It may be well, in the first place, to make some negative statements as to what the committee does not discover. First, it has never yet hired haunted house in which the sights and sounds continued during the tenancy of the curious observers. [{137}] The most obvious inference is that the earlier observers who saw and heard abnormal things were unscientific, convivial, nervous, hysterical, or addicted to practical joking. This, however, is not the only possible explanation. As a celebrated prophet, by his own avowal had been ‘known to be steady for weeks at a time,’ so, even in a regular haunted house, the ghost often takes a holiday. A case is well known to the writer in which a ghost began his manœuvres soon after a family entered the house. It made loud noises, it opened doors, turning the handle as the lady of the house walked about, it pulled her hair when she was in bed, plucked her dress, produced lights, and finally appeared visibly, a hag dressed in grey, to several persons. Then as if sated, the ghost struck work for years, when it suddenly began again, was as noisy as ever, and appeared to a person who had not seen it before, but who made a spirited if unsuccessful attempt to run it to earth.
The truth is, that magazine stories and superstitious exaggerations have spoiled us for ghosts. When we hear of a haunted house, we imagine that the ghost is always on view, or that he has a benefit night, at certain fixed dates, when you know where to have him. These conceptions are erroneous, and a house may be haunted, though nothing desirable occurs in presence of the committee. Moreover the committee, as far as the writer is aware, have neglected to add a seer to their number. This mistake, if it has been made, is really wanton. It is acknowledged that not every one has ‘a nose for a ghost,’ as a character of George Eliot’s says, or eyes or ears for a ghost. It is thought very likely that, where several people see an apparition simultaneously, the spiritual or psychical or imaginative ‘impact’ is addressed to one, and by him, or her (usually her) handed on to the rest of the society. Now, if the committee do not provide themselves with a good ‘sensitive’ comrade, what can they expect, but what they get, that is, nothing? A witch in an old Scotch trial says, of her ‘Covin,’ or ‘Circle,’ ‘We could do no great thing without our Maiden’. The committee needs a Maiden, as a Covin needed one, and among the visionaries of the Psychical Society, there must be some young lady who should be on the House Committee. Yet one writer in the Society’s Proceedings who has a very keen scent for an impostor, if not for a ghost, avers that, from the evidence, she believes that they are examining facts, and not the origin of fables.
These facts, as was said, differ from the stories in ‘Christmas numbers’. The ghost in typical reports seldom or never speaks. It has no message to convey, or, if it has a message, it does not convey it. It does not unfold some tragedy of the past: in fact it is very seldom capable of being connected with any definite known dead person. The figure seen sometimes ‘varies with the seer’. [{139}] In other cases, however, different people attest having seen the same phantasm. Finally a new house seems just as likely to be haunted as an old house, and the committee appears to have no special knowledge of very ancient family ghosts, such as Pearlin Jean, the Luminous Boy of Corby, or the rather large company of spectres popularly supposed to make themselves at home at Glamis Castle.
What then is the type, the typical haunted house, from which, if narratives vary much, they are apt to break down under cross-examination?
The phenomena are usually phenomena of sight, or sound, or both. As a rule the sounds are footsteps, rustling of dresses, knocks, raps, heavy bangs, noises as of dragging heavy weights, and of disarranging heavy furniture. These sometimes occur freely, where nobody can testify to having seen anything spectral. Next we have phantasms, mostly of figures beheld for a moment with ‘the tail of the eye’ or in going along a passage, or in entering a room where nobody is found, or standing beside a bed, perhaps in a kind of self-luminous condition. Sometimes these spectres are taken by visitors for real people, but the real people cannot be found; sometimes they are at once recognised as phantasms, because they are semi-transparent, or look very malignant, or because they glide and do not walk, or are luminous, or for some other excellent reason. The combination, in due proportions, of pretty frequent inexplicable noises, with occasional aimless apparitions, makes up the type of orthodox modern haunted house story. The difficulty of getting evidence worth looking at (except for its uniformity) is obviously great. Noises may be naturally caused in very many ways: by winds, by rats, by boughs of trees, by water pipes, by birds. The writer has known a very satisfactory series of footsteps in an historical Scotch house, to be dispelled by a modification of the water pipes. Again he has heard a person of distinction mimic the noises made by his family ghosts (which he preserved from tests as carefully as Don Quixote did his helmet) and the performance was an admirable imitation of the wind in a spout. There are noises, however, which cannot be thus cheaply disposed of, and among them are thundering whacks on the walls of rooms, which continue in spite of all efforts to detect imposture. These phenomena, says Kiesewetter, were known to the Acadians of old, a circumstance for which he quotes no authority. [{140a}]
Paracelsus calls the knocks pulsatio mortuorum, in his fragment on ‘Souls of the Dead,’ and thinks that the sounds predict misfortune, a very common belief. [{140b}] Lavaterus says, that such disturbances, in unfinished houses are a token of good luck!
Again there is the noise made apparently by violent movement of heavy furniture, which on immediate examination (as in Scott’s case at Abbotsford) is found not to have been moved. The writer is acquainted with a dog, a collie, which was once shut up alone in a room where this disturbance occurred. The dog was much alarmed and howled fearfully, but it soon ceased to weigh on his spirits. When phantasms are occasionally seen by respectable witnesses, where these noises and movements occur, the haunted house is of a healthy, orthodox, modern type. But the phenomena are nothing less than modern, for Mather, Sinclair, Paracelsus, Wierus, Glanvill, Bovet, Baxter and other old writers are full of precisely these combinations of sounds and sights, while many cases occur in old French literature, old Latin literature, and among races of the lower barbaric and savage grades of culture. One or two curious circumstances have rather escaped the notice of philosophers though not of Thyræus. First, the loudest of the unexplained sounds are occasionally not audible to all, so that (as when the noise seems to be caused by furniture dragged about) we may conjecture with Thyræus, that there is no real movement of the atmosphere, that the apparent crash is an auditory hallucination. The planks and heavy objects at Abbotsford had not been stirred, as the loud noises overhead indicated, when Scott came to examine them.
In a dreadfully noisy curacy vouched for by ‘a well-known Church dignitary,’ who occupied the place, there was usually a frightful crash as of iron bars thrown down, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. All the boxes and heavy material in a locked set of attics, seemed to be dancing about, but were never found to have been stirred. Yet this clergyman discovered that ‘the great Sunday crash might manifest itself to some persons in the house without his wife or himself being conscious of it. Knowing how overwhelming the sound always appeared to me when I did hear it, I cannot but consider this one of the most wonderful things in the whole business.’ [{142}]
In this case, in a house standing hundreds of yards apart from any neighbour, and occupied only by a parson, his wife, and one servant, these phenomena lasted for a year, with great regularity. There were the usual footsteps, the ordinary rappings were angry when laughed at, and the clergyman when he left at the end of a year, was as far as ever from having detected any cause. Indeed it is not easy to do so. A friend of the writer’s, an accomplished man of law, was once actually consulted, in the interests of an enraged squire, as to how he could bring a suit against somebody for a series of these inexplicable disturbances. But the law contained no instrument for his remedy.
From the same report of the S. P. R. we take another typical case. A lady, in an old house, saw, in 1873, a hideous hag watching her in bed; she kept the tale to herself, but, a fortnight later, her brother, a solicitor, was not a whit less alarmed by a similar and similarly situated phenomenon. In this house dresses were plucked at, heavy blows were struck, heavy footsteps went about, there were raps at doors, and nobody was ever any the wiser as to the cause. Here it may be observed that a ghost’s power of making a noise, and exerting what seems to be great physical energy, is often in inverse ratio to his power of making himself generally visible, or, at all events, to his inclination so to do. Thus there is a long record of a haunted house, by the chief observer, Miss Morton, in P. S. P. R., pt. xxii. p. 311. A lady had died of habits too convivial, in 1878. In April, 1882, Miss Morton’s family entered, but nobody saw the ghost till Miss Morton viewed it in June. The appearance was that of a tall lady in widow’s weeds, hiding her face with a handkerchief. From 1882 to 1884, Miss Morton saw the spectre six times, but did not name it to her family. Her sister saw the appearance in 1882, a maid saw it in 1883, and two boys beheld it in the same year. Miss Morton used to follow the appearance downstairs and speak to it, but it merely gave a slight gasp, and seemed unable to converse. By way of testing the spectre, Miss Morton stretched threads at night from the railing of the stair to the wall, but the ghost descended without disturbing them. Yet her footsteps sounded on the stairs. This is, in fact, a crucial difficulty about ghosts. They are material enough to make a noise as they walk, but not material enough to brush away a thread! This ghost, whose visible form was so much en évidence, could, or did, make no noise at all, beyond light pushes at doors, and very light footsteps. In the curacy already described, noises were made enough to waken a parish, but no form was ever seen. Briefly, for this ghost there is a cloud of witnesses, all solemnly signing their depositions. These two examples are at the opposite poles between which ghostly manifestations vary, in haunted houses.