The Psychical Researcher's Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist / From "The New Decameron", Volume III.

by J. D. Beresford

He was infernally sceptical about those aborigines. It seems that he had had a tremendous argument with the other investigator about the possibility of "spirits" being black and naked, and he was dead set on proving that he had been right. I think, as a matter of fact, that what I said tended to confirm him in his theory. He put it that if there were such spirits on this plane, I must have seen them or have had some quite first-hand evidence of their existence; and when I said that I had seen black people, Indians, and so on, he cross-examined me until I got confused. You see, I had to confess that they weren't, strictly speaking, black, that they wore clothes, and washed, and lived in houses; and he got me involved in apparent contradictions—you have no idea how easy it is, when you are trying to be very lucid—and then he changed the subject with the remark that I was a very poor witness.

It was about this time that I began to lose my temper. It was after three o'clock when we got to that point, and I was getting very tired, and, strange as it may appear, curiously doubtful about my own existence. I had for some time been coming to the conclusion that he did not quite believe in my reality; and after he had dismissed my account of the black races as being untrustworthy, he said, half to himself, that quite probably I was nothing more than an hallucination, a thought projection of his own mind. And after that I got more and more annoyed—partly, I think, because I had a kind of haunting fear that what he had said might be true. When you have been talking to a spirit for over three hours in the middle of the night, you are liable to doubt anything.

But it was foolish of me to try and prove to him that I had a real objective existence, because obviously it wasn't possible. I tried to touch him, and my hand went through him as if he were nothing more than a patch of mist. Then I got right out of bed and moved various articles about the room, but, as he said, that proved nothing, for if he had an hallucination about me, he might equally well have one about the things I appeared to move. And then we drifted into a futile argument as to what I looked like.

It began as a sort of test, to try if my own conception of myself tallied with his; and it didn't—not in the very least. In fact, the description he gave of me would have done very well for the typical goblin of fairy-tale, which, as I told him, was precisely how I saw him. He laughed at that, and told me that, as a matter of fact, he had no shape at all, and that my conception of him proved his description of me was the correct one, because I had visualised myself. He said that he would appear to me in any shape that I happened to be thinking of, and naturally I should be thinking of my own. And I could not disprove a thing he said; and when I looked at myself in the cheval glass, I was not at all sure that I did not look like the traditional goblin.

Well, I assure you that I felt just then as if the one possible way left to demonstrate my sanity, my very existence, was to lose my temper; and I did it very thoroughly. I raved up and down the room, knocked the furniture about, chucked my boots through him, and called him a damned elemental. And although it had no more effect upon him than if I had been in another world—as I suppose in a sense I actually was—that outbreak did help to restore my sanity.

Perhaps you may have noticed that if a man is worsted in an argument he invariably loses his temper? It is the only means he has left to convince himself that he is right. Well, my temper did that for me on this occasion. I could not prove my existence to that confounded spirit by any logic or demonstration, but I could prove it to myself by getting angry. And I did.

The Researcher glared round the circle as if challenging anyone there to deny the validity of his existence, then slapped his note-book together and sat upon it.

I do not expect you to believe my story (he concluded, with a touch of vehemence). Indeed, I would much sooner that you did not believe it. I have been trying to doubt it myself for the past eleven years, and I still hope to succeed in that endeavour, aided by my intensive study of the comforting theories of the later Victorian scientists. But I must warn you that there was just one touch of what one might call evidence, beyond my own impressions of that night—which may have been, and probably were, a mixture of telepathy, hallucination, expectancy, and auto-suggestion, that found expression in automatic writing.

This rather flimsy piece of evidence rests upon a conclusion drawn from the end of my conversation with the spirit. I was still banging about the room, then, and I said that I had finished with psychical research, that never again would I make the least inquiry with regard to a possible future life, or any kind of spiritualistic phenomenon. And, curiously enough, the poltergeist precisely echoed my resolve. He said that that night's experience had clearly shown him that the research was useless, that it could never prove anything, and that, even if it did, no one would believe it. For if, as he pointed out, we who were in a manner of speaking face to face, were unable to prove our own existence to each other, how could we expect to prove the other's existence to anyone else?

It was getting light then, and he faded out almost immediately afterwards.