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Or take this instance, reported by Lady Eardley:

"One day I went to my bathroom, locked the door, undressed, and was just about to get into the bath, when I heard a voice say:

"'Unlock the door!'

"I was startled and looked around, but of course no one was there. I had stepped into the bath when I heard the voice twice more, saying:

"'Unlock the door!'

"On this I jumped out and did unlock the door, and then stepped into the bath again. As I got in I fainted away and fell down flat in the water. Fortunately, as I fell, I was just able to catch at a bell handle, which was attached to the wall above the tub. My pull brought the maid, who found me, she said, lying with my head under water. She picked me up and carried me out. If the door had been locked I would certainly have been drowned."

Still more impressive is an experience in the life of an Englishwoman named Mrs. Jean Gwynne Bettany. Her statement is corroborated by her father and mother.

See "Phantasms of the Living," vol. i, pp. 194-195.

"On one occasion," she says, "I was walking in a country lane. I was reading geometry as I walked along, a subject little likely to produce fancies or morbid phenomena of any kind, when, in a moment, I saw a bedroom in my house known as the 'White Room,' and upon the floor lay my mother, to all appearance dead. The vision must have remained some minutes, during which time my real surroundings appeared to pale and die out; but as the vision faded, actual surroundings came back, at first dimly, and then clearly.

"I could not doubt that what I had seen was real, so, instead of going home, I went at once to the house of our medical man, and he immediately set out with me, on the way putting questions I could not answer, as my mother was to all appearance well when I left home.

"I led the doctor straight to the 'White Room,' where we found my mother actually lying as in my vision. This was true even to minute details. She had been seized suddenly by an attack at the heart, and would soon have breathed her last but for the doctor's timely advent."

Mrs. Bettany's father, Mr. S. G. Gwynne, adds:

"I distinctly remember being surprised by seeing my daughter, in company with the family doctor, outside the door of my residence; and I asked: 'Who is ill?' She replied: 'Mamma.' She led the way at once to the 'White Room,' where we found my wife lying in a swoon on the floor. It was when I asked when she had been taken ill that I found it must have been after my daughter had left the house. None of the servants in the house knew anything of the sudden illness, which our doctor assured me would have been fatal had he not arrived when he did."

In this last case, it should be noted the ghost seen was an apparition not of a dead person, but of a living one. This is most important, from the point of view of gaining insight into the nature and characteristics of ghosts.

The investigators who, a matter of twenty-five or thirty years ago, began for the first time to inquire into the subject in a scientific way, early made the interesting discovery that phantasms of the living are seen quite as frequently as phantasms of the dead. Besides which, it was found that ghosts could be produced experimentally--that by a mere act of willing, one person could make another, sometimes miles distant, see a ghost. Many successful experiments of the kind, supported by ample corroborative evidence, are now on record. For example:

Mr. B. F. Sinclair, at the time a resident of Lakewood, New Jersey, had occasion to go to New York to be absent several days. His wife was not feeling well when he left home, and he was greatly worried about her.

"That night," to continue the narrative in his own words, "before I went to bed, I thought I would try to find out, if possible, her condition. I had undressed, and was sitting on the edge of the bed, when I covered my face with my hands and willed myself in Lakewood at home, to see if I could see her. After a little, I seemed to be standing in her room before the bed, and saw her lying there, looking much better. I felt satisfied she was better, and so spent the week more comfortably regarding her condition.

"On Saturday I went home. When she saw me, she remarked:

"'I thought something had surely happened to you. I saw you standing in front of the bed the night you left, as plain as could be, and I have been worrying about you ever since.'

"After explaining my effort to find out her condition, everything became clear to her. She had seen me when I was trying to see her. I thought at the time I was going to see her and make her see me."

In at least one instance another experimenter, a German savant named Wesermann, performed the seemingly impossible feat of creating, by a simple act of volition, a ghost not of himself but of a person who was dead.

Herr Wesermann had been greatly troubled by the conduct of a friend, a young officer in the German army, and in the hope of reforming him, "willed" one evening that at eleven o'clock that night he should see in a dream an apparition of a lady in whom he had once been greatly interested, but who had been dead five years.

It chanced that at eleven o'clock, instead of being in bed and asleep, Herr Wesermann's friend was chatting with a brother officer. Nevertheless, the apparition came to him at the hour appointed, and was seen, not only by him, but by his companion also.

The door of his chamber seemed to open, and the ghost of his dead sweetheart walked in, "dressed in white, with black kerchief and bared head." Both officers started to their feet, and watched with bulging eyes while the ghost bowed gravely to them, turned, and without a word disappeared.

They followed instantly, rushing into the corridor, but saw only the sentry, who solemnly assured them that nobody but themselves had entered or left the room.

Facts like these naturally raised in the minds of many of the investigators a belief that quite possibly ghosts could be explained without resorting to the alternative of dogmatically denying their reality or regarding them as supernatural beings. This belief was strengthened by other facts brought to light in the course of experiments to determine the actuality of telepathy, or thought transference as it used to be called.

It was discovered that, under certain favoring conditions, thoughts could indeed be transmitted from mind to mind without passing through the ordinary known channels of communication; and furthermore that thoughts thus transmitted were often apprehended, not as mere ideas, but in the form of auditory or visual hallucinations.

Thus, if it were a question of "telepathing" the idea of a certain playing card, say the three of diamonds, the recipient, instead of simply getting the thought, "three of diamonds," might hear an hallucinatory voice saying to him, "three of diamonds," or might see three diamond-shaped objects floating before his eyes, the "ghosts" of three diamonds, so to speak.

Of even greater significance was the discovery that it frequently happened also that instead of getting the message which the experimenter had consciously attempted to send, the recipient would get other ideas merely latent in the experimenter's mind--ideas connected with his environment, something he had been doing, etc. Or the recipient might get the right message several hours after the experiment had been made--receiving it, for example, in a dream.

The obvious conclusion was that telepathy must be a function not of a person's ordinary consciousness, but of what psychologists call the subconsciousness, thus accounting for the difficulty of invariably obtaining satisfactory results in telepathic experiments.

In the light of these discoveries, then, the belief has been gaining ground that ghosts--real ghosts--are at most nothing but mental images impressed upon one mind by another through the subtle power of telepathy, and apprehended in the form of hallucinations of the various senses, just as any ordinary telepathic message may be apprehended.

A person is stricken with a mortal illness, is fatally injured, or is passing through some other great crisis likely to terminate in death. Consciously or subconsciously, he thinks of loved ones far away, and is seized with a longing to get into touch with them once more, if only to notify them of the catastrophe threatening him.

Across the intervening space, by what mechanism we as yet do not know, his thought wings its way to them, finds lodgment in their subconsciousness, and thence, when favoring conditions arise--as in some moment of mental relaxation--is projected into their consciousness before, at the time of, or after the sender's death, and is seen, or heard, it may be, as a Phantom Drummer, a Knocking Ghost, or the phantasmal image of the sender himself.

If, however, conditions are such as to prevent the message from emerging from the recipient's subconsciousness into his field of conscious vision, it may, on occasion, as telepathic experiments have proved, be retransmitted to a third party, and by him be apprehended; as, for example, the Drummer of Cortachy, in the two instances cited above, was heard not by members of the Ogilvy family, but by comparative strangers.

More than this, evidence has been accumulating to make it certain that in most cases not even telepathy is involved in the creation of ghosts, but that they are merely products of the seer's own subconsciousness. This was first clearly indicated by the results of an interesting "census of hallucinations," originated some years ago at the International Congress of Psychology, and simultaneously carried on--principally by members of the Society for Psychical Research--in the United States, England, France, Germany, and other countries. To thousands of persons the question was put:

"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?"

Of the 27,339 replies received to this question no fewer than 3,266 were in the affirmative. Many of those replying narrated true "ghost stories" similar to the ones given above; many testified to apparitions not of dead persons but of living friends; and in addition to this, the replies of many others brought out the interesting fact that there often were "ghosts" of inanimate objects--of hats and chairs and tables as well as of human beings.

One respondent, Mrs. Savile Lumley, testified that, in broad daylight and while taking a calisthenic lesson, she and another young woman "distinctly saw a chair over which we felt we must fall, and called out to each other to avoid it. But no chair was there."

The Reverend G. Lyon Turner, professor of philosophy at the Lancashire Independent College, Manchester, England, woke up one morning to find the ceiling of his room adorned with a huge chandelier of some ten arms, and the jets shining brightly through the ground-glass globes at the end of each arm. He knew that when he went to bed no chandelier had been there, and naturally feared that something was the matter with his eyesight.

"I moved my head," he said, "to see whether the phantom moved, too. But no, it remained fixed; and the objects behind and beyond it became more or less completely visible as I moved, exactly as would have been the case had it been a real chandelier. So I woke my wife, but she saw nothing."

Even more bizarre was the phantasm that appeared to another Englishman. Here is his own account of it:

"I had just gone to bed, and was--at least, this was my impression at the time--quite awake. The door of my room was ajar, and there was a light in the passage which half-illumined my room. Suddenly I became aware of a series of slight taps on the passage outside. These taps were not sufficiently loud for a human footstep; on the other hand, the volume of their sound was greater than that made by a walking-stick. I fully remember sitting up in bed and beholding two top-boots trot rapidly across the room and vanish into the opposite wall. The illusion was astonishingly vivid, and I can recall the details to this day. I have never had a waking dream since, and have never experienced ambulant top-boots except on this occasion."

Whence the origin of these odd apparitions? The reply of modern science is that they were nothing more than the weird externalization of ideas latent in the minds of those perceiving them. Indeed, in the case of Mr. Turner there is absolute proof that this was the case, for that gentleman afterwards identified the phantom chandelier with one familiar to him as hanging from the ceiling of the college chapel in which he daily said prayers. Furthermore, there is proof--of which an abundance will be given in subsequent chapters--that often the ideas thus externalized relate to things once seen or heard but long since forgotten; it may be to things seen or heard in a wholly unconscious, or, rather, subconscious, way. And as with ideas of things, so with ideas of persons.

In this connection, as illuminating vividly the problem of ghosts, may well be given an experience narrated to me by Doctor Morton Prince, the eminent Boston psychopathologist, or medical psychologist.

A patient of his came to him one morning in a condition of extreme nervousness, declaring that the previous night she had seen a ghost. "I woke up," said she, "and saw at the foot of my bed a young woman, who gradually faded away." She maintained that at no time had she seen anybody resembling the apparition, but in the minute description she gave, Doctor Prince at once recognized a relative of his, with whom he remembered he had been talking in the hall when the patient last visited him. Saying nothing to her he quietly assembled a few photographs, and, before she departed, asked her to look them over.

"Why," she said, picking one up, "here is my ghost!"

"Yes," was Doctor Prince's reply, "and you saw your ghost in this house when you were here only a few days ago. I was talking to her as you came in."

"But," objected the patient, "I certainly did not see her, for I noticed somebody was with you, and I purposely turned away as I passed, lest I should seem rude."

"All the same," said Doctor Prince, "you saw her without being conscious of it--saw her, as it were, out of the corner of your eye. One fleeting glance would be enough to give you the memory image that you mistook for a ghost."

Undoubtedly Doctor Prince was right, and undoubtedly this dual law of subconscious perception and memory is enough to account for some of the most impressive ghosts cited in this chapter. Even the strange haunting of the Petit Trianon, as experienced by Miss Morison and Miss Lamont, may be said to find its explanation here.

It is true that both Miss Morison and Miss Lamont profess to have known little about the history of the Petit Trianon previous to their visit to Versailles. But their detailed report of the haunting contains statements showing that, subconsciously at any rate, they must have possessed considerable knowledge of the place. Miss Morison admits that she had, as a girl, great enthusiasm for Marie Antoinette, and had read not a little about her, including an article descriptive of her summer home; while Miss Lamont is a teacher of French history, and accordingly must have had rather more knowledge than the average person regarding the life story of Queen Marie. Besides which, and most significant, there was published, just before they went to Versailles, an illustrated magazine article picturing a historical f?te in the gardens of the Petit Trianon, with some account of its history.

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