In the meantime, however, the article of the anonymous Times correspondent appeared in that journal on June 8th—an article which was practically an attack on certain methods of the S.P.R., after which Mr. Myers published the following letter:—
ON THE TRAIL OF A GHOST.
To the Editor of "The Times."
"Sir,—A letter entitled 'On the Trail of a Ghost,' which you publish to-day, appears to suggest throughout that some statement has been made on behalf of the Society for Psychical Research with regard to the house which your correspondent visited. This, however, is not the case; and as a misleading impression may be created, I must ask you to allow me space to state that I visited B——, representing that society, before your correspondent's visit, and decided that there was no such evidence as could justify us in giving the results of the inquiry a place in our Proceedings. I had already communicated this judgment to Lord Bute, to the council of the society, and to Professor Sidgwick, the editor of our Proceedings, and it had been agreed to act upon it.—I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
"Frederick W.H. Myers,
Hon. Sec. of the Society for Psychical Research.
Leckhampton House, Cambridge, June 8."
One may gather from a comparison of this letter with the foregoing records that the standard of evidence is a somewhat variable quantity in the Society for Psychical Research. In attempting to explain the matter, Mr. Myers wrote to Lord Bute, June 11, 1897:—
"As to haunted houses recorded at length in Proceedings, there have been several minor ones, and one especially, 'Records of a Haunted House,' where I was instrumental in getting the account written. The great point there was the amount of coincidence of visions seen independently.... In the B—— case there is some coincidence of vision, but so far as I know, not nearly so much as in the Records of a Haunted House, which did appear in Proceedings. We want to keep our level approximately the same throughout."
Another point of view in relation to the same matter, is that taken by Miss Freer in an article in the Nineteenth Century, August 1897:—