Was it a ghost? The murders in Bussey's wood

by Henry Johnson Brent

In a court of justice, if I was put upon my oath, I could not swear that it was a ghost that I saw when I stood at the end of the garden on that luminous night; nor would I swear that it was a man with his vitality in force; but I would swear that I saw something that looked like a man, but might have been a ghost. It acted as if it might have been either,—but if a man, like a crazy one, and who had a charm to subdue, upon the instant and without effort, the temper of two severe watch-dogs, one a mastiff, the other a bull, and also to suspend for more than a second my power of vision.

After I had finished writing my narrative, and thought that I had nothing further to do in this business besides giving my manuscript into the hands of the printer, I became possessed of two photographs kindly lent to my curiosity by the chief of police. They are the portraits of Isabella and John Joyce. My first idea was to have them multiplied and affixed somewhere in my pages, but then I thought of the illustrated papers with their abominable attempts to illustrate by the pencil every spasm to which human nature is incident, and was stopped at once from that design.

The face of the girl is bright, expressive, and, in a degree, pretty. Had she lived to womanhood she might have grown into what is called a fine woman. The features are large and regular, the eyes full of vivacity and good temper, the nose prominent and well shaped, the mouth pleasant, and indicative of resolution. Altogether the girl had a generous and loving kind of lookout, and not rare in the species at her budding and buoyant age. She looks like a child beginning to see the vague outline of the sea on which she must voyage with the rest, and not at all having such quick destruction in her thoughts, as came to her ere she heard the breakers of human experience sobbing on the shore. She was not too young to die, but too young to be slaughtered. The boy’s face is that of a child; but a bright and reflective little fellow, with a large development of brain, and, by the extreme innocence of his expression, casting a deeper shadow of crime upon the wretch who took away his life. Taking the photograph as a test, he seems to be about eight years old and no more, and with such a face that it must have been a sad thing for those who found him, to look upon with the mask of murder stamped upon it.

I have also seen a bundle of papers, written over in large, straggling chirography, and said to be communications of spirits, through mediums, upon the topic of the murders. There is one-half page written, so those say,—his wife, for instance,—who knew his “hand of write,” by the dead father of the children. Their testimony, whatever it may be, has as yet been of no special advantage in directing investigation, at least as far as I know; probably on the theory that if the souls of the departed undertook to interfere in the proceedings of our courts, they might produce embarrassing predicaments, being so far as we are instructed in such matters incapable of appearing bodily on the witness-stand to testify to facts within their knowledge; and, besides, it would be exceedingly inconvenient for our judicial officials to serve a summons upon them, as their places of special abode cannot, at present, be determined upon with any exactness outside of a graveyard directory. Cases are, however, upon the record wherein ghosts have pointed out such lines of proceedings as finally led to the proper adjustment of contested property and estates. Perhaps the day may reach us when not only the spirit of the law, and the spirit of the past, but the spirits of the dead, will have large control over the vexed condition of our temporary existence here.

XVI.
GHOSTS.

Will it be impertinent if I say that I am no advocate of the spiritualistic doctrines? Will it be less out of place, if I add that I am no direct opponent of that wonderful creed,—new creed, some people call it; but, in fact, as long established as the first death,—as old as man’s first doubt, or his first impulse to worship the unseen, or investigate the first difficulty? I assume no dictatorship of judgment, adhere to no prejudice or formula of education, or habit of social or sectional condition, but place myself in that grand philosophic pause of suspended opinion. There have been good Turks, there are good Turks; there have been good Jews, there are good Jews. One of the latter, leaving his old traditions, rules now the destiny of a great so-called, and properly so-called I believe, Christian Empire; but because in our youth we have been led to think hard of bloody Mahomet, and the Jewish unbelievers of the first Christian era, when mysteries assumed the prerogative of logical religion, and faith was not as quick to conceive as it has been since, we are not justified in believing that the Turk and the Jew are beyond the pale of our sympathies, and, for old deeds done under peculiar pressure, are to be anathematized from our human charities. There are members known, of the spiritualist belief, to be as pure and spotless as any equal number of any other God-believing sect; and while we cannot but look with feelings akin to pity at some of the phases of their peculiar practice, it behooves no man, limited as we all are in our claim to exact knowledge, to condemn the whole because some of their people do certain things, that, in the performance, border upon the absurd.

The mystery of life is more mysterious than the mystery of death. In the first we would, if not governed by the subjection of judgment to certain rules and discipline of faith, be led to believe in a thousand things that appeal to us daily by the miraculous condition of their nature. Science, while it reveals, establishes materiality; and the farther it advances into the realms of air, the more it fills that air with material substances. Dare it go higher yet, and rob the firmament of all its poetry, its vague spirit of religious spirituality, and, sweeping away the dreams of the tenderest imaginations, build up the steps of the Eternal throne with granite boulders, and form of the Almighty a statue of specific gravity, with needs like our own, and humanly dependent on the vegetation and the atmosphere of these terrestrial regions which astronomy with its supernaturally endowed telescope has established as fact?

It may be an objection, founded upon some basis of common sense, that I have introduced what I call a veritable ghost into my work. I cannot help that. In fact I never would have written my book if I had not had that interview with what now, in all the sincerity that is left to a man in these abominable days, I believe and assert was a ghost; a real ghost,—no dramatic shade made up of an off-duty carpenter with an actor to speak his part,—a ghost arranged for the nonce with a screen between us, of vapory muslin; but a solemn, a meaning, a power to move, but not a power to absolutely affright, ghost. In fact I see no reason to be frightened by them. Grant that they exist,—you never have heard of one that did harm to anybody. They have, it is to be supposed, thrown off the passions of the flesh, with the flesh,—the passion of anger, the passion of mischief, and all the low and base adjunctives that adhere to us in our state of usual visibility. They are not monsters, but symbols, or aerial realities of our former friends. Even the ghost of Robespierre, of Nero, or Jeffrey, would be harmless, bad as they were when encompassed in their fibrous shells of flesh. Ghosts, as a general rule of logic, cannot be as bad as those of earth with whom they have their interviews. And it is not to be supposed that they always have a sublime or important mission to accomplish. If the rule holds good that Providence allows them to flit hitherward, the ghost of a washerwoman has as much right to appear to her successor of the soap-suds, as the ghost of Cæsar to his slayer before the battle that settled the destiny of half a world. And the washerwoman’s ghost could not do that, or would not even think of doing that, and yet she might have her homely mission, as important to her friends, as ghosts of a higher rank. But they all have their mission, the ghosts of demi-gods as well as the ghosts of plebeians. They easily establish, what otherwise could not be practically proved, the vexed question of the immortality of the soul. A testimony of a dead man would be as valuable to me, with regard to that matter, as the wire-drawn assertions of a man paid a large salary to keep good, and say that we turn into ghosts after all,—for they all say that.

Now I most respectfully ask what harm does it do to believe in ghosts? Is it weakness? Then St. Paul was weak to idiocy, for he was the apostle of the supernatural, as the Bible will prove, if you choose to consult his record. Was our Saviour weak? It was he,—that supremely blessed, that uncontradictable authority, either in assertion or suggestion—who took upon himself the spectral character, and asked Thomas to test him, by placing his hands upon the image of his wounds. Or, if he was not a ghost, but a substantial form of flesh after his crucifixion, death then makes no difference in our condition, and is but a process without a change. Had his apostles and disciples disbelieved in his appearance after death, and hooted at the story told of his ghost wandering toward them, where would be the Christian church to-day, and where the theory of the resurrection? We disbelieve now, and scoff at what the Saviour did, and his apostles saw, unless he was an impostor, and they liars. Do we in our churches, when we read the biblical narrative of the innumerable appearances, sneer at the book that tells us its contents are the result of divine inspiration, and every word is true? That man or woman would not be a church-member long who dared to do a thing so impious.

If fault be found with me for writing a narrative with such a spectral thread of ghastly tissue running through its woof, what should they say of the king of the ink-plume, Shakespeare himself? He fairly revels in ghosts. In the second part of “King Henry the Sixth,” Bolingbroke, the conjurer, invokes a spirit. In “Julius Cæsar,” Brutus has his celebrated interview with the ghost of Cæsar. In “Macbeth,” the ghost of Banquo comes to the king’s table and nods between the libations, frightening the king out of his royal wits; and in the “witch scene” we have the bubbling caldron, the armed head, a bloody child, a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, and “eight kings,” who pass across the stage, the last with a glass in his hand. What would the play of “Hamlet” be without the father’s spirit wandering on the moonlit battlement, or the interview with the queen-mother, known as the miniature scene? In “Richard the Third,” crowds of ghosts stalk through the tent of the hunchback king, and start him from his sleep; and Richmond, too, holds converse with them. The ghosts of Prince Edward, Henry the Sixth, Clarence, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Hastings, the two young Princes, Queen Ann, and Buckingham, stalk before the tyrant’s vision, and curse him as they pass. Otway makes use of ghosts in his “Venice Preserved,” and Sir Walter Scott welded them in the machinery of his novels; and the ponderous-brained Sam Johnson religiously believed in them. The ghosts of Shakespeare were born of the poetic faculty, and the legendary creed of the world’s experience. Place a rose, the sweetest you can find, under a glass case, and you shut out the odor that belongs to it. Is that odor dead and imperceptible because you have raised a barrier between it and your senses? Does it not exist, even more potently, within its crystal prison? Because you do not perceive that sweetness, would you say it is not? Are our direct senses to settle all points of doubt and difficulty? Or, let a man enter, then, who had never seen a rose, and you were to tell him of the great fragrance of the flower of which bards have sung and Scriptures made similes,—would you not scoff him if he said such things were not possible to a plant like that, that looked like painted paper? Then how can you say anything about it who have never seen a ghost? To your senses it may be as yet hidden by a barrier stronger than glass, but yet as transparent to others. But I do not write to argue, but only to suggest. I admit my own weakness and confess to doubts, and cannot place myself with indisputable certainty on any solid basis of logic, and therefore must allow great scope to others; but since I have ventured to tell my story, I had a strong and natural desire to stand, as well as it was possible upon the platform of rational opinion, and felt that I had a right to attempt to place myself there. If any man can prove that I did not see exactly what I say I saw, let him do so, but let him not attempt to “pshaw” me out of the evidences of my senses, and proclaim from his stolid pedestal, called the “impossible,” that I am a dreamer, a madman, and all that sort of adjectiveness which grows from ignorance of the noun substantives of reason. When he can come to me and show me the authority, not derived from his metaphysics or his sectarianism, or his prejudice, by which he is empowered to deny the possibility or the probability and actuality of ghosts, and settle then and forever that such things cannot be, I will admit that I was crazy; bereft of reason; at one moment gifted with eyesight, and the next deprived of it: things which, by the way, would be more at variance with the “order of Heaven,” and more extraordinary, in fact, than the assumed appearance of that thing we call ghost; and which, after all said, and done, and laughed, and sneered at, is that idea of the human hope baptized in our dreams and our theology, by the name of “Immortality.” You cannot prove to a drowning man that he is not surrounded by water. You may tell him that he can swim; but he will tell you that, though he can, he has the cramp. You may tell him that a ship without volition can float where he is struggling; but he will tell you that the ship has nothing to do with it. He believes in the things that he feels and sees around him, but which you do not experience, and he will not take your arguments and suggestions as the embodiment of an infallible life-preserver. I saw what I saw; prove to me that I did not see it,—for the question is with me and nobody else,—and prove it without the usual insolence, if you can; remembering, in your endeavor to convince, that insult is more of an offence than an argument; indeed, it is only used when argument is exhausted.