LETTERS ON THE TRUTHS CONTAINED IN POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.
IV.—REAL GHOSTS, AND SECOND-SIGHT.
Dear Archy,—You will not expect, after my last letter, that under the title of real ghosts, I am going to introduce to your acquaintance a set of personages resembling Madame Tussaud's wax-work, done in air—filmy gentlemen, in spectral blue coats, gray trousers, Wellingtons; and semi-transparent ladies clad from the looms of the other world. No, Nicolai's case, has extinguished that delusion. The visitant and his dress are figments of the imagination always. They are as unreal and subjective as the figures we see in our dreams. They are fancy's progeny, having under pressing circumstances acting rank, as realities. But, Archy, do dreams never come true? Let them plead their own cause. Enter Dream.
A Scottish gentleman and his wife were travelling four or five years ago in Switzerland. There travelled with them a third party, an intimate friend, a lady, who some time before had been the object of a deep attachment on the part of a foreigner, a Frenchman. Well, she would have nothing to say to him, but she gave him a good deal of serious advice, which I conclude she thought he wanted, and ultimately promoted, or was a cognisant party to his marriage with a lady, whom she likewise knew. The so-married couple were now in America. And the lady, my friend's fellow-traveller, occasionally heard from them, and had every reason to believe they were both in perfect health. One morning on their meeting at breakfast she told her companions, that she had had a very impressive dream the night before, which had recurred twice. The scene was a room in which lay a coffin, near which stood her ex-lover, in a luminous transfigured resplendent state; his wife was by, looking much as usual. The dream had caused the lady some misgivings; but her companions exhorted her to view it as a trick of her fancy, and she was half persuaded so to do. The dream, however, was right notwithstanding. In process of time, letters arrived announcing the death after a short illness of the French gentleman, within the twenty-four hours in which the vision appeared. Exit Dream, with applause.
I adduce this individual instance, simply because it is the last I have heard, out of many that have come before me equally well attested. I should have observed, that my informant was the fellow-traveller himself: he told me the story in presence of his wife, who religiously attested its accuracy. You will meet with similar stories, implicitly believed, in every society you go into, varying in their circumstances—a ghost being sometimes put in the place of a dream, and sometimes a vague but strong mental impression, a foreboding only. But the common point exists in all, that all intimation of the death of an absent acquaintance has been in one or another way insinuated into the mind of his friend about the time the event really took place. Instances of this kind, it will be found, are far too numerous to permit one off-hand to conclude that they have arisen from accident; that the connexion between the event and its anticipation and foreshadowing has been merely coincidence.
If you ask me how I would otherwise explain these stories, I will frankly avow, that it appears to me neither impossible, nor absurdly improbable, that the soul, or the nervous system, as you like, of the dying man, should have put itself into direct communication with the thoughts of his absent friend.
Ah, ah! the last touch of the vampyr theory again! You were then very modest about your hobby, and pretended not to know him, and passed him off as my beast, and now you daringly mount him yourself, and expect to be allowed to pace him before us, in that easy and confident style, as if he were some well-known roadster of Stewart's, or Ferriar's, or Hibbert's, or Abercromby's. Now shall we shortly see you thrown, or run away with, or led by some will-o'-the-wisp into a bottomless slough.
Well, that at all events will amuse you.
But in the mean time did you ever hear of the Wynyard ghost? A late General Wynyard and the late Sir John Colebrook, when young men, were serving in Canada. One day—it was daylight—Mr Wynyard and Mr Colebrook both saw a figure pass through the room in which they were sitting, which Mr Wynyard recognised as a brother then far away. One of them walked to the door, and looked out upon the landing-place; but the stranger was not there, and a servant, who was on the stairs, had seen nobody pass out. In time the news arrived, that Mr Wynyard's brother had died about the time of the visit of the apparition. Of this story, which I had heard narrated, I inquired the truth of two military men, each a General Wynyard, near relations of the ghost-seer of that name. They told me it was so narrated by him, certainly, and that it had the implicit belief of the family.
Another similar, double-barreled ghost story I recently had narrated to me, and was assured it rested on evidence equally good. I have heard of several others being in existence.