The Amiens case (1746) is reported and attested by Father Charles Louis Richard, Professor in Theology, a Dominican friar. The haunted house was in the Rue de l’Aventure, parish of St. Jacques. The tenant was a M. Leleu, aged thirty-six. The troubles had lasted for fourteen years, and there was evidence for their occurrence earlier, before Leleu occupied the house. The disturbances were of the usual kind, a sound of heavy planks being tossed about, as in the experience of Scott at Abbotsford, raps, the fastening of doors so that they could not be opened for long, and then suddenly gave way (this, also, is frequent in modern tales), a sound of sweeping the floor, as in the Epworth case, in the Wesleys’ parsonage, heavy knocks and thumps, the dragging of heavy bodies, steps on the stairs, lights, the dancing of all the furniture in the room of Mlle. Marie de Lâtre, rattling of crockery, a noise of whirring in the air, a jingling as of coins (familiar at Epworth), and, briefly, all the usually reported tintamarre. Twenty persons, priests, women, girls, men of all sorts, attest those phenomena which are simply the ordinary occurrences still alleged to be prevalent.
The narrator believes in diabolical agency, but he gives the explanations of common-sense. 1. M. Leleu is a visionary. But, as no one says that all the other witnesses are visionaries, this helps us little. 2. M. Leleu makes all the noise himself. That is, he climbs to the roof with a heavy sack of grain on his shoulder, and lets it fall; he runs up and down the chimneys with his heavy sack on his shoulder, he frolics with weighty planks all over the house, thumps the walls, makes furniture dance, and how? What is his motive? His tenants leave him, he is called a fool, a devil, a possessed person: his business is threatened, they talk of putting him in jail, and that is all he has got by his partiality for making a racket. 3. The neighbours make the noises, and again the narrator asks ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ 4. Some priests slept in the house once and heard nothing. But nobody pretends that there is always something to hear. The Bishop of Amiens licenses the publication ‘with the more confidence, as we have ourselves received the depositions of ten witnesses, a number more than sufficient to attest a fact which nobody has any interest in feigning’.
In a tale like this, which is only one out of a vast number, exactly analogous, Common-sense is ill-advised in simply alleging imposture, so long maintained, so motiveless, and, on the whole, so very difficult to execute. M. Leleu brought in the Church, with its exorcisms, but our Dominican authority does not say whether or not the noises ceased after the rites had been performed. Dufresnoy, in whose Dissertations [{178}] these documents are republished, mentions that Bouchel, in his Bibliothéque du Droit François, d. v. ‘Louage,’ treats of the legal aspect of haunted houses. Thus the profession has not wholly disdained the inquiry.
Of all common sensible explanations, the most sporting and good-humoured is that given by the step-daughter of Alexander Dingwall, a tenant in Inverinsh, in 1761. Poor Dingwall in his cornyard ‘heard very grievous lamentations, which continued, as he imagined, all the way to the seashore’. These he regarded as a warning of his end, but his stepdaughter sensibly suggested that, as the morning was cold, ‘the voice must be that of a fox, to cause dogs run after him to give him heat’. Dingwall took to bed and died, but the suggestion that the fox not only likes being hunted, but provokes it as a form of healthy exercise, is invaluable. The tale is in Theophilus Insulanus, on the second sight.
There is no conclusion to be drawn from this mass of Cock Lane stories. Occasionally an impostor is caught, as at Brightling, in 1659. Mr. Joseph Bennet, a minister in that town, wrote an account of the affair, published in Increase Mather’s Remarkable Providences. ‘Several things were thrown by an invisible hand,’ including crabs! ‘Yet there was a seeming blur cast, though not on the whole, yet upon some part of it, for their servant girl was at last found throwing some things.’ She averred that an old woman had bidden her do so, saying that ‘her master and dame were bewitched, and that they should hear a great fluttering about their house for the space of two days’. This Cock Lane phenomenon, however, is not reported to have occurred. The most credulous will admit that the maid is enough to account for the Brightling manifestations; some of the others are more puzzling and remain in the region of the unexplained.
APPARITIONS, GHOSTS, AND HALLUCINATIONS.
Apparitions appear. Apparitions are not necessarily Ghosts. Superstition, Common-sense, and Science. Hallucinations: their kinds, and causes. Aristotle. Mr. Gurney’s definition. Various sources of Hallucination, external and internal. The Organ of Sense. The Sensory Centre. The Higher Tracts of the Brain. Nature of Evidence. Dr. Hibbert. Claverhouse. Lady Lee. Dr. Donne. Dr. Hibbert’s complaint of want of evidence. His neglect of contemporary cases. Criticism of his tales. The question of coincidental Hallucinations. The Calculus of Probabilities: M. Richet, MM. Binet et Féré; their Conclusions. A step beyond Hibbert. Examples of empty and unexciting Wraiths. Our ignorance of causes of Solitary Hallucinations. The theory of ‘Telepathy’. Savage metaphysics of M. d’Assier. Breakdown of theory of Telepathy, when hallucinatory figure causes changes in physical objects. Animals as Ghost-seers: difficult to explain this by Telepathy. Strange case of a cat. General propriety and lack of superstition in cats. The Beresford Ghost, well-meaning but probably mythical. Mrs. Henry Sidgwick: her severity as regards conscientious Ghosts. Case of Mr. Harry. Case of Miss Morton. A difficult case. Examples in favour of old-fashioned theory of Ghosts. Contradictory cases. Perplexities of the anxious inquirer.
Only one thing is certain about apparitions, namely this, that they do appear. They really are perceived. Now, as popular language confuses apparitions with ghosts, this statement sounds like an expression of the belief that ghosts appear. It has, of course, no such meaning. When Le Loyer, in 1586, boldly set out to found a ‘science of spectres,’ he carefully distinguished between his method, and the want of method observable in the telling of ghost stories. He began by drawing up long lists of apparitions which are not spectres, or ghosts, but the results of madness, malady, drink, fanaticism, illusions and so forth. It is true that Le Loyer, with all his deductions, left plenty of genuine spectres for the amusement of his readers. Like him we must be careful not to confound ‘apparitions,’ with ‘ghosts’.
When a fist, applied to the eye, makes us ‘see stars’; when a liver not in good working order makes us see muscæ volitantes, or ‘spiders’; when alcohol produces ‘the horrors,’—visions of threatening persons or animals,—when a lesion of the brain, or delirium, or a disease of the organs of sense causes visions, or when they occur to starved and enthusiastic ascetics, all these false perceptions are just as much ‘apparitions,’ as the view of a friend at a distance, beheld at the moment of his death, or as the unrecognised spectre seen in a haunted house.
In popular phrase, however, the two last kinds of apparitions are called ‘ghosts,’ or ‘wraiths,’ and the popular tendency is to think of these, and of these alone, when ‘apparitions’ are mentioned. On the other hand the tendency of common-sense is to rank the two last sorts of apparition, the wraith and ghost, with all the other kinds, which are undeniably caused by accident, by malady, mental or bodily, or by mere confusion and misapprehension, as when one, seeing a post in the moonlight, takes it for a ghost. Science, following a third path, would class all perceptions which ‘have not the basis in fact that they seem to have’ as ‘hallucinations’. The stars seen after a blow on the eye are hallucinations,—there are no real stars in view,—and the friend, whose body seems to fill space before our sight when his body is really on a death-bed far away;—and again, the appearance of the living friend whom we see in the drawing-room while he is really in the smoking-room or in Timbuctoo,—are hallucinations also. The common-sense of the matter is stated by Aristotle. ‘The reason of the hallucinations is that appearances present themselves, not only when the object of sense is itself in motion, but also when the sense is stirred, as it would be by the presence of the object’ (De Insomn., ii. 460, b, 23-26).