The juge de paix, as we have seen, pronounced that the clearest point in the case was ‘the absence of known cause for the effects,’ and he non-suited Thorel, the plaintiff.
The cause of the phenomena is, of course, as obscure for us as for the worthy magistrate. We can only say that, when precisely similar evidence was brought before judges and juries in England and New England, at a period when medicine, law, and religion all recognised the existence of witchcraft, magic, and diabolical possession, they had scarcely any choice but to condemn the accused. Causa patet, they said: ‘The devil is at the bottom of it all, and the witch is his minister’.
The affair of Cideville by no means stands alone in modern France. In 1853, two doctors and other witnesses signed a deposition as to precisely similar phenomena attending Adelaide Françoise Millet, a girl of twelve, at Songhien, in Champagne. The trouble, as at Cock Lane, began by a sound of scratching on the wood of her bed. The clerk of the juge de la paix, the master of the Douane, two doctors, and others visited her, and tied her hands and feet. The noise continued. Mysterious missiles pursued a girl in Martinique, in 1854. The house, which was stormed by showers of stone, in Paris (1846), entirely baffled the police. [{283a}] There is a more singular parallel to the Cideville affair, the account was printed from the letter of a correspondent in the Abeille of Chartres, March 11, 1849. [{283b}] At Gaubert, near Guillonville, a man was imprisoned for thefts of hay, the property of a M. Dolléans. Two days after his arrest, namely, on December 31, 1848, the servant of M. Dolléans had things of all sorts thrown at her from all directions. She fell ill, and went into hospital for five days, where she was untroubled. On her return, in the middle of a conversation, ribbons and bits of string would fly at her, and twist themselves round her neck, as in the case of Francis Fey, of Spraiton, given by Aubrey and Bovet. Mademoiselle Dolléans carefully watched the girl for a fortnight, and never let her out of her sight, but could not discover any fraud. After about a month the maid was sent home, where she was not molested. Naturally we see in her the half-insane cunning of hysteria, but that explanation does not apply to little Master Dolléans, a baby of three months old. The curse fell on him: however closely his parents watched him, pots and pans showered into his cradle, the narrator himself saw a miscellaneous collection of household furniture mysteriously amassed there.
The Abeille of Chartres held this letter over, till two of its reporters had visited the scene of action, and interviewed doctors, priests, and farmers, who all attested the facts. Happily, in this case, an exorcism by a priest proved efficacious. At Cideville, holy water and consecrated medals were laughed at by the sprite, who, by the way, answered to the name of Robert.
PRESBYTERIAN GHOST HUNTERS.
Religious excitement and hallucination. St. Anthony. Zulu catechumens. Haunted Covenanters. Strange case of Thomas Smeaton. Law’s ‘Memorialls’. A deceitful spirit. Examples of insane and morbidly sensitive ghosts. ‘Le revenant qui s’accuse s’excuse.’ Raising the devil in Irvine. Mode of evocation. Wodrow. His account of Margaret Lang, and Miss Shaw of Bargarran. The unlucky Shaws. Lord Torphichen’s son. Cases from Wodrow. Lord Middleton’s story. Haunted house. Wraiths. Lord Orrery’s ghost no metaphysician. The Bride of Lammermoor. Visions of the saints. Their cautiousness. Ghost appearing to a Jacobite. Ghost of a country tradesman. Case of telepathy known to Wodrow. Avenging spectres. Lack of evidence. Tale of Cotton Mather.
In spite of a very general opinion to the opposite effect, it is not really easy to determine in what kind of age, and in what conditions of thought and civilisation, ghosts will most frequently appear, and ghostly phenomena will chiefly abound. We are all ready to aver that ‘ghaists and eldritch fantasies’ will be most common ‘in the dark ages,’ in periods of ignorance or superstition. But research in mediæval chronicles, and in lives of the saints makes it apparent that, while marvels on a large and imposing scale were frequent, simple ordinary apparitions and haunted houses occur comparatively seldom. Perhaps they were too common to be thought worth noticing, yet they are noticed occasionally, and, even in these periods of superstition, were apparently regarded as not quite everyday phenomena.
One thing in this matter is tolerably certain, namely, that intense religious excitement produces a tendency to believe in marvels of all sorts, and also begets a capacity for being hallucinated, for beholding spectres, strange lights, dubious miracles. Thus every one has heard of the temptation of St. Anthony, and of other early Christian Fathers. They were wont to be surrounded by threatening aspects of wild beasts, which had no real existence. In the same way the early Zulu converts of Bishop Callaway, when they retired to lonely places to pray, were haunted by visionary lions, and phantasms of enemies with assegais. They, probably, had never heard of St. Anthony’s similar experiences, nor, again, of the diabolical attacks on the converts of Catholic missionaries in Cochin China, and in Peru.
Probably the most recent period of general religious excitement in our country was that of the Covenant in Scotland. Not a mere scattered congregation or two, as in the rise of Irvingism, but a vast proportion of a whole people lived lives of prolonged ecstatic prayer, and often neglected food for days. Consequently devout Covenanters, retired in lonely places to pray, were apt to be infested by spectral animals, black dogs as a rule, and they doubted not at all that the black dog was the Accuser of the Brethren. We have Catholic evidence, in Father Piatti’s Life of Father Elphinstone, S. J., to black dogs haunting Thomas Smeaton, the friend of Andrew Melville (1580). But Father Piatti thinks that the dogs were avenging devils, Smeaton being an apostate (MS. Life of Elphinstone). Again Covenanters would see mysterious floods of light, as the heathen also used, but, like the heathen, they were not certain as to whether the light was produced by good or bad spirits. Like poor bewildered Porphyry, many centuries earlier, they found the spirits ‘very deceitful’. You never can depend on them. This is well illustrated by the Rev. Mr. Robert Law, a Covenanting minister, but not a friend of fanaticism and sedition.
In his Memorialls, a work not published till long after his death, he gives this instance of the deceitfulness of sprites. The Rev. Mr. John Shaw, in Ireland, was much troubled by witches, and by ‘cats coming into his chamber and bed’. He died, so did his wife, ‘and, as was supposed, witched’. Before Mr. Shaw’s death his groom, in the stable, saw ‘a great heap of hay rolling toward him, and then appeared’ (the hay not the groom) ‘in the shape and lykness of a bair. He charges it to appear in human shape, which it did.’ The appearance made a tryst to meet the groom, but Mr. Shaw forbade this tampering with evil in the lykness of a bair. However a stone was thrown at the groom, which he took for a fresh invitation from the bair, so he went to the place appointed. ‘The divill appears in human shape, with his heid running down with blood,’ and explains that he is ‘the spirit of a murdered man who lay under his bed, and buried in the ground, and who was murdered by such a man, naming him by name’. The groom, very naturally, dug in the spot pointed out by this versatile phantom, ‘but finds nothing of bones or anything lyke a grave, and shortly after this man dyes,’ having failed to discover that the person accused of murder had ever existed at all.