Adventurings in the Psychical

by H. Addington Bruce

“All the same,” said Doctor Prince, “you saw her without being conscious of it—saw her, as it were, out of the corner of your eye. One fleeting glance would be enough to give you the memory image that you mistook for a ghost.”

Undoubtedly Doctor Prince was right, and undoubtedly this dual law of subconscious perception and memory is enough to account for some of the most impressive ghosts cited in this chapter. Even the strange haunting of the Petit Trianon, as experienced by Miss Morison and Miss Lamont, may be said to find its explanation here.

It is true that both Miss Morison and Miss Lamont profess to have known little about the history of the Petit Trianon previous to their visit to Versailles. But their detailed report of the haunting contains statements showing that, subconsciously at any rate, they must have possessed considerable knowledge of the place. Miss Morison admits that she had, as a girl, great enthusiasm for Marie Antoinette, and had read not a little about her, including an article descriptive of her summer home; while Miss Lamont is a teacher of French history, and accordingly must have had rather more knowledge than the average person regarding the life story of Queen Marie. Besides which, and most significant, there was published, just before they went to Versailles, an illustrated magazine article picturing a historical fête in the gardens of the Petit Trianon, with some account of its history.

It is worth noting, too, that the two ladies were not haunted in exactly the same way, each of them seeing certain people and scenes that were not visible to the other. On the theory of a supernatural manifestation this would be hard to explain, but the difficulty vanishes if we recognize that the subconscious knowledge of the Trianon possessed by each must necessarily have differed.

The problem remains to account for the fact, as distinct from the facts, of the haunting. Why should Miss Morison and Miss Lamont, among all the thousands of visitors to the Petit Trianon, alone have had such an experience? To this, assuredly, there is no answer if one is going to stick to the old-fashioned notion of ghosts and attribute to them objective reality. But the answer is very simple on the modern scientific hypothesis.

Miss Morison and Miss Lamont, the psychologist would say, were haunted for the reason that, being of exceptionally romantic, impressionable temperaments, the ideas associated in their minds with the Petit Trianon, appealed to them with such “suggestive” force as to plunge them for the time being into a state of “psychical dissociation,” during which their subconsciousness obtained complete control over the upper consciousness, and flooded them with its latent memories of all that they had ever read or heard about the place and its historic residents. In other words, they were as two persons “dreaming awake.”

The same explanation would obviously apply to the ghostly vision seen on the lawn by Mrs. M. Nor do we need to go beyond the hypothesis of subconscious perception to account for the experiences of Lady Eardley and the guest at the Boston hotel. In the latter case it is necessary to assume nothing more than that the lady who saw the apparition at the elevator entrance perceived her danger without being aware of it, and subconsciously developed the hallucination that enabled her to avoid it.

As to the Eardley case, it is a well-established medical fact that some diseases, in their initial stages, cause organic changes too slight to be noticed by the sufferer’s upper consciousness, but plainly perceptible to his subconsciousness which, through symbolical dreams or hallucinations, sometimes seeks to convey to the upper consciousness a warning that all is not well.

I myself have had such an experience. A number of years ago, beginning in the summer, I was troubled by a recurrent nightmare in which, although the details were not always the same, the central incident never varied. Always the nightmare ended with a phantom cat clawing viciously at my throat. I did not then know as much about dreams as I do now, so, beyond thinking vaguely that “it must mean something,” I paid no attention to this repeated nightmare.

At the end of six months I had an attack of grippe, necessitating treatment by a throat specialist, who speedily discovered in my throat a growth of which I consciously had had no knowledge. With its removal the recurrent dream of the cat instantly ceased to trouble me.