The following well-authenticated account of a posthumous appearance, is not without its ludicrous element. A court-preacher in one of the little Saxon Duchies, appeared once in bands and gowns before his sovereign, bowing most humbly and reverently. The duke asked what he desired, but received no answer except another deep reverence. A second question meets with the same reply, whereupon the divine leaves the room, descends the stairs and crosses the court-yard, while the prince, much surprised at his strange conduct, stands at a window and watches him till he reaches the gates. Then he sends a page after him to try and ascertain what was the matter with the old gentleman, but the page comes running back almost beside himself, and reports that the minister had died a short while before. The prince refuses to believe his report, and sends a high official, but the latter returns with the same report and this additional information: The dying man had asked for writing materials, in order to recommend his widow to his sovereign, but had hardly commenced writing the letter when death surprised him. The fragment was brought to the duke and convinced him that his faithful servant, unable to reach him by letter, and yet nervously anxious to approach him, had spiritually appeared to him in his most familiar costume (Daumer, Mystagog. I. p. 224).
Before we regret such statements or treat them with ridicule, it will be well to remember, that men endowed with an extraordinary power of controlling certain faculties of body and soul, are by no means rare, and that the difference between them and those last mentioned, consists only in the degree. We speak of the power of sight and limit it ordinarily to a certain distance—and yet a Hottentot, we are told, can perceive the head of a gazelle in the dry, uniform grass of an African plain, at the distance of a thousand yards! Many men cannot hear sounds in nature which are perfectly audible to others, while some persons hear even certain notes uttered by tiny insects, which escape altogether the average hearing of man. Patients under treatment by Baron Reichenbach, saw luminous objects and the appearance of lights hovering above ground, where neither he nor any of his friends could perceive anything but utter darkness, and the special gift with which some persons are endowed to feel, as it were, the presence of water and of metals below the surface, is well authenticated. Poor Caspar Hauser, bred in darkness and solitude, felt various and deep impressions upon his whole being during the first months of his free life, whenever he came in contact with plants, stones or metals. The latter sent a current through all his limbs; tobacco fields made him deadly sick, and the vicinity of a graveyard gave him violent pains in his chest. Persons who were introduced to him for the first time, sent a cold current through him; and when they possessed a specially powerful physique, they caused him abundant perspiration, and often even convulsions. The waves of sound he felt so much more acutely than others, that he always continued to hear them with delight, long after the last sound had passed away from the ears of others. It may be fairly presumed that this extreme sensitiveness to outward impressions is originally possessed by all men, but becomes gradually dulled and dimmed by constant repetition; at the same time it may certainly be preserved in rare privileged cases, or it may come back again to the body in a diseased or disordered condition, and at the moment of dissolution.
Nor is the power occasionally granted to men to control their senses limited to these; even the spontaneous functions of the body are at times subject to the will of man. An Englishman, for instance, could at will modify the beating of his heart (Cheyne, "New Dis.," p. 307), and a German produced, like a veritable ruminant, the antiperistaltic motions of the stomach, whenever he chose (Blumenbach, Phys. § 294). Other men have been known who could at any moment cause the familiar "goose-skin," or perspiration, to appear in any part of the body, and many persons can move not only the ears—a lost faculty according to Darwin—but even enlarge or contract the pupil of the eye, after the manner of cats and parrots. Even the circulation of the blood has been known, in a few rare cases, to have been subject to the will of men, and the great philosopher Kant did not hesitate to affirm, supported as he was by his own experience, that men could, if they were but resolute enough, master, by a mere effort of the will, not a few of their diseases.
A striking evidence of the comparative facility with which men thus exceptionally gifted, may be able to imitate certain magic phenomena, was once given by an excellent mimic, whom Richard describes in his Théorie des Songes. He could change his features so completely that they assumed a deathlike appearance; his senses lost gradually their power of perception, and the vital spirit was seen to withdraw from the outer world. A slow, quivering motion passed through his whole system from the feet upward, as if he wished to rise from the ground. After a while all efforts of the body to remain upright proved fruitless; it looked as if life had actually begun to leave it already. At this moment he abandoned his deception and was so utterly exhausted that he heard and saw but with extreme difficulty.
In the face of these facts the possibility at least cannot be denied that certain specially endowed individuals may possess, in health or in disease, the power to perceive phenomena which appear all the more marvelous because they are beyond the reach of ordinary powers of perception.
In our own day superstition and wanton, or cunningly devised, imposture have been so largely mixed up with the subject, that a strong and very natural prejudice has gradually grown up against the belief in ghosts. Every strange appearance, every mysterious coincidence, that escaped the most superficial investigation, was forthwith called a ghost. History records, besides, numerous cases in which the credulity of great men has been played upon for purposes of policy and statecraft. When the German Emperor Joseph showed his great fondness of Augustus of Saxony—afterwards king of Poland—his Austrian counsellors became alarmed at the possible influence of such intimacy of their sovereign with a Protestant prince, and determined to break it off. Night after night, therefore, a fearful vision arose before the German emperor, rattling its chains and accusing the young prince of grievous heresy. Augustus, however, known already at that time for his gigantic strength, asked Joseph's permission to sleep in his room; when the ghost appeared as usual, the young prince sprang upon him, and feeling his flesh and blood, threw him bodily out of a window of the second story into a deep fosse. The unfortunate king of Prussia, Frederick William II., fell soon after his ascension of the throne into the hands of designing men, who determined to profit by his great kindness of heart and his tendency to mysticism, and began to work upon him by supernatural apparitions. One of the most cunningly devised impostures of the kind was practised upon King Gustavus III. of Sweden by ambitious noblemen of his court.
The scene was the ancient Lofoe church in Drotingholm, a favorite residence of former Swedish monarchs. The king's physician, Iven Hedin, learnt accidentally from the sexton that his master had been spending several nights in the building, in company with a few of his courtiers. Alarmed by this information he persuaded the sexton to let him watch the proceedings from a secret place in the old steeple of the church. An opportunity came in the month of August, 1782, and he had scarcely taken possession of his post when two of the royal secretaries came in, closed the door, and arranged a curious contrivance in the body of the building. To his great surprise and amusement the doctor saw them fasten some horse-hairs to the heavy chandeliers suspended from the lofty ceiling, and then pin to them masks sewed on to white floating garments. Finally large quantities of incense were scattered on the floor and set on fire, while all lights, save a few thin candles, were extinguished. Then the king was ushered in with five of his courtiers, made to assume a peculiar, very irksome position, and all were asked to hold naked swords upon each other's breasts. Thereupon the first comer murmured certain formulas of conjuration, and performed some ceremonies, when his companion slowly drew up one of the masks. It was fashioned to resemble the great Gustavus Adolphus, and in the dimly-lighted church, filled with dense smoke, it looked to all intents and purposes like a ghost arising from the vaults underneath. It disappeared as slowly into the darkness above, and was immediately followed by another mask representing Adolphus Frederick, and even the physician, who knew the secret, could not repress a shudder, so admirably was the whole contrived. Then followed a few flashes of lightning, during which the horse-hairs were removed, lights were brought in, and the king, deeply moved and shedding silent tears, escorted from the building. The faithful physician watched his opportunity, and when a favorable hour appeared, revealed the secret to his master, and thus, fortunately for Sweden, defeated a very dangerous and most skillfully-conducted conspiracy.
Even ventriloquism has lent its aid to many an historical imposture, as in the case of Francis I. of France, whose valet, Louis of Brabant, possessed great skill in that art, and used it unsparingly for his own benefit and to the advantage of courtiers who employed him for political purposes. He even persuaded the mother of a beautiful and wealthy young lady to give him her daughter's hand by imitating the voice of her former husband, and commanding her to do so in order to release him from purgatory!
We fear that to this class of ghostly appearances must also be counted the almost historical White Lady of the Margraves of Brandenburg.
Report says that she represents a Countess Kunigunde of Orlamünde, who lived in the fourteenth century and killed her two children, for which crime she was executed by order of a Burggrave of Nuremberg. History, however, knows nothing of such an event, and the White Lady does not appear till 1486, when she is first seen in the old palace at Baireuth. This was nothing but a trick of the courtiers; whenever they desired to leave the dismal town and the uncomfortable building, one of the court ladies personated the ghost, and occasionally, even two white ladies were seen at the same time. In 1540 the ghost met with a tragic fate; it had appeared several times in the castle of Margrave Albert the warrior, and irritated the prince to such a degree that he at last seized it one night and hurled it headlong down the long staircase. The morning dawn revealed his chancellor, Christopher Strass, who had betrayed his master and now paid with a broken neck for his bold imposture. After this catastrophe the White Lady was not seen for nearly a hundred years, when she suddenly reappeared in Baireuth. In the year 1677 the then reigning Margrave of Brandenburg found her one day sitting in his own chair and was terrified; the next day he rode out, fell from his horse, and was instantly killed. From this time the White Lady became a part of the history of the house of Brandenburg, accompanying the princes to Berlin and making it her duty to forewarn the illustrious family of any impending calamity. King Frederick I. saw her distinctly, but other sovereigns discerned only a vague outline and now and then the nose and eyes, while all the rest was closely veiled. In the old palace at Baireuth there exist to this day two portraits of the White Lady, one in white, as she appeared of old, and very beautiful, the other in black satin, with her hair powdered and dressed after more modern fashion—there is no likeness between the two faces. The ghost was evidently a good patriot, for she disturbed French officers who were quartered there, in the new palace as well as in the old, and as late as 1806 thoroughly frightened a number of generals who had laughed at the credulity of the Germans. In 1809 General d'Espagne roused his aides in the depth of night by fearful cries, and when they rushed in he was found lying in the centre of the room, under the bedstead. He told them that the White Lady, in a costume of black and white, resembling one of the portraits, had appeared and threatened to strangle him; in the struggle she had dragged the bedstead to the middle of the room and there upset it. The room was thoroughly searched at his command, the hangings removed from the walls, and the whole floor taken up, but no trace was found of any opening through which a person might have entered; the doors had been guarded by sentinels. The general left the place immediately, looking upon the vision as a warning of impending evil, and, sure enough, a few days later he found his death upon the battle-field of Aspern. Even the great Napoleon, whose superstition was generally thought to be confined to his faith in his "star," would not lodge in the rooms haunted by the White Lady, and when he reached Baireuth in 1812, a suite of rooms was prepared for him in another wing of the palace. It was, however, noticed that even there his night's rest must have been interrupted, for on the next morning he was remarkably nervous and out of humor, murmuring repeatedly "Ce maudit château," and declaring that he would never again stay at the place. When he returned to that neighborhood in 1813, he refused to occupy the rooms that had been prepared for him, and continued his journey far into the night, rather than remain at Baireuth. The town was, however, forever relieved of its ill-fame after 1822. It is not without interest that in the same year the steward of the royal palace died, and report says in his rooms were found a number of curiosities apparently connected with the White Lady's costume; if this be so, his ardent patriotism and fierce hatred of the French might well furnish a cue to some of the more recent apparitions. The White Lady continued to appear in Berlin, and the terror she created was not even allayed by repeated discoveries of most absurd efforts at imposture. Once she turned out to be a white towel agitated by a strong draught between two windows; at another time it was a kitchen-maid on an errand of love, and a third time an old cook taking an airing in the deserted rooms. She appeared once more in the month of February, 1820, announcing, as many believed, the death of the reigning monarch, which took place in June; and quite recently (1872) similar warning was given shortly before the emperor's brother, Prince Albrecht, died in his palace.