Hours with the Ghosts or, Nineteenth Century Witchcraft / Illustrated Investigations into the Phenomena of Spiritualism and Theosophy

by Henry Ridgely Evans

Case D.

This is another striking evidence of telepathic communication, in which I was one of the agents. L— was a reporter on a Baltimore paper, and his apartments were the rendezvous of a coterie of Bohemian actors, journalists, and litterati, among whom was X—, a student at the Johns-Hopkins University, and a poet of rare excellence. Poets have a proverbial reputation for being eccentric in personal appearance; in X this eccentricity took the form of an unclipped beard that stood out in all directions, giving him a savage, anarchistic look. He vowed never under any circumstances to shave or cut this hirsute appendage.

L— came to me one day, and laughingly remarked: “I am being tortured by a mental obsession. X’s beard annoys me; haunts my waking and sleeping hours. I must do something about it. Listen! He is coming down to my rooms, Saturday evening, to do some literary work, and spend the night with me. We shall have supper together, and I want you to be present. Now I propose that we drug his coffee with some harmless soporific, and when he is sound asleep, tie him, and shave off his beard. Will you help me? I can provide you with a lounge to sleep on, but you must promise not to go to sleep until after the tragedy.”

I agreed to assist him in his practical joke, and we parted, solemnly vowing that our project should be kept secret.

This was on Tuesday, and no communication was had with X, until Saturday morning, when L— and I met him on Charles street.

“Don’t forget to-night,” exclaimed L— “I have invited E to join us in our Epicurean feast.”

“I will be there,” said X. “By the way, let me relate a curious dream I had last night. I dreamt I came down to your rooms, and had supper. E— was present. You fellows gave me something to drink which contained a drug, and I fell asleep on the bed. After that you tied my hands, and shaved off my beard. When I awoke I was terribly mad. I burst the cords that fastened my wrists together, and springing to my feet, cut L— severely with the razor.”

“That settles the matter”, said L—, “his beard is safe from me”. When we told X of our conspiracy to relieve him of his poetic hirsute appendage, he evinced the greatest astonishment. As will be seen, every particular of the practical joke had been transferred to his mind, the drugging of the coffee, the tying, and the shaving.

Telepathy is a logical explanation of many of the ghostly visitations of which the Society for Psychical Research has collected such a mass of data. For example: A dies, let us say in India and B, a near relative or friend, residing in England, sees a vision of A in a dream or in the waking state. A clasps his hands, and seems to utter the words, “I am dying”. When the news comes of A’s death, the time of the occurrence coincides with the seeing of the vision. The spiritualist’s theory is that the ghost of A was an actual entity. One of the difficulties in the way of such an hypothesis is the clothing of the deceased—can that, too, be disembodied? Thought transference (conscious or unconscious), I think, is the only rational explanation of such phantasms. The vision seen by the percipient is not an objective but a subjective thing—a hallucination produced by the unknown force called telepathy. The vision need not coincide exactly with the date of the death of the transmitter but may make its appearance years afterwards, remaining latent in the subjective mind of the percipient. It may, as is frequently the case, be revealed by a medium in a séance. Many thoughtful writers combat the telepathic explanation of phantasms of the dead, claiming that when such are seen long after the death of persons, they afford indubitable evidence of the reality of spirit visitation. The reader is referred to the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research for a detailed discussion of the pros and cons of this most interesting subject.

Many of the so-called materializations of the séance-room may be accounted for by hallucinations superinduced by telepathic suggestions from the mind of the medium or sitters. But, in my opinion, the greater number of these manifestations of spirit power are the result of trickery pure and simple—theatrical beards and wigs, muslin and gossamer robes, etc., being the paraphernalia used to impersonate the shades of the departed, the imaginations of the sitters doing the rest.