Adventurings in the Psychical

by H. Addington Bruce

To mention only a few cases,[28] as long ago as 1661 there was an outbreak of this kind at the home of a wealthy Englishman named Mompesson, an invisible ghost for months disturbing the peace of the Mompesson family by beating on a drum, banging at doors, tugging at bedclothes, and hurling household articles about in a most destructive manner. The affair made so much stir that a royal commission was sent to inquire into it, but signally failed to lay the ghost. For nearly a year, in 1716-1717, the Reverend Samuel Wesley, father of the founder of Methodism, was tormented in like fashion at his rectory in Lincolnshire. In 1753 a Russian monastery was invaded by an equally malicious and equally invisible “spirit,” which for months amused itself by ringing the monastery bells at unseemly hours. Nine years later all London was thrilled by the celebrated Cock Lane ghost, which produced spirit rappings with as much éclat as the most up-to-date, medium-invoked visitant from “the other side.” In none of these instances did contemporary investigators find a wholly satisfactory explanation for the singular phenomena involved.

Nevertheless, it may confidently be affirmed that, instead of strengthening the case for the physical phenomena of spiritism, the doings of the poltergeists—as these tricky ghosts are called by psychical researchers—considerably weaken it. For during recent years a number of poltergeist hauntings have been looked into by members of the Society for Psychical Research, and whenever the conditions have been such as to permit a thorough investigation, it has been found that, so far from being spiritual entities, poltergeists are invariably compounded of deceit, credulity, and delusion. Even more important, from the standpoint of getting at the true inwardness of physical mediumship, the discovery has been made that fraud has frequently been practised in poltergeist cases without any apparent motive.

Again I will give an instance from actual occurrence, in order to make my meaning perfectly clear. Word was one day received at the London offices of the Society for Psychical Research that a ghost had taken possession of a farmhouse in Shropshire, and was making life miserable for the lawful occupants, a family named Hampson and their two maidservants, Priscilla Evans and Emma Davies. Nobody saw the ghost, but it made its presence felt in true poltergeist style.

It had announced its advent, about four o’clock one fine afternoon, by lifting a saucepan from the kitchen fire and throwing it across the room, picking red-hot coals out of the fire and scattering them over the floor, and by causing a lamp globe to fly miraculously through the air. This last prank, naturally enough, so frightened the Hampsons and their servants that they fled from the house, and summoned aid from the nearest neighbors, among them a Mr. Lea, who, in the report that reached the Society for Psychical Research,[29] declared that when he approached the Hampson homestead, it seemed as if all the upstairs rooms were on fire, “as there was such a light in the windows.”

Reënforced, the Hampsons made bold to enter the house again, but the poltergeist had seemingly formed a strong dislike to them, for the report added:

“As things were continuing to jump about the kitchen in a manner which was altogether inexplicable, and many were getting damaged, Hampson decided to remove everything out of the apartment. He accordingly took down a barometer from the wall, when something struck him on the leg, and a loaf of bread, which was on the table, was thrown by some invisible means, and hit him on the back. A volume of ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ was thrown, or jumped, through the window, and a large, ornamental sea-shell went through in similar fashion.

“In the parlor a sewing machine was thrown about and damaged. The nurse girl was nursing the baby by the fire when some fire leaped from the grate, and the child’s hair was singed and its arms burned. The girl was so alarmed that she set off to a neighbor’s, and on the way there her clothes took fire, and had to be torn from her body. During the evening, while the girl was at the neighbor’s, a plate, which she touched while having her supper, was repeatedly thrown on the floor, and the pieces were picked up by some unseen agency, and put in the center of the table.”

On the girl’s return to the Hampson place the manifestations broke out anew. Mr. and Mrs. Lea were strongly of the opinion that they were the work of the devil; the Hampsons, however, inclined to the view that the blame lay at the door of some evil spirit that was especially desirous of tormenting the nurse girl, Emma Davies, it being noticed that things quieted down whenever she was out of the house. On this theory they sent her to her home in a neighboring village, where the poltergeist continued to annoy her. In the presence of a police officer, watching her closely to detect evidence of fraud, it wrenched the buttons from her dress and ripped out the stitches of her apron. While the village schoolmistress and some twenty other people looked on, it twice drew off her shoes and tossed them to the opposite side of the room; and it was said to have afterward lifted her bodily from the floor, and held her suspended in mid-air.