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

by Henry Johnson Brent

The composing of an epic poem is held to be the highest achievement of the human mind. Ideality, or imagination, is the means used in the performance of the work. Ideality is the inspiration of religion, and without it religion would simply be a form of law, to be broken like other laws, and to be vindicated by penalties and processes similar to those imposed and employed in the vindication and substantiation of any other law. The ecclesiastical synonym for ideality is faith.

If ideality be the source of the highest results of intellectual effort, and of religious belief, who can venture to fabricate a chain with which to bind and circumscribe its flights? If man in power, for the supposed benefit of the man out of power, does so, it is merely the result of policy, or passion, or human prejudice, or selfishness; and no man that ever lived, from the Pope of Rome to the backwood preacher, and from the preacher to the ethical moralist, has had that right inherent in his particular nature, to tax as a royalty the patent of the human mind to the grand prerogative of thought.

Canute, the king, tried an experiment of mastery with the tide. What other despot of school theory will make the same effort with the tidings of the brain of man, hoping for better success than the Danish fool? If there be such, so sure as the first known madman of the Hamlet race was driven from the beech, will the other be overwhelmed by the resistless force of that great wave of intelligence which has already grappled with the lightning, and taught it the babel language by which man expresses his endless wants. Man, when he seizes upon the great faculties of electricity, does not stultify himself by establishing a limit to its capacity. At first it was a rod upon a chimney that drew a spark from the thunder-storm; then the galvanic battery, to draw paralysis from limbs; then the wire from city to city; and now it passes beneath the throbbing bosom of the sea, and whispers the price of stocks or the policy of cabinets into the ear of a man who sits at his table, like a musician at his piano, taking out of the thunderbolts of Jove a language and a spirit that ignorance would deny the possibility of being there. And what more will be accomplished by electricity? We stand upon the threshold of its domain, enlightened by flashes that invite and illumine to farther experiments.

Doubt is the genius of discovery, but, at present, with regard to the supernatural, there is nothing proved except what we believe; otherwise, the world would have but one creed.

XVII.
MANIFESTATIONS.

As may be well imagined, a subject so conspicuous and mysterious as the dark deeds done in Bussey’s wood, would not be allowed to pass over without some professional attempts on the part of the spiritualistic community to discover their hidden secret. “Seances” were called, and the force of mediumistic power enlisted and put in operation to extract the terrible revelation from some detective spirit among the dead; with what result the police are best able to judge, and the culprit, too; but it occurred to me that it might possibly amuse my readers to read some of the communications relating to the topics I have been treating of, from the spirit world, through what is called trance mediums. The two or three that I shall take occasion to abridge were sent to the police head-quarters, and I have no doubt they were sent in good faith. The result of the incantations is of little moment, but I have understood that it was said somewhere by a presumed spirit, that they would tell all about the murders, and expose the culprit, if a sum of money would be raised competent to the support of the bereaved mother of the children. The fact that there were large rewards offered—and I believe they have not been withdrawn—should have satisfied them that if, through their agency, the murderer was detected, they could make over the amount to Mrs. Joyce. I do not vouch for the truth of the rumor, but think it improbable, because it was an unnecessary demand under the circumstances. The occasions when, actuated by a mixed motive of curiosity and a desire to examine, I have witnessed the proceedings at these sittings of the faithful, have not had a very strong tendency to convince me that good spirits put their feet under the mahogany. To be sure my experience has been limited, but it has been definite up to this period. I have not attended the public or professional seances; but there are many persons who are sceptics, yet strongly mediumistic, and able to make the table move across the room by the mere imposition of their hands. I have heard the alphabet repeated at my own room, where only one gentleman was present beside myself; and this gentleman, an involuntary and unprofessional medium, was of considerable power, and used that power for the purposes of investigation. Answers I have there witnessed to questions, that astonished me,—direct, satisfactory, and going back into the far and dim years of childhood, astonishing to my friend, as well as to myself,—facts that my own mind had entirely lost in the lapse of years, but which came up to my recollection as vivid as if of yesterday’s happening. Sometimes my recollection has been corrected, and in such a way as to convince me that my idea of the circumstance had been erroneous. And then again, a something of intelligence would move the table, in answer to the alphabet, and tell such self-evident lies, with so enthusiastic a vivacity as to startle me into the belief that he had been the writer of bulletins for some newspaper during the late Southern conflict. And this assumed spirit would pass himself off as a deceased member of my family, staggering me with his knowledge, and from which bewilderment I confess I can find no present means of rational escape. I have, however, come pretty nearly to the conclusion that the spirit, or whatever it is, that I have alluded to above, has been our only visitor; but the imagination cannot conceive a scheme so subtle as his has been to deceive us into the belief that those persons, whose character he pretended to represent, were in fact the very individuals themselves; and under ordinary circumstances few men could have been blamed had they been credulous of his representations.

I have frequently tried by the most determined exercise of will, to force the responses into the channel I had mentally prepared for them; but in no case, I must candidly confess, could I command obedience. This fact shook my theory of sympathetic influence, and settled in that small sphere of experiment the vexed question of the power of mind to operate upon matter. My friend, who has the mediumistic faculty, made similar attempts, and always with like result. Let wiser heads than mine unravel and explain, by cogent and irresistible logic, these eccentric incidents, for I must admit my utter inability to explain them by any rules outside of those adopted by the spiritualist. But though I may have been a witness of these phenomena, it does not follow that I am a spiritualist, any more than I am of the mythological faith of pagan Greece, because, forsooth, I take delight in the statue of Minerva, go into raptures over that of Venus, and read with unfeigned enjoyment the poems of that prince of old idolaters, blind but immortal Homer.

I have before me a package of manuscript purporting to have been written by inhabitants of another world,—by hands that have felt the pressure of the hand of death, and yet, it would seem, are able to express thought with the intelligence usually attributed to life. One of these communications purports to have been written by Isabella Joyce, the murdered girl, and another by her father, Stephen Joyce.

The manuscript of the girl strikes me as of a better order of chirography than is usually to be found in that of children of her age; while the father’s is large and roughly emphatic, and bears the impress of a passionate desire to discover the murderer and avenge the deaths of his children. Friends of Stephen Joyce assert that the formation of the writing is unmistakably similar to his; but, as I have not been able to compare the dead man’s penmanship with anything done by him while on earth, I cannot pass judgment either of denial or verification.

It would appear that, speedily after the murders were discovered, meetings were called of the spiritualists, in the hope that some revelation would be made that might lead to the arrest of the party or parties engaged in the atrocious deed.