“I told the poor old fellow that his secret should be safe with me, and should not be made public so long as he lived. The old man grasped my hand eagerly and expressed his gratitude in the strongest terms. Thus, Mr. Barnum, I have given you the pure and honest facts in regard to my adventure in a so called haunted house. Don’t make it public until you are convinced that the old gardener has shuffled off this mortal coil.”
So much for Kirby’s story of the haunted house. No doubt, the old gardener has before this become in reality a disembodied spirit, but that his grand-daughter became legally possessed of the estate is not at all probable. Real estate does not change hands so easily in England. So powerful, however is the superstitious belief in haunted houses, that it is doubtful whether that property will for many years sustain half so great a cash value in the market as it would have done had it not been considered a “haunted house.”
It is to be hoped that, as schools multiply and education increases, the follies and superstitions which underlie a belief in ghosts and hobgoblins will pass away.
CHAPTER XXXV.
HAUNTED HOUSES.—GHOSTS.—GHOULS.—PHANTOMS.—VAMPIRES.—CONJURORS.— DIVINING.—GOBLINS.—FORTUNE-TELLING.—MAGIC.—WITCHES.—SORCERY.— OBI.—DREAMS.—SIGNS.—SPIRITUAL MEDIUMS.—FALSE PROPHETS.— DEMONOLOGY.—DEVILTRY GENERALLY.
Whether superstition is the father of humbug, or humbug the mother of superstition (as well as its nurse,) I do not pretend to say; for the biggest fools and the greatest philosophers can be numbered among the believers in and victims of the worst humbugs that ever prevailed on the earth.
As we grow up from childhood and begin to think we are free from all superstitions, absurdities, follies, a belief in dreams, signs, omens, and other similar stuff, we afterward learn that experience does not cure the complaint. Doubtless much depends upon our “bringing up.” If children are permitted to feast their ears night after night (as I was) with stories of ghosts, hobgoblins, ghouls, witches, apparitions, bugaboos, it is more difficult in after-life for them to rid their minds of impressions thus made.
But whatever may have been our early education, I am convinced that there is an inherent love of the marvelous in every breast, and that everybody is more or less superstitious; and every superstition I denominate a humbug, for it lays the human mind open to any amount of belief, in any amount of deception that may be practised.
One object of these chapters consists in showing how open everybody is to deception, that nearly everybody “hankers” after it, that solid and solemn realities are frequently set aside for silly impositions and delusions, and that people, as a too general thing, like to be led into the region of mystery. As Hudibras has it: