What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

Here is one more remarkable case—one out of dozens of such. A middle-aged Italian gentleman of the Jewish persuasion, asked that the spirit of his father, who, it was stated by the medium, was present, should mention where he and his son, then communicating with him, last met on earth. It should be stated that the inquirer, having abandoned the faith of his fathers, professed entire disbelief in any existence of the soul, or any future life. The answer to his query was spelled out in the manner I have already described, a certain Italian city being named. I watched the face of the sceptical inquirer as the letters were “rapped out” and gradually completed the name required. And I needed no confession of the fact from him to know that the answer had been correctly given. I thought the man would have fallen from his chair. He became ghastly pale, and trembled all over. He was in truth very terribly impressed and affected, but—and the phenomenon is a very curious, though by no means an uncommon one—a few days afterwards the impression had entirely faded from his mind. He continued fully to admit that the fact which had occurred was altogether inexplicable, but wholly refused to believe that it involved any supposition inconsistent with his strictly materialistic creed.

In the above case, as in that of the banker given above, it may of course be said that it was within the bounds of possibility that Mr. Hume should have previously ascertained the fact that he stated. It is, of course, impossible for me here to explain to the reader every detail of the circumstances that seem to me to render such an explanation wholly inadmissible. I can only say that to a mind as entirely open upon the subject as I think my mind is, the supposition in question appears so improbable, that it fails to impress me as a possibility.

On the other hand, I have to say that every attempt of a similar kind, whether by Mr. Hume or by any other so-called medium, in which I myself have been the subject of the experiment, has absolutely and wholly failed. Mr. Hume never, to the best of my remembrance, introduced or announced the presence of any spirit “for me.” I was like the boy at school whom no relative ever comes to see! The Mrs. G—— who has been mentioned at an earlier page, announced upon one occasion the presence of my mother, with results which would have sufficed to prove very satisfactorily that my mother’s spirit was not there, if I had previously fully believed the case to have been otherwise.

I once went to visit the then celebrated Alexis in Paris. He knew that I was a resident in Florence, and began operations by proposing to describe to me my house there. Of course such an experiment admitted of almost every conceivable kind of mystification and uncertainty. I told him that the proposed description would necessarily occupy more of his time than seemed to me needed for producing the conviction of the reality of his power, which I was anxious to acquire; and that it would be abundantly sufficient for that purpose if he would simply tell me the number composed of four figures which I had written on a piece of paper, and sealed in a (perfectly non-transparent) packet. He refused to make the attempt.

Many years subsequently I attended the séances of a gentleman in London, whose performances attracted a good deal of attention at the time—of an unfavourable description, for the most part—and whose chief specialty consisted in enclosing a piece of slate pencil loosely between two ordinary framed slates, securely tied together, and awaiting communications to be made by writing produced on the slate by the pencil thus enclosed acting automatically. I did see written words thus produced, where to the best of my observation there had been no words before the slates were (quite securely) tied together. Nor could I form any theory or guess as to the manner in which this writing was produced under circumstances which seemed to make it perfectly impossible that it should be so produced. But the words so written conveyed no remarkable or surprising information—and indeed to the best of my recollection had little meaning at all.

Thus once again that portion of the performance which was, or might have been, of the nature of sleight of hand, was done so well as to cause much puzzlement and surprise; while what may be called the spiritual part of the promised phenomenon failed entirely.

I have witnessed the performances of sundry other mediums—I hate to write the word!—always with the same net result. That is to say, the strictly physical phenomena witnessed were in very many cases—not in all—utterly unaccountable and incomprehensible. The statement that the performances of many masters of legerdemain are also unaccountable and incomprehensible appears to me, while I fully admit the truth of it, to be of very little value. The phenomena produced by these professors are in almost every case totally different in kind, and are in every case placed in a wholly different category by the fact that the performers of them have the assistance of tools and means—the highly-skilled preparation and combination of which constitute a very important (if not the most essential) part of their professional equipment—and of the resources of their own prepared locale. Furthermore, I cannot forget the testimony of that “prince of conjurors,” Bosco, to the effect that the phenomena, which I declared to him I had seen, were entirely unachievable by any of the resources of his art.

Above all I have the certain knowledge (resting not only on my own very perfect recollection, but on the unvarying testimony of the two other persons engaged in the experiment) that a table did move much and violently, as recorded above, while wholly and certainly untouched by any human hands or persons, and uncommunicated with—if I may use such an expression—save by the minds of the operators.

The net conclusion, therefore, of my rather extensive experience in the matter is, that as regards phenomena purely physical, such have been and are frequently produced by the practisers of “animal magnetism”—or by whatever name it may be preferred to call it—of a nature wholly inexplicable by any of the theories or suggestions which have been adduced for the explanation of them.

With regard to non-physical phenomena—that is to say, such as imply the abnormal exercise of intelligences, whether incarnate or disembodied, outside the intelligence of the individual experimenting—I have to testify that I have heard from many highly credible persons the statement of their own experience of such communication with intelligences other than their own. And I have heard such statements immediately on the occurrence of the facts. But I have never in my own person received or been made the subject of any such.