There is a very remarkable story of this kind, related by Macnish, which he calls “a case of hallucination, arising without the individual being conscious of any physical cause by which it might be occasioned.” If this case stood alone, strange as it is, I should think so too: but when similar instances abound, as they do, I can not bring myself to dispose of it so easily. The story is as follows: Mr. H—— was one day walking along the street, apparently in perfect health, when he saw, or supposed he saw, his acquaintance, Mr. C——, walking before him. He called to him aloud; but he did not seem to hear him, and continued moving on. Mr. H—— then quickened his pace for the purpose of overtaking him; but the other increased his, also, as if to keep ahead of his pursuer, and proceeded at such a rate that Mr. H—— found it impossible to make up to him. This continued for some time, till, on Mr. C——’s reaching a gate, he opened it and passed in, slamming it violently in Mr. H——’s face. Confounded at such treatment from a friend, the latter instantly opened the gate, and looked down the long lane into which it led, where, to his astonishment, no one was to be seen. Determined to unravel the mystery, he then went to Mr. C——’s house, and his surprise was great to hear that he was confined to his bed, and had been so for several days. A week or two afterward, these gentlemen met at the house of a common friend, when Mr. H—— related the circumstance, jocularly telling Mr. C—— that, as he had seen his wraith, he of course could not live long. The person addressed laughed heartily, as did the rest of the party; but, in a few days, Mr. C—— was attacked with putrid sore throat and died; and within a short period of his death, Mr. H—— was also in the grave.
This is a very striking case; the hastening on, and the actually opening and shutting the gate, evincing not only will but power to produce mechanical effects, at a time the person was bodily elsewhere. It is true he was ill, and it is highly probable was at the time asleep. The showing himself to Mr. H——, who was so soon to follow him to the grave, is another peculiarity which appears frequently to attend these cases, and which seems like what was in old English, and is still in Scotch, called a tryst—an appointment to meet again between those spirits, so soon to be free. Supposing Mr. C—— to have been asleep, he was possibly, in that state, aware of what impended over both.
There is a still more remarkable case given by Mr. Barham in his reminiscences. I have no other authority for it: but he relates, as a fact, that a respectable young woman was awaked, one night, by hearing somebody in her room, and that on looking up she saw a young man to whom she was engaged. Extremely offended by such an intrusion, she bade him instantly depart, if he wished her ever to speak to him again. Whereupon he bade her not be frightened, but said he was come to tell her that he was to die that day six weeks,—and then disappeared. Having ascertained that the young man himself could not possibly have been in her room, she was naturally much alarmed, and, her evident depression leading to some inquiries, she communicated what had occurred to the family with whom she lived—I think as dairy-maid; but I quote from memory. They attached little importance to what seemed so improbable, more especially as the young man continued in perfectly good health, and entirely ignorant of this prediction, which his mistress had the prudence to conceal from him. When the fatal day arrived, these ladies saw the girl looking very cheerful, as they were going for their morning’s ride, and observed to each other that the prophecy did not seem likely to be fulfilled; but when they returned, they saw her running up the avenue toward the house in great agitation, and learned that her lover was either dead or dying, from an accident.
The only key I can suggest as the explanation of such a phenomenon as this, is, that the young man in his sleep was aware of the fate that awaited him,—and that while the body lay in his bed, in a state approaching to trance or catalepsy, the freed spirit—free as the spirits of the actual dead—went forth to tell the tale to the mistress of his soul.
Franz von Baader says, in a letter to Dr. Kerner, that Eckartshausen, shortly before his death, assured him that he possessed the power of making a person’s double or wraith appear, while his body lay elsewhere in a state of trance or catalepsy. He added that the experiment might be dangerous, if care were not taken to prevent intercepting the rapport of the ethereal form with the material one.
A lady, an entire disbeliever in these spiritual phenomena, was one day walking in her own garden with her husband, who was indisposed, leaning on her arm, when seeing a man with his back toward them, and a spade in his hand, digging, she exclaimed, “Look there! who’s that?” “Where?” said her companion; and at that moment the figure leaning on the spade turned round and looked at her, sadly shaking its head, and she saw it was her husband. She avoided an explanation, by pretending she had made a mistake. Three days afterward the gentleman died,—leaving her entirely converted to a belief she had previously scoffed at.
Here, again, the foreknowledge and evident design, as well as the power of manifesting it, are extremely curious—more especially as the antitype of the figure was neither in a trance nor asleep, but perfectly conscious, walking and talking. If any particular purpose were to be gained by the information indicated, the solution might be less difficult. One object, it is true, may have been, and indeed was attained, namely, the change in the opinions of the wife; and it is impossible to say what influence such a conversion may have had on her after-life.
It must be admitted that these cases are very perplexing. We might, indeed, get rid of them by denying them; but the instances are too numerous, and the phenomenon has been too well known in all ages, to be set aside so easily. In the above examples, the apparition, or wraith, has been in some way connected with the death of the person whose visionary likeness is seen; and, in most of these instances, the earnest longing to behold those beloved seems to have been the means of effecting the object. The mystery of death is to us so awful and impenetrable, and we know so little of the mode in which the spiritual and the corporeal are united and kept together during the continuance of life, or what condition may ensue when this connection is about to be dissolved, that while we look with wonder upon such phenomena as those above alluded to, we yet find very few persons who are disposed to reject them as utterly apocryphal. They feel that in that department, already so mysterious, there may exist a greater mystery still; and the very terror with which the thoughts of present death inspires most minds, deters people from treating this class of facts with that scornful skepticism with which many approximate ones are denied and laughed at. Nevertheless, if we suppose the person to have been dead, though it be but an inappreciable instant of time before he appears, the appearance comes under the denomination of what is commonly called a ghost; for whether the spirit has been parted from the body one second or fifty years, ought to make no difference in our appreciation of the fact, nor is the difficulty less in one case than the other.
I mention this because I have met with, and do meet with, people constantly, who admit this class of facts, while they declare they can not believe in ghosts; the instances, they say, of people being seen at a distance at the period of their death, are too numerous to permit of the fact being denied. In granting it, however, they seem to me to grant everything. If, as I have said above, the person be dead, the form seen is a ghost or spectre, whether he has been dead a second or a century; if he be alive, the difficulty is certainly not diminished; on the contrary, it appears to me to be considerably augmented; and it is to this perplexing class of facts that I shall next proceed, namely, those in which the person is not only alive, as in some of the cases above related, but where the phenomenon seems to occur without any reference to the death of the subject, present or prospective.
In either case, we are forced to conclude that the thing seen is the same; the questions are, what is it that we see, and how does it render itself visible? and, still more difficult to answer, appears the question, of how it can communicate intelligence, or exert a mechanical force. As, however, this investigation will be more in its place when I have reached that department of my subject commonly called ghosts, I will defer it for the present, and merely confine myself to that of doubles, or doppelgängers, as the Germans denominate the appearance of a person out of his body.