Psychic Days
"Friday's child is full of woe." Of all days Friday is universally regarded as the most unlucky. According to Soames in his work, The Anglo-Saxon Church, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit on a Friday and died on a Friday. And since Jesus Christ was crucified on a Friday, it is naturally of small wonder that Friday is accursed.
To travel on Friday is generally deemed to be courting accident; to be married on Friday, courting divorce or death. Few sailors care to embark on Friday; few theatrical managers to produce a new play on Friday. In Livonia most of the inhabitants are so prejudiced against Friday, that they never settle any important business, or conclude a bargain on that day; in some places they do not even dress their children.
For my part, I so far believe in this superstition that I never set out for a journey, or commence any new work on Friday, if I have the option of any other day. Thursday has always been an unlucky day for me. Most of my accidents, disappointments, illnesses have happened on Thursdays. Wednesday has been my luckiest day. Monday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the days when I have mostly experienced occult phenomena. On All-Hallows E'en the spirits of the dead are supposed to walk. I remember when a child hearing
from the lips of a relative how in her girlhood she had screwed up the courage to shut herself in a dark room on All-Hallows E'en and had eaten an apple in front of the mirror; and that instead of seeing the face of her future husband peering over her shoulder, she had seen a quantity of earth falling. She was informed that this was a prognostication of death, and, surely enough, within the year her father died. I have heard, too, of a girl who, on All-Hallows E'en, walked down a gloomy garden path scattering hempseed for her future lover to pick up, and on hearing someone tiptoeing behind her, and fancying it was a practical joker, turned sharply round, to confront a skeleton dressed exactly similar to herself. She died before the year was out from the result of an accident on the ice.
I have often poured boiling lead into water on All-Hallows E'en and it has assumed strange shapes, once—a boot, once—a coffin, once—a ship; and I have placed all the letters of the alphabet cut out of pasteboard by my bedside, and on one occasion (my door was locked, by the way, and I fully satisfied myself no one was in hiding) found, on awakening in the morning, the following word spelt out of them—"Merivale." It was not until some days afterwards that I remembered associations with this word, and then it all came back to me in a trice—it was the name of a man who had once wanted me to join him in an enterprise in British West Africa.
On New Year's Eve a certain family, with whom I am very intimately acquainted, frequently see ghosts of the future, as well as phantasms of the
dead, and, when I stay with them, which I often do at Christmas, I am always glad when this night is over. On one occasion, one of them saw a lady come up the garden path and vanish on the front doorsteps. She saw the lady's face distinctly; every feature in it, together with the clothes she was wearing, stood out with startling perspicuity.
Some six months later, she was introduced to the material counterpart of the phantasm, who was destined to play a most important part in her life. On another New Year's Eve she saw the phantasm of a dog, to which she had been deeply attached, enter her bedroom and jump on her bed, just as it had done during its lifetime. Not in the least frightened, she put down her hand to stroke it, when it vanished. I have given several other instances of this kind in my Haunted Houses of London and Ghostly Phenomena—they all, I think, tend to prove a future existence for dumb animals.
The 28th of December, Childermass Day, or the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the day on which King Herod slaughtered so many infants (if they were no better mannered than the bulk of the County Council children of to-day, one can hardly blame him), is held to be unpropitious for the commencement of any new undertaking by those of tender years.