The register of the parish of L——, in which B—— House is situated, mentions under the date July 14, 1873, the death of Sarah N——, housekeeper of B—— House (single), aged twenty-seven years, daughter of John N——, farmer, and Helen R——. (In Scottish legal documents married women are described by their maiden name.) It is said that her last illness was very short, lasting only three days. Mrs. S—— had the great charity to attend her on her deathbed. It is mentioned in the register, that the official intimation of Sarah N——'s death was given, not by her parents nor by Major S——, but by her uncle, Neil N——.
Major S—— seems to have been somewhat eccentric, and was very fond of dogs, of which he kept a considerable number. He had very strong views upon psychical subjects. He was a believer in spirit-return, and many witnesses have attested that he frequently spoke of his own return after death. Among these psychic beliefs were two relating to animals; and as they are of a kind not very commonly discussed even among spiritualists, and enter, to some extent, into the following narrative, it is convenient here to state them at length. It is very commonly held that the soul or living personality of man, which will survive the change called by us "death," is capable of entering living bodies and making use of their organs. The form in which this belief is most commonly met with, is that of the alleged inspiration of trance mediums by the souls of the dead. Such a case is that of Mrs. Piper, said to have been animated by the soul of Dr. Phinuit and other personalities now disincarnated. It has naturally been argued that if it is possible for the disembodied spirit to occupy and animate the body of a human being, it would, a fortiori, be easy for it to do the same with the body of a beast, where the resistance of will would presumably be less.
This idea, coupled with the belief that the soul can be separated from the body during life, so producing a kind of temporary death, while leaving the body in such a state that it is capable of being again inhabited and animated, lies at the bottom of the numerous statements as to sorcerers and sorceresses changing themselves into hares, wolves, or cats, which are to be found in the records of witch trials.
That this was possible, at least after death, was evidently a strong belief upon the part of Major S——. We are informed that he frequently intimated his intention of entering the body of a particular black spaniel which he possessed, and so strong a belief was attached to his words, that after his death all his dogs, including the spaniel in question, were shot, apparently in order to render impossible any such action upon his part. The policy of the measure adopted was short-sighted. If the Major had thoroughly succeeded in animating the body of the living spaniel, the physical resources at his disposal would have been too limited to have enabled him to give much trouble. As it is, a series of witnesses attest apparitions of this spaniel, and of at least one other dog, which may naturally be regarded as much more disturbing.
The second point is possibly the same as the last, but it appears to be more probably based upon the belief held by Major S——, in common with a large number of those who have made a serious study of apparitions—and certainly a large number of the members of the S.P.R.—that such apparitions are really hallucinations or false impressions upon the senses, created, so far as originated by any external cause, by other minds either in the body or out of the body, which are themselves invisible in the ordinary and physical sense of the term, and really acting through some means at present very imperfectly known. Such an opinion of course reserves the question of the possible action of unseen forces upon what is commonly called matter involved in 'spirit'-photography, materialisation, levitation, the passage of matter through matter, and other forms of apport, although such a distinction, if logically carried out, becomes somewhat tenuous in face of the generally accepted fact that all mental processes are accompanied by physical processes in the brain. In the following pages will be found instances of the phenomenon of the apparent removal of bed-clothing, which raise a question as to the propriety of regarding as exhaustive an explanation based solely upon the hypothesis of subjective hallucination which otherwise would appear to be generally applicable. It would stand to reason that if such an intelligence can produce an hallucination of the appearance of the human figure, it would be at least equally easy for it to produce an hallucination of the appearance of a beast. A belief to this effect seems to be the explanation of the fact mentioned in a letter to The Times of June 10, 1897, by Dr. Menzies, who refers to Major S—— as "an old and dear friend." He writes, "I have no doubt that he created much scandal by saying to his gardener that he had better take care to keep up the garden properly, for when he was gone his soul would go into a mole and haunt the garden and him too."
This theory of the possibility of producing by mental force the hallucination audible or visual of a beast, may also be the explanation, not only of the apparition of the large dog which has been seen, as well as that of a spaniel, but also of the phenomenon, attested by several witnesses, of their having heard the sound as of a large dog throwing itself from the outside against the lower part of their doors.
Major S—— died, as already stated, in 1876, and was buried beside Sarah N—— and, it is said, an old Indian manservant. The grave is in the middle of the parish churchyard. No monument marks their resting-place, but a high enclosure, which surrounds it, is a prominent object. The whole of his dogs, fourteen in number, including the spaniel already mentioned, were killed after his death.
The S.P.R. some years ago published a census of hallucinations based upon the interrogation of seventeen thousand persons, who were not only taken casually, but from whom those were excluded whose replies were foreseen. From the analysis of these statistics, it appears that the great majority of these phantasms are figures of people who were living and continue to live, although research seems to point to the fact that their bodies are either always, or very often, in a state of apparent unconsciousness at the moment of the phenomenon. Among the minority, i.e. of apparitions of the dead, the frequency seems to be in inverse proportion to the time which has elapsed since death. Those which appear at the moment of death are very frequent, whereas, on the other hand, those of persons who have been very long dead are almost unknown; e.g. the apparition seen by Lady Galway a few years ago at Rufford Abbey, where the form represented a person who must have been dead for about three hundred years, belongs to a class of which examples are very few.
A haunted house (or any other locality) is merely a place where experience shows that hallucinations are more or less localised, and the only especially interesting question about it is, why the hallucinations should be localised at a particular place, and what causes them there.