“Nothing is easier than to lift a table by means of a concealed apparatus. The knocking also may be produced by means of muscular motion or otherwise. But can any one lift a table without any apparatus, simply by placing the hand on it; or can any one contrive an apparatus so cunning that no one present, having full liberty to examine everything, shall be able to detect it?
“By collusion or otherwise questions also might be answered, but I maintain that the agent in spiritualism can tell all the most secret and hidden things of one’s life, and even one’s secret thoughts, and also that it understands and can converse in any language. I have verified this by repeated experience. But it will not always speak when it is wanted to speak, and the ‘medium’ has no power over it to make it answer questions. But the fact that it often tells lies and often refuses to tell anything, does not make void the fact that it does also at times answer every question which one can ask it. It is by this sort of capricious behaviour that it succeeds in completely deluding some to trust in it, and others to disbelieve in it altogether. But let a man confine himself at first to the physical phenomenon and try if he can make a table to rise up into the air completely off the ground, simply by placing his hand on it, and without any apparatus whatever. If he cannot do this, and if no human being can do it, let it be acknowledged that there is some non-human agent. A little experience will very soon convince any one that it is an intelligent, and a wonderfully intelligent, agent, and then it will remain to be considered whether this intelligent agent is good or evil—I say it is evil.
R. C.”
During the year 1863, when the ghost illusion was one of the topics of the day, the famous George Cruikshank wrote a pamphlet, entitled—“A Discovery concerning Ghosts, with a Rap at the ‘Spirit Rappers,’ illustrated with Cuts, and dedicated to the ‘Ghost Club.’” Curious to say, he says nothing respecting the Polytechnic ghost, but is exercised chiefly with famous stories of ghosts and apparitions, which it is alleged have appeared to various persons. The author examines analytically a number of them, and comes to the conclusion that the persons relating them usually deceived themselves or other people, and that most of the stories are mental hallucinations. The inimitable George, as his friends delighted to call him, treats with profound contempt the spirit rappers, and all the cheats and fortune-telling mendicants who try to impose on innocent people with their bad conjuring tricks—people who might have got through the world safely; but the fatal chord is struck, and they go from bad to worse, until they end in a mad house.
The whole tribe of persons who made money directly or indirectly out of what they called spirit mediums, &c., fairly howled upon me in the lecture room, and, threatening personal violence, I was for some time attended home at night by the most stalwart of our Polytechnic employés; for, like Cruikshank, I vigorously denounced the traders in spirits, founding my arguments on the belief that God was too merciful to us to add to the troubles of this world the fear and trembling brought about by pretended communication with the invisible world.
The first story I told at my Polytechnic “Strange Lecture” had a very simple plot.
It represented the room of a student who was engaged burning the midnight oil, and, looking up from his work, sees an apparition of a skeleton. Resenting the intrusion he rises, seizes a sword or a hatchet which is ready to his hand, and aims a blow at the ghost; which instantly disappeared again and again to return.
This ghost was admirably performed by my assistant, whom we called Ye Perringe, who, wearing a cover of black velvet, held the real skeleton in his arms and made the fleshless bones assume the most elegant attitudes, the lower part from the pelvis downward being attired in white linen, and the white skeleton ghost assuming a sitting posture, so that it appeared to come out of the floor.
Although this exhibition only lasted a few minutes, it drew hundreds and thousands of pounds to the treasury of the Polytechnic. In fact, as already stated, I was obliged to remove to the larger theatre of the Institute.
The next ghost story was told in the large theatre; and it illustrated Charles Dickens’s story of the “Haunted Man.” At the same time was shown “Cupid and the Love-Letter.” When the curtain drew up, a peasant girl was discovered using her spinning-wheel and demurely thinking of something not told to the audience.