I have met with other instances in which children have seen apparitions without exhibiting any alarm; and in the case of Fredericka Hauffe, the infant in her arms was frequently observed to point smilingly to those which she herself said she saw. In the above related case, we find a valuable example of an apparition which we can not believe to have been a mere subjective phenomenon, being seen by one person and not by another. The receptivity of the child may have been greater, or the rapport between it and its father stronger; but this occurrence inevitably leads us to suggest, how often our departed friends may be near us, and we not see them!
A Mr. B——, with whom I am acquainted, informed me that, some years ago, he lost two children. There was an interval of two years between their deaths; and about as long a period had elapsed since the decease of the second, when the circumstance I am about to relate took place. It may be conceived that at that distance of time, however vivid the impression had been at first, it had considerably faded from the mind of a man engaged in business; and he assures me that, on the night this event occurred, he was not thinking of the children at all; he was, moreover, perfectly well, and had neither eaten nor drank anything unusual, nor abstained from eating or drinking anything to which he was accustomed. He was therefore in his normal state; when shortly after he had lain down in bed, and before he had fallen asleep, he heard the voice of one of the children say: “Papa—papa!”
“Do you hear that?” he said to his wife, who lay beside him—“I hear Archy calling me, as plain as ever I heard him in my life!”
“Nonsense!” returned the lady; “you are fancying it.”
But presently he again heard “Papa, papa!” and now both voices spoke. Upon which—exclaiming, “I can stand this no longer”—he started up, and, drawing back the curtains, saw both children in their night-dresses, standing near the bed. He immediately jumped out; whereupon they retreated slowly, and with their faces toward him, to the window, where they disappeared. He says that the circumstance made a great impression upon him at the time; and, indeed, that it was one that could never be effaced; but he did not know what to think of it, not believing in ghosts, and therefore concluded it must have been some extraordinary spectral illusion, especially as his wife heard nothing. It may have been so; but that circumstance by no means proves it.
From these varying degrees of susceptibility, or affinity, there seems to arise another consequence, namely, that more than one person may see the same object, and yet see it differently, and I mention this particularly, because it is one of the objections that unreflecting persons make to phenomena of this kind, second sight especially. In the remarkable instance which is recorded to have occurred at Ripley, in the year 1812, to which I shall allude more particularly in a future chapter, much stress was laid on the fact, that the first seer said, “Look at those beasts!” While the second answered, they were “not beasts, but men.” In a former chapter, I mentioned the case of a lady, on board a ship, seeing and feeling a sort of blue cloud hanging over her, which afterward, as it retired, assumed a human form, though still appearing a vapory substance. Now, possibly, had her receptivity, or the rapport, been greater, she might have seen the distinct image of her dying friend. I have met with several instances of these cloudy figures being seen, as if the spirit had built itself up a form of atmospheric air; and it is remarkable, that when other persons perceived the apparitions that frequented the Seeress of Prevorst, some saw those as cloudy forms, which she saw distinctly attired in the costume they wore when alive; and thus, on some occasions, apparitions are represented as being transparent, while on others they have not been distinguishable from the real corporeal body. All these discrepancies, and others, to be hereafter alluded to, are doubtless only absurd to our ignorance; they are the results of physical laws, as absolute, though not so easily ascertained, as those by which the most ordinary phenomena around us are found explicable.
With respect to these cloudy forms, I have met with four instances lately, two occurring to ladies, and two to gentlemen; the one a minister, and the other a man engaged in business; and although I am quite aware that these cases are not easily to be distinguished from those of spectral illusion, yet I do not think them so myself; and as they occurred to persons in their normal state of health, who never before or since experienced anything of the kind, and who could find nothing in their own circumstances to account for its happening then, I shall mention them. In the instances of the gentlemen and one of the ladies, they were suddenly awakened, they could not tell by what, and perceived bending over them a cloudy form, which immediately retreated slowly to the other end of the room, and disappeared. In the fourth case, which occurred to an intimate friend of my own, she had not been asleep; but having been the last person up in the house, had just stepped into the bed, where her sister had already been some time asleep. She was perfectly awake, when her attention was attracted by hearing the clink of glass, and, on looking up, she saw a figure standing on the hearth, which was exactly opposite her side of the bed, and as there was water and a tumbler there, she concluded that her sister had stepped out at the bottom, unperceived by her, and was drinking. While she was carelessly observing the figure, it moved toward the bed, and laid a heavy hand upon her, pressing her arm in a manner that gave her pain. “Oh, Maria, don’t!” she exclaimed; but as the form retreated, and she lost sight of it, a strange feeling crept over her, and she stretched out her hand to ascertain if her sister was beside her. She was, and asleep; but this movement awoke her, and she found the other now in considerable agitation. She, of course, tried to persuade her that it was a dream, or night-mare, as did the family the next day; but she was quite clear in her mind at the time, as she then assured me, that it was neither one nor the other; though now, at the distance of a year from the occurrence, she is very desirous of putting that construction upon it. As somebody will be ready to suggest that this was a freak played by one of the family, I can only answer that that is an explanation that no one who is acquainted with all the circumstances, could admit; added to which, the figure did not disappear in the direction of the door, but in quite an opposite one.
A very singular thing happened to the accomplished authoress of “Letters from the Baltic,” on which my readers may put what interpretation they please, but I give it here as a pendant to the last story. The night before she left Petersburgh she passed in the house of a friend. The room appropriated to her use was a large dining-room, in which a temporary bed was placed, and a folding screen was so arranged as to give an air of comfort to the nook where the bed stood. She went to bed, and to sleep, and no one who knows her can suspect her of seeing spectral illusions, or being incapable of distinguishing her own condition when she saw anything whatever. As she was to commence her journey on the following day, she had given orders to be called at an early hour, and, accordingly, she found herself awakened toward morning by an old woman in a complete Russian costume, who looked at her, nodding and smiling, and intimating, as she supposed, that it was time to rise. Feeling, however, very sleepy, and very unwilling to do so, she took her watch from behind her pillow, and, looking at it, perceived that it was only four o’clock. As, from the costume of the old woman, she knew her to be a Russian, and therefore not likely to understand any language she could speak, she shook her head, and pointed to the watch, giving her to understand that it was too early. The woman looked at her, and nodded, and then retreated, while the traveller lay down again and soon fell asleep. By-and-by, she was awakened by a knock at the door and the voice of the maid whom she had desired to call her. She bade her come in, but, the door being locked on the inside, she had to get out of bed to admit her. It now occurred to her to wonder how the old woman had entered, but, taking it for granted that there was some other mode of ingress she did not trouble herself about it, but dressed, and descended to breakfast. Of course, the inquiry usually addressed to a stranger was made—they hoped she had slept well! “Perfectly,” she said, “only that one of their good people had been somewhat over anxious to get her up in the morning;” and she then mentioned the old woman’s visit, but to her surprise, they declared they had no such person in the family. “It must have been some old nurse, or laundress, or something of that sort,” she suggested. “Impossible!” they answered; “you must have dreamed the whole thing; we have no old woman in the house; nobody wearing that costume; and nobody could have got in, since the door must have been fastened long after that!” And these assertions the servants fully confirmed; added to which, I should observe, that the house, like foreign houses in general, consisted of a flat, or floor, shut in by a door, which separated it entirely from the rest of the building, and, being high up from the street, nobody could even have gained access by a window. The lady now beginning to get somewhat puzzled, inquired if there were any second entrance into the room; but, to her surprise, she heard there was not; and she then mentioned that she had locked the door on going to bed, and had found it locked in the morning. The thing has ever remained utterly inexplicable, and the family, who were much more amazed by it than she was, would willingly believe it to have been a dream; but, whatever the interpretation of it may be, she feels quite certain that that is not the true one.
I make no comments on the above case, though a very inexplicable one; and I scarcely know whether to mention any of those well-established tales, which appear to be certainly as satisfactorily attested as any circumstance which is usually taken simply on report. I allude particularly to the stories of General Wynyard; Lord Tyrone and Lady Beresford; the case which took place at Havant, in Hampshire, and which is related in a letter from Mr. Caswell the mathematician to Dr. Bentley; that which occurred in Cornwall, as narrated by the Rev. Mr. Ruddle, one of the prebendaries of Exeter, whose assistance and advice were asked, and who himself had two interviews with the spirit; and many others, which are already published in different works; especially in a little book entitled “Accredited Ghost-Stories.” I may, however, mention that, with respect to those of Lady Beresford and General Wynyard, the families of the parties have always maintained their entire belief in the circumstances; as do the family of Lady Betty Cobb, who took the riband from Lady Beresford’s arm, after she was dead—she having always worn it since her interview with the apparition, in order to conceal the mark he had left by touching her.
There have been many attempts to explain away the story of Lord Littleton’s warning, although the evidence for it certainly satisfied the family, as we learn from Dr. Johnson, who said, in regard to it, that it was the most extraordinary thing that had happened in his day, and that he heard it from the lips of Lord Westcote, the uncle of Lord Littleton.