his feet; he hath no cap on his head: his hair is long and yellow, but his face cannot be seen. . . . Now he putteth on his pied coat and his pied cap, he casteth one side of his gown over his shoulder and he danceth, and saith, "There is a God, let us be merry!" "E. K. 'He danceth still.' "'There is a heaven, let us be merry. " ' Doth this doctrine teach you to know God, or to be skilful in the heavens ? " ' Note it.' "E. K. 'Now he putteth off his clothes again: now he kneeleth down, and washeth his head and his neck and his face, and shaketh his clothes, and plucketh off the uttermost sole of his shoes, and falleth prostrate on the ground, and saith, "Vouch- safe, oh God, to take away the weariness of my body and to cleanse the filthiness of this dust, that I may be apt for this pureness." 206 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters "E. K. 'Now he taketh the white gar- ment, and putteth it on him. . . . Now he sitteth down on the desk-top and looketh toward me. ... He seemeth now to be turned to a woman, and the very same which we call Galvah.'" Side by side with the esoteric and trans- cendental utterances which Kelley credited to the spirits, he cleverly introduced sufficient in the way of references to the elixir of life and the transmutation of metals, to keep alive in Dee's breast the hope of ultimately solving the crucial problems of medieval science. All the money Dee could procure was spent on ingredients for magical formulas, and to such lengths did his enthusiasm carry him that before long he was reduced to poverty. He became so poor, in fact, that when, in the summer of 1583, the Earl of Leicester an- nounced his intention of bringing a notable foreign visitor, Count Albert Lasky of Bo- hemia, to dine with Dee, the unhappy doctor was compelled to send word that he could not provide a proper dinner. Leicester, moved to pity, reported his plight to the queen, who at once belied her reputation for niggardliness by bestowing a liberal gift on A Medieval Ghost Hunter 207 the Sage of Mortlake, as Dee was now styled at the Court. The dinner accordingly took place, and was a tremendous success in more ways than one. Lasky turned out to be an exceedingly excitable and impressionable man, and his curiosity was so aroused by the occult dis- course of his host that he begged to be ad- mitted to the seances. Always alert to the main chance, Kelley, after a few preliminary sittings of unusual picturesqueness, inspired the spirits to predict that Lasky would one day be elected King of Poland. It needed nothing more to induce the happy and hopeful count to invite both Dee and Kelley to return with him to Bohemia. He would, he promised, protect and provide for them; they should live with him in his many tur- reted castle, and want for nothing. Here, indeed, was a pleasant way out of their present poverty, and Dee and Kelley readily gave consent. Nor did they leave Eng- land a moment too soon. Scarcely had they taken ship before a mob, roused to fury by superstitious fears, broke into the phi- losopher's house at Mortlake and destroyed almost everything that they did not steal 208 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters furniture, books, manuscripts, and costly sci- entific apparatus. Of this, though, Dee for the moment happily knew nothing. Nor, for all his long inter- course with the spirits, was he able to foresee that he was now embarking on a career of tragic adventure that falls to the lot of few scientists. At first, however, all went well enough. Lasky entertained his learned guests in lavish fashion, and, assuming their garb of long, flowing gown, joined heartily with them in the ceremonies of the seance room. But as time passed and their incantations redounded in no way to his advantage, he gradually lost patience, and broadly hinted that they might better transfer their services to another patron. Whereupon, closely followed by the irrepress- ible Kelley, Dee removed to the court of the emperor, Rudolph II, at Prague. He had dedicated one of his scientific treatises to the emperor's father, and in his simplicity firmly believed that this would insure him a warm and lasting welcome. But Rudolph, from the outset, showed himself far from well-dis- posed to Dee, Kelley, and their attendant retinue of invisible spirits. When Dee gran- diloquently introduced himself, in a Latin A Medieval Ghost Hunter 209 oration, as a messenger from the unseen world, the emperor curtly checked him with the remark that he did not understand Latin. And the next day a hint was given him that, at the request of the papal nuncio, he and Kelley were to be arrested and sent to Rome for trial as necromancers. Before night-fall they were in full flight, to remain homeless wanderers until another Bohemian count, hearing of their presence in his dominions, took them under his protection on the proviso that they were to replenish his exchequer by converting humble pewter into silver and gold. In this, of course, they signally failed, and the next few years of their lives were years of the greatest misery. This, at any rate, so far as Dee was concerned. Kelley, with pitiless insistence, drew his pay regularly, and when funds were not forthcoming, refused to act as crystal-gazer and spirit interpreter. On one of these occasions Dee tried to replace him by training his son, Arthur Dee, as a crystal- gazer; but, try as he might, the boy said he could see in the crystal nothing but meaning- less clouds and specks. Had Dee not been thoroughly infatuated this might have disillu- 210 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters sioned him, and convinced him that Kelley had simply been preying on his credulity. But the old man he was now well advanced in years saw in his son's failure only proof of Kelley's superior gifts, and by dint of great sacrifices contrived to find the money necessary to persuade him to return to his post. At last a day came when money could no longer be found, and then Kelley definitely determined to break the partnership. According to one account, he informed Dee that, for the sake of his immortal soul, he could no longer have dealings with the spirits; that they were spirits not of good but of evil, and Mephis- topheles was their master; and that, did he continue to traffic with them, Mephistopheles would soon have him, body and soul. An- other version given by the astrologer, William Lilly, who is said to have been con- sulted by the friends of King Charles I. as to the best time for that unhappy monarch to attempt to escape from prison says that one fine morning Kelley took French leave of Dee, running away with an alchemically inclined friar who had promised him a good income. Whatever the facts of his final rup- ture with his long-suffering master, it is cer- A Medieval Ghost Hunter 211 tain that, after a romantic career, in which he gained a German baronetcy, Kelley was clapped into prison on a charge of fraud, and broke his neck while trying to escape. Dr. Dee, in the meantime, a sadder if not a really wiser man, had found his way back to England, where he essayed the difficult task of retrieving his ruined fortunes. Elizabeth smiled on him as graciously as ever, and at Christmas time sent to him a royal gift of two hundred angels in gold. But he needed more than an occasional bounty; he needed the assurance of a steady income, and the chance to pursue again his scientific studies undis- turbed by the phantoms of gnawing want. So, in a memorial, "written with tears of blood," as he himself put it, Dee begged the queen to appoint a commission to investigate his case and review the evidence he would produce to prove that his services to the nation warranted a reward. Promptly the commis- sion was appointed, and as promptly began its labors. This led to what Isaac Disraeli, perhaps Dee's best biographer, has described as a " literary scene of singular novelty." Let me depict it in Disraeli's little known words: "Dee, sitting in his library," says 212 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters Disraeli, "received the royal commissioners. Two tables were arranged; on one lay all the books he had published, with his unfinished manuscripts; the most extraordinary one was an elaborate narrative of the transactions of his whole life. This manuscript his secretary read, and, as it proceeded, from the other table Dee presented the commissioners with every testimonial. These vouchers consisted of royal letters from the Queen, and from princes, ambassadors, and the most illustrious persons of England and of Europe; passports which traced his routes, and journals which noted his arrivals and departures; grants and appointments and other remarkable evidences ; and when these were wanting, he appealed to living witnesses. "Among the employments which he had filled, he particularly alluded to a 'painful journey in the winter season, of more than fifteen hundred miles, to confer with learned physicians on the Continent, about her maj- esty's health.' He showed the offers of many princes to the English philosopher, to retire to their courts, and the princely estab- lishment at Moscow proffered by the czar; but he had never faltered in his devotion to A Medieval Ghost Hunter 213 his sovereign. ... He complained that his house at Mortlake was too public for his studies, and incommodious for receiving the numerous foreign literati who resorted to him. Of all the promised preferments, he would have chosen the mastership of St. Cross for its seclusion. Here is a great man making great demands, but reposing with dignity on his claims; his wants were urgent, but the penury was not in his spirit. The commis- sioners, as they listened to his autobiography, must often have raised their eyes in wonder, on the venerable and dignified author before them." Their report was terse, direct, and wholly favorable, inspiring the queen to declare that Dee should have the mastership of St. Cross, and that immediately. But days passed into months, and months into years, and Eliza- beth's "immediately" still belonged to the future. For some reason she soon lost all interest in the returned Sage of Mortlake. Again and again he memorialized her, once with a letter vindicating himself from the accusation of practising sorcery. Her sole reply was to grant him finally the uncongenial post of warden of Manchester College, from 214 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters which he retired after some mortifying ex- periences with the minor officials. Nor did he fare better at the hands of Elizabeth's successor. Steadily he sank lower in the scale of society, until at last he was forced to sell his books, one by one, to buy bread. And still, for all his poverty, he pressed constantly forward in his adventurings into the invisible world. If his friends deserted him, he would at least have the companionship of "angels." As his hallucinations grew, his youthful buoy- ancy returned. He would leave England, would fare across to the Continent, and there seek out men of a mind like unto his own. Joyfully, he made ready for the journey; but, even while he packed and planned, the call came for another and a longer voyage. In the eighty-first year of his age, 1608, the aged dreamer became in very fact a dweller in the spirit world. Of his place in the history of mankind, it is not easy to write with any degree of finality. There can be no doubt that he was utterly swept off his feet by the domination of a fixed idea. And it is not possible to point to any specific contributions which he made to the advancement of learning, worldly or otherwise. A Medieval Ghost Hunter 215 Still, it is equally certain that he was anything but a negative quantity in an age resplendent for its positive men. He played his part, however mistakenly, in the intellectual awak- ening that has shed such luster on the times of Elizabeth ; and, if only for his overpowering curiosity, and his intense and unfailing ardor to get at the truth of all things, natural or supernatural, he merits respect as a forerunner of the scientific spirit which in his day was but feebly striving to loose itself from the bondage of bigotry and intolerance. XI GHOST HUNTERS OF YESTERDAY AND TO- DAY PYCHICAL research, of which so much mention has been made in the preceding pages, may be roughly yet sufficiently de- scribed as an effort to determine by strictly scientific methods the nature and significance of apparitions, hauntings, spiritistic phenom- ena, and those other weird occurrences that would seem to confirm the idea that the spirits of the dead can and do communicate with the living. It is something compara- tively new and like all scientific endeavor is the outgrowth of many minds. But so far as its origin may be attributed to any one man, credit must chiefly be given to a Cam- bridge University professor named Henry Sidgwick. At the time, Sidgwick was merely a lecturer in the university, a post given him as a reward for his brilliant career as an undergraduate. He was a born student and investigator, a 216 Ghost Hunters of To-day 217 restless seeker after knowledge. Philosophy, sociology, ethics, economics, mathematics, the classics, he made almost the whole wide field of thought his sphere of inquiry. And after awhile, as is so often the case, his learn- ing became too profound for his peace of mind. He had been born and brought up in the faith of the English Church, and had unhesitatingly made the religious declaration required of all members of the university faculty. But little by little he felt himself drifting from the moorings of his youth, and doubting the truth of the ancient doctrines and traditions. Honestly skeptical, but still un- willing to lose his hold on religion, he turned feverishly to the study of oriental languages, of ancient philosophies, of history, of science, in the hope of finding evidence that would re- move his doubts. But the more he read the greater grew his uncertainty, especially with respect to the vital question of the existence of a spiritual world and its relation to man- kind. While he was still laboring in this valley of indecision, Sidgwick was visited by a young man, Frederic W. H. Myers, who had studied under him a few years earlier and for whom 218 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters he had formed a warm friendship. Myers, it seemed, was tormented by the same scruples that were harassing him. It was his belief, he told Sidgwick, that if the teachings of the Bible were true if there existed a spiritual world which in days of old had been manifest to mankind then such a world should be manifest now. And one beautiful, starlit evening, when they were strolling together through the university grounds, he put to his old master the pointed question : "Do you think that, although tradition, intuition, metaphysics, have failed to solve the riddle of the universe, there is still a chance of solving it by drawing from actual observable phenomena ghosts, spirits, whatsoever it may be valid knowledge as to a world un- seen?" Gazing gravely into the eager face of his companion, and weighing his words with the caution that was characteristic of him, Sidg- wick replied that he had indeed entertained this thought; that, although not over hopeful of the result, he believed such an inquiry should be undertaken, notwithstanding the unpleas- ant notoriety it would entail on those embark- ing in it. Would he, then, make the quest, Ghost Hunters oj To-day 219 and would he permit Myers to pursue it by his side ? Long and earnestly the two friends talked together, and when tb *r walk ended, that December night in Ko9, psychical re- search had at last come definitely into being. In the beginning, however, progress was painfully slow and uncertain. "Our meth- ods," as Myers afterward explained, "were all to make. In those early days we were more devoid of precedents, of guidance, even of criticism that went beyond mere expressions of contempt, than is now readily conceived." It was realized that no mere analysis of alleged experiences in the past would do; that what was needed was a rigid scrutiny of pres- ent-day manifestations of a seemingly super- normal character, and the collection of a mass of well authenticated evidence sufficient to justify inferences and conclusions. Earnestly and bravely the friends went to work, and before long had the satisfaction of finding an invaluable assistant in the person of Edmund Gurney, another Cambridge man and an en- thusiast in all matters metaphysical. At first, to be sure, Gurney entered into psychical research in a half-hearted, quizzi- cal way, expecting to be amused rather than 220 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters instructed. And he derived little encourage- ment from the investigations carried on by Sidgwick, Myt s, and himself in the field of spiritistic mediuiL hip. Fraud seemed always to be at the botto of the phenomena pro- duced in the sea* c ;e room. But his interest was suddenly and permanently awakened by the discovery, following several years spent in patiently collecting evidence, of facts pointing to the possibility of thought being communi- cated from mind to mind by some agency other than the recognized organs of sense. At once he made it his special business to accumulate data bearing on this point, his labors ultimately leading him into an ex- haustive examination of hypnotism, as he found that the hypnotic trance seemed pe- culiarly favorable to " thought transference," or "telepathy." Meantime, the example of this little Cam- bridge group had been followed by other inves- tigators; and in 1876, before no less dignified and conservative a body than the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the proposal was made that a special com- mittee be appointed for the systematic exam- ination of spiritistic and kindred phenomena. Ghost Hunters of To-day 221 The idea was broached by Dr. W. F. Barrett, professor of physics at the Royal College of Science, Dublin, and was warmly seconded by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace and Sir William Crookes, two distinguished scientists who had already made adventures in psychical research and were destined to wide renown as ghost hunters. For some reason nothing was done at the time ; but five years later Professor Barrett re- newed his suggestion, asking Myers and Gurney if they would join him in the forma- tion of such a society. That, they replied, they would gladly do, provided Sidgwick could be induced to accept its presidency. Having long before realized that the field was too extensive for thorough exploration by any individual, however gifted, Sidgwick willingly gave his consent. And accordingly, in Janu- ary, 1882, the now celebrated Society for Psychical Research was formally organized, its first council including, besides Sidgwick, Myers, Gurney, and Barrett, such men as Arthur J. Balfour, afterward Prime Minis- ter of Great Britain; the brilliant Richard Hutton; Prof. Balfour Stewart; and Frank Podmore, than whom no more merciless exe- 222 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters cutioner of bogus ghosts is wielding the ax to-day. Unfortunately, the first council also num- bered several avowed spiritists, notably the medium Stainton Moses; and the society's birthplace was in the rooms of the British National Association of Spiritualists. These two facts created a wide-spread suspicion that the society was actually nothing more than an adjunct to the spiritistic movement. Nor was confidence wholly restored by the hasty with- drawal of the spiritistic representatives as soon as they learned that strictly scientific methods of inquiry were to prevail ; or by the accession, as honorary members, of national figures like W. E. Gladstone, John Ruskin, Lord Tenny- son, A. R. Wallace, Sir William Crookes, and G. F. Watts. To the scientific as well as the popular con- sciousness, the society was little better than an assemblage of cranks, with strangely fan- tastic notions, and only too likely to lose its mental balance and help ignorant and super- stitious people to lose theirs. Conscious, however, of the really serious and important nature of their enterprise, and cheered by Gladstone's comforting assurance that no in- Ghost Hunters of To-day 223 vestigation of greater moment to mankind could be made,* the members of the society applied themselves zealously to the business that had brought them together. Sensibly enough, they adopted the princi- ple of specialization and division of labor. While one group carried on experiments de- signed to prove or disprove the telepathic hypothesis, another engaged in a systematic examination of the alleged facts of clairvoy- ance. A third, in its turn, under the skilful guidance of Gurney, investigated the phe- nomena of the hypnotic trance, with results unexpectedly beneficial to medical science. A special committee was also appointed to col- lect and sift evidence as to the reality of apparitions and hauntings, making whenever possible personal examinations of the seers of the visions and the places of their occurrence. Finally, there were various subcommittees of inquiry into the physical phenomena of spirit- ism, the knockings, table turnings, pro- duction of spirit forms, and similar marvels of the Dunglas Home type of "medium." * Gladstone's words were " Psychical research is the most im- portant work which is being done in the world by far the most important." 224 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters From the outset, these subcommittees demon- strated the value of psychical research, as a protection to the interests of society, by ex- posing, one after another, the fraudulent char- acter of the pretended intermediaries between the seen and the unseen world. In this' region of inquiry no one was more successful than a recruit from distant Aus- tralia, by name Richard Hodgson. Hodgson, unlike Sidgwick and Myers and many others of his associates, had not engaged in psychical research from the hope that the truths of the Bible might thereby be demonstrated. His motive was that of the detective eager to un- ravel mysteries. From his boyhood he had had a singular fondness for solving tricks and puzzles of all sorts; and when, in 1878, he came to England to complete his education at Cambridge, he naturally gravitated into the company of Sidgwick, Myers, and Gurney, as men busied in an undertaking that appealed to his detective instinct. He was radically different from them in temperament and point of view not at all mystical, full of animal spirits, fond of all manner of sports, and in- terested in occult subjects only so far as they furnished working material for his nimble and Ghost Hunters of To-day 225 inquiring mind. The Cambridge trio, how- ever, took kindly to him, invited him to join the Society for Psychical Research, and two years after its formation were instrumental in sending him to India to investigate the methods of Madam Blavatsky, the high priestess of the theosophic movement which was then winning adherents throughout the civilized world. From this inquiry he returned to England with an international reputation as a detec- tive of the supernatural. With the aid of two disgruntled confederates of the theosophist leader, he had demonstrated the falsity of the foundations on which her claims rested, and had shown that downright swindling consti- tuted a large part of her stock in trade. With redoubled ardor he now plunged into the task of exposing the spiritistic mediums plying their vocation in England, and for this pur- pose enlisted the assistance of a professional conjurer, S. J. Davey, who was also a mem- ber of the Society for Psychical Research. Davey, after a little practice, succeeded in duplicating by mere sleight of hand many of the most impressive feats of the mediums; do- ing this, indeed, so well that some spiritists 226 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters alleged that he was in reality a medium him- self. Hodgson, for his part, by clever analysis of the Davey performances and of the feats of Davey's mediumistic competitors, brought home to his colleagues in the Society for Psychical Research a lively sense of the folly of depending on the human eye as a detector of fraudulent spiritistic phenomena. His crowning triumph came with his exposure of Eusapia Paladino, the Italian medium who is still enjoying an undeserved popularity on the European continent. But in time even Hodgson met his Waterloo. Sent to the United States to investigate the trance phenomena of Mrs. Leonora Piper, he was forced to confess that in her case the theory of fraud fell to the ground, and as is well known he ended by developing into an out and out spiritist. A few days before Christmas, 1905, he suddenly died in Boston; and, if reports from the spirit world may be accepted, the once-renowned ghost hunter has himself become a ghost, visiting in especial two of his American colleagues, Prof. William James and Prof. James H. Hyslop.* * For details of the Hodgson " manifestations " the reader may consult Professor Hyslop's recently published book " Psychical Re- search and the Resurrection " particularly Chaps. V-VH. Ghost Hunters of To-day 227 To return, however, to the early days of the Society for Psychical Research. Valuable as were the results obtained by Hodgson and his associates on what may be called the anti- swindle committees, they had a distinctly negative bearing on the supreme object of inquiry proof of the existence of a spiritual world in which human personality exists after the death of the body. Some enthu- siasts did not hesitate to proclaim at an early date that such proof had actually been se- cured, basing this assertion on the seemingly supernatural facts brought to light by the committees on telepathy, clairvoyance, and apparitions. But the society, under the leader- ship of the cautious Sidgwick, who was its president for many years, steadily refused to countenance this view, and insisted that before any definite conclusions could be reached far more evidence would have to be assembled. Thus the first ten years of the society's exist- ence were marked by few positive results, the most important being the statement of the case for telepathy and of its possible relation- ships to apparitions and hauntings, as well as to the purely psychical phenomena of spirit- ualism. 228 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters Indeed, the society formally expressed its ac- quiescence in the telepathic hypothesis as early as 1884, in the words, "Our society claims to have proved the reality of thought trans- ference of the transmission of thoughts, feelings, and images from one mind to an- other by no recognized channel of sense." But to no other dictum did it commit itself until ten years more had passed when, fol- lowing the so-called census of hallucinations, it gave voice to its belief that between deaths and apparitions of the dying person a con- nection existed that was not due to chance. And since then the society has contented itself with steadily accumulating evidence designed to throw light on the causal connection between deaths and ghosts, and to illumine the central problem of demonstrating scientifically the existence of an unseen world and the immor- tality of the soul. Individuals, of course, have been free to express their views, and from the pens of several have come striking and suggestive analyses of the evidence assembled in the course of the society's twenty-five years. In this respect, beyond any question, primacy must be given the writings of Myers. Even Ghost Hunters of To-day 229 before the organization of the society, his per- sonal researches had led him to suspect that, whatever the truth about the life beyond the grave, there was reason for radical changes of belief regarding the nature of human per- sonality itself. In the light of the phenomena of the hypnotic trance, clairvoyance, halluci- nations, and even of natural sleep, it seemed to him that, instead of being a stable, indi- visible unity, human personality was essen- tially unstable and divisible. And as the years passed and he was enabled to coordinate the results of the investigations carried on by the different committees, he gradually became convinced that over and beyond the self of which man is normally con- scious there existed in every man a secondary self endowed with faculties transcending those of the normal wake-a-day self. To this he gave the name of the " subliminal self," and, in the words of Professor James, "endowed psychology with a new problem, the explo- ration of the subliminal region being destined to figure thereafter in that branch of learning as Myers's problem." Not content with this, he gave himself, with all the earnestness that had originally drawn 230 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters him into activity with Sidgwick, to the formula- tion of a cosmic philosophy based on the hypothesis of the subliminal self and its opera- tions in that unseen world of whose existence he no longer doubted. Here he laid himself open to the charge of extravagance and trans- cendentalism, and undoubtedly exceeded the logical limit. But for all of that his labors cut short by death six years ago, and only a few months after the death of his beloved master, Sidgwick have been little short of epoch marking, and amply suffice to vindicate the existence of the once despised, and still by no means venerated, Society for Psychical Research. Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Mr. Frank Podmore are other members of the society who have granted the outside world informative glimpses of its workings and dis- coveries. Sir William Crookes, of course, is best known as a great chemist, discoverer of the element thallium, and inventor of numer- ous scientific instruments; while Sir Oliver Lodge's most striking work has been in elec- tricity, and more particularly in the direction of improving wireless telegraphy. But both have long been actively interested in psychical Ghost Hunters of To-day 231 research, and perhaps most of all in those phases of it bearing on the telepathic hypothe- sis, their great aim being to discover just what the technique of telepathic communication from mind to mind may be. Mr. Podmore, on the other hand, like Richard Hodgson, has chiefly concerned him- self with psychical research from the detective, or critical, standpoint. He began his labors late in the '70's, associating himself with the Cambridge group, and has consistently maintained the attitude of a skeptical, though open minded, investigator. To-day, to a cer- tain extent, he may be said to occupy the place so long filled by Henry Sidgwick as a sane, restraining influence on the less judicial members of the society, who would unhesi- tatingly brush aside all objections and em- brace the spiritistic hypothesis with all its supernatural implications.* Of course, psychical research has by no means been confined to the English organiza- tion. All over the world investigators are now probing into the mysteries of the seem- * A new work by Mr. Podmore is announced for immediate pub- lication, with the characteristic title of "The Naturalization of the Supernatural." It is said to contain a detailed analysis of the work of various well-known mediums. 232 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters ingly supernormal. But, as a general thing, their methods scarcely reach the strict stand- ards set by the organized inquirers of England, and as a natural consequence they are more easily deceived by tricksters. This is particularly true of the European ghost hunters, whose laxity of procedure, not to say gullibility, was clearly shown by the ease with which Hodgson exposed the pretensions of Eusapia Paladino after Continental savants had pronounced her feats genuine. And it is even more strikingly exhibited by the pathetic fidelity with which they still trust in her, not- withstanding the Hodgson exposure, and the fact that they themselves have on more than one occasion caught her committing fraud. In the United States, however, psychical re- search worthy of the name took root early, owing to the establishment of an American branch of the English society under the ca- pable direction of Dr. Hodgson. A year or so ago, after his death, this branch was aban- doned. But in its place, and organized along similar lines, there has arisen the American Institute for Scientific Research, the creation of Prof. James H. Hyslop. Until a few years ago occupant of the chair Ghost Hunters of To-day 233 of logic at Columbia University, Professor Hyslop is unquestionably one of the most conspicuous figures in psychical research in this or any other country. Like Professor Sidgwick, he first became interested in the subject through religious doubt, and forthwith attacked its problems with the zeal of a man whose principal characteristics are intense enthusiasm, resourcefulness of wit, and intel- lectual fearlessness. As everybody knows, his experiences with Mrs. Piper led him to unite with Hodgson and Myers in regarding the spiritistic hypothesis as the only one ca- pable of explaining all the phenomena en- countered. But he is none the less able and eager to expose fraud wherever found, and if only from the police view-point his society will undoubtedly do good work. Associated with him are many of the American investigators formerly identified with the English society; some of whom, notably Prof. William James of Harvard, the dean of psychical research in the United States, also keep up their connec- tion with the parent organization. Summing up the results of the really scien- tific ghost hunting of the last twenty-five years, it may be safely said that if the hunters have 234 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters not accomplished their main object of defi- nitely proving the existence of a spiritual world, their labors have nevertheless been of high value in several important directions. They have exposed the fraudulent preten- sions of innumerable charlatans, and have thus acted as a protection for the credulous. They ( have shown that, making all possible allow- ance for error of whatever kind, there still remains in the phenomena of apparitions, clairvoyance, etc., a residuum not explainable on the hypothesis of fraud or chance coinci- dence. They have aided in giving validity to the idea of the influence of suggestion as a factor both in the cause and the cure of disease. They have given a needed stimulus to the study of abnormal mental conditions. And, finally, by the discovery of the impressive facts that led Myers to formulate his hypothesis of the subliminal self, they have opened the door to far-reaching reforms in the whole sociological domain, in education, in the treatment of vice and crime, in all else that makes for the uplifting of the human race. Up-To-Date Books on Great Subjects SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY BY SIR OLIVER LODGE, F.R.S. In this able and intensely modern work, the distinguished author sums up the states of science, faith and theology in their bearing, separately and collectively, upon religion and immortality; and it constitutes, therefore, an extremely valuable contribution to the literature of the present important crisis in modern thought. 8vo. $2.00 NET. POSTPAID $2.20 RELIGION AND MEDICINE BY DRS. WORCESTER, McCOMB AND CORIAT This is the celebrated Official Book of the celebrated Emmanuel Movement. Its effect upon the thought and the religion of its age is already probably greater than that of any book published for many years. It is a clear, non-technical statement of the principles it stands for. It is unquestionably the most widely discussed book in America. 12mo. $1.60 NET. POSTPAID $1.66 THE LIVING WORD BY ELWOOD WORCESTER, D.D., Pn.D. "For the past generation," says Dr. Worcester in his Preface, " men have been groping for a theology which should approach the old mysteries, God, evil, the soul and immortality from the point of view of modern scientific and philosophic thought. The old static aspect of the universe has been supplemented by the dynamic. The old transcendent conception of God has yielded to the immanent. The thought of God as mere ruler and judge is no longer sufficient for men's religious needs. Science has discovered God at work, and religion also craves a spiritual and an active Deity who works through laws and through us." 12mo. $1.60 NET. POSTPAID $1.63 MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY, NEW YORK " The latest voice of modern scientific investigation.' CHICAGO DAILY NEWS. THE RIDDLE OF PERSONALITY BY H. ADDINGTON BRUCE AUTHOR OF " HISTORIC GHOSTS AND GHOST HUNTERS " CONTENTS CHAPTERS APPENDICES I. Early Phases of the I. D. D. Home and Problem Eusapia Paladino II. The Subliminal Self n. The Census of Halluci- III. "Pioneers of France in nations the New World" m Hypnotism and the IV. American Explorers of Drink Rabit the Subconscious _... TT ... V. The Evidence for Sur- ** Hypnoidization vival V. Spiritism vs Telepathy VI. The Nemesis of VI. Hints for further read- Spiritism ing "A singularly well balanced judgment is needed to succeed in the task set for himself by MR. H. ADDINGTON BRUCE in his discussion of men's latent powers. But he has distinctly proved that he is possessed of that rare gift. . . . The book is one of great value and written in a style that will bring enlightenment to many readers." The Outlook. "A. volume of genuine value and one that will be read with profit by those who are interested in and have followed the arguments and experiments of curious delvers into the mysteries of the human mind. It is a clear, logical and impartial presentation of the whole subject from a scientific point of view, in which is set forth all that can be absolutely classed as fact regarding the latent faculties of man, revealed by study, accident, personal observation and experiment." Boston Evening Transcript. 8vo. $1.50 NET. POSTPAID $1.62 MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY, NEW YORK University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. QL JW* REC'DYRl OCT08T 001 I II 3 1158 01167 8488 A 000034527 2 ST7 F