The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, Andrew Lang [free children's online books txt] 📗

can never be other than the word of the seer, with whatever value may attach to the testimony of those for whom he “sees,” and describes, persons and places unknown to himself.  The evidence of individuals as to their own subjective experiences is accepted by psychologists in other departments of the study. {66} CHAPTER IV

Veracious Waking Hallucinations not recognised by Science; or explained by Coincidence, Imposture, False Memory.  A Veracious Hallucination popularly called a Wraith or Ghost.  Example of Unveracious Hallucination.  The Family Coach.  Ghosts’ Clothes and other Properties and Practices; how explained.  Case of Veracious Hallucination.  Riding Home from Mess.  Another Case.  The Bright Scar.  The Vision and the Portrait.  Such Stories not usually believed.  Cases of Touch: The Restraining Hand.  Of Hearing: The Benedictine’s Voices; The Voice in the Bath-room.  Other “Warnings”.  The Maoris.  The Man at the Lift.  Appearances Coincident with Death.  Others not Coincident with Anything.

In “crystal-gazing” anybody can make experiments for himself and among such friends as he thinks he can trust.  They are hallucinations consciously sought for, and as far as possible, provoked or induced by taking certain simple measures.  Unsought, spontaneous waking hallucinations, according to the result of Mr. Galton’s researches, though not nearly so common as dreams, are as much facts of sane mental experience.  Now every ghost or wraith is a hallucination.  You see your wife in the dining-room when she really is in the drawing-room; you see your late great-great-grandfather anywhere.  Neither person is really present.  The first appearance in popular language is a “wraith”; the second is a “ghost” in ordinary speech.  Both are hallucinations.

So far Mr. Galton would go, but mark what follows!  Everybody allows the existence of dreams, but comparatively few believe in dream stories of veracious dreams.  So every scientific man believes in hallucinations, {68} but few believe in veracious hallucinations.  A veracious hallucination is, for our purpose, one which communicates (as veracious dreams do) information not otherwise known, or, at least, not known to the knower to be known.  The communication of the knowledge may be done by audible words, with or without an actual apparition, or with an apparition, by words or gestures.  Again, if a hallucination of Jones’s presence tallies with a great crisis in Jones’s life, or with his death, the hallucination is so far veracious in that, at least, it does not seem meaningless.  Or if Jones’s appearance has some unwonted feature not known to the seer, but afterwards proved to be correct in fact, that is veracious.  Next, if several persons successively in the same place, or simultaneously, have a similar hallucination not to be accounted for physically, that is, if not a veracious, a curious hallucination.  Once more, if a hallucinatory figure is afterwards recognised in a living person previously unknown, or a portrait previously unseen, that (if the recognition be genuine) is a veracious hallucination.  The vulgar call it a wraith of the living, or a ghost of the dead.

Here follow two cases.  The first, The Family Coach, {69a} gave no verified intelligence, and would be styled a “subjective hallucination”.  The second contributed knowledge of facts not previously known to the witness, and so the vulgar would call it a ghost.  Both appearances were very rich and full of complicated detail.  Indeed, any ghost that wears clothes is a puzzle.  Nobody but savages thinks that clothes have ghosts, but Tom Sawyer conjectures that ghosts’ clothes “are made of ghost stuff”.

As a rule, not very much is seen of a ghost; he is “something of a shadowy being”.  Yet we very seldom hear of a ghost stark naked; that of Sergeant Davies, murdered in 1749, is one of three or four examples in civilised life. {69b}  Hence arises the old question, “How are we to account for the clothes of ghosts?” One obvious reply is that there is no ghost at all, only a hallucination.  We do not see people naked, as a rule, in our dreams; and hallucinations, being waking dreams, conform to the same rule.  If a ghost opens a door or lifts a curtain in our sight, that, too, is only part of the illusion.  The door did not open; the curtain was not lifted.  Nay, if the wrist or hand of the seer is burned or withered, as in a crowd of stories, the ghost’s hand did not produce the effect.  It was produced in the same way as when a hypnotised patient is told that “his hand is burned,” his fancy then begets real blisters, or so we are informed, truly or not.  The stigmata of St. Francis and others are explained in the same way. {70}  How ghosts pull bedclothes off and make objects fly about is another question: in any case the ghosts are not seen in the act.

Thus the clothes of ghosts, their properties, and their actions affecting physical objects, are not more difficult to explain than a naked ghost would be, they are all the “stuff that dreams are made of”.  But occasionally things are carried to a great pitch, as when a ghost drives off in a ghostly dogcart, with a ghostly horse, whip and harness.  Of this complicated kind we give two examples; the first reckons as a “subjective,” the second as a veracious hallucination.

THE OLD FAMILY COACH

A distinguished and accomplished country gentleman and politician, of scientific tastes, was riding in the New Forest, some twelve miles from the place where he was residing.  In a grassy glade he discovered that he did not very clearly know his way to a country town which he intended to visit.  At this moment, on the other side of some bushes a carriage drove along, and then came into clear view where there was a gap in the bushes.  Mr. Hyndford saw it perfectly distinctly; it was a slightly antiquated family carriage, the sides were in that imitation of wicker work on green panel which was once so common.  The coachman was a respectable family servant, he drove two horses: two old ladies were in the carriage, one of them wore a hat, the other a bonnet.  They passed, and then Mr. Hyndford, going through the gap in the bushes, rode after them to ask his way.  There was no carriage in sight, the avenue ended in a cul-de-sac of tangled brake, and there were no traces of wheels on the grass.  Mr. Hyndford rode back to his original point of view, and looked for any object which could suggest the illusion of one old-fashioned carriage, one coachman, two horses and two elderly ladies, one in a hat and one in a bonnet.  He looked in vain—and that is all!

Nobody in his senses would call this appearance a ghostly one.  The name, however, would be applied to the following tale of

RIDING HOME FROM MESS

In 1854, General Barter, C.B., was a subaltern in the 75th Regiment, and was doing duty at the hill station of Murree in the Punjaub.  He lived in a house built recently by a Lieutenant B., who died, as researches at the War Office prove, at Peshawur on 2nd January, 1854.  The house was on a spur of the hill, three or four hundred yards under the only road, with which it communicated by a “bridle path,” never used by horsemen.  That path ended in a precipice; a footpath led into the bridle path from Mr. Barter’s house.

One evening Mr. Barter had a visit from a Mr. and Mrs. Deane, who stayed till near eleven o’clock.  There was a full moon, and Mr. Barter walked to the bridle path with his friends, who climbed it to join the road.  He loitered with two dogs, smoking a cigar, and just as he turned to go home, he heard a horse’s hoofs coming down the bridle path.  At a bend of the path a tall hat came into view, then round the corner, the wearer of the hat, who rode a pony and was attended by two native grooms.  “At this time the two dogs came, and crouching at my side, gave low frightened whimpers.  The moon was at the full, a tropical moon, so bright that you could see to read a newspaper by its light, and I saw the party above me advance as plainly as if it were noon-day; they were above me some eight or ten feet on the bridle road. . . .  On the party came, . . . and now I had better describe them.  The rider was in full dinner dress, with white waistcoat and a tall chimney-pot hat, and he sat on a powerful hill pony (dark-brown, with black mane and tail) in a listless sort of way, the reins hanging loosely from both hands.”  Grooms led the pony and supported the rider.  Mr. Barter, knowing that there was no place they could go to but his own house, cried “Quon hai?” (who is it?), adding in English, “Hullo, what the devil do you want here?”  The group halted, the rider gathered up the reins with both hands, and turning, showed Mr. Barter the known features of the late Lieutenant B.

He was very pale, the face was a dead man’s face, he was stouter than when Mr. Barter knew him and he wore a dark Newgate fringe.

Mr. Barter dashed up the bank, the earth thrown up in making the bridle path crumbled under him, he fell, scrambled on, reached the bridle path where the group had stopped, and found nobody.  Mr. Barter ran up the path for a hundred yards, as nobody could go down it except over a precipice, and neither heard nor saw anything.  His dogs did not accompany him.

Next day Mr. Barter gently led his friend Deane to talk of Lieutenant B., who said that the lieutenant “grew very bloated before his death, and while on the sick list he allowed the fringe to grow in spite of all we could say to him, and I believe he was buried with it”.  Mr. Barter then asked where he got the pony, describing it minutely.

“He bought him at Peshawur, and killed him one day, riding in his reckless fashion down the hill to Trete.”

Mr. Barter and his wife often heard the horse’s hoofs later, though he doubts if any one but B. had ever ridden the bridle path.  His Hindoo bearer he found one day armed with a lattie, being determined to waylay the sound, which “passed him like a typhoon”. {74}  Here the appearance gave correct information unknown previously to General Barter, namely, that Lieutenant B. grew stout and wore a beard before his death, also that he had owned a brown pony, with black mane and tail.  Even granting that the ghosts of the pony and lieutenant were present (both being dead), we are not informed that the grooms were dead also.  The hallucination, on the theory of “mental telegraphy,” was telegraphed to General Barter’s mind from some one who had seen Lieutenant B. ride home from mess not very sober, or from the mind of the defunct lieutenant, or, perhaps, from that of the deceased pony.  The message also reached and alarmed General Barter’s dogs.

Something of the same kind may or may not explain Mr. Hyndford’s view of the family coach, which gave no traceable information.

The following story, in which an appearance of the dead conveyed information not known to the seer, and so deserving to be called veracious, is a little ghastly.

THE BRIGHT SCAR

In 1867, Miss G., aged eighteen, died suddenly of cholera in St. Louis.  In 1876 a brother, F. G., who was much attached to her, had done a good day’s business in St. Joseph.  He was sending in his orders to his employers (he is a commercial traveller) and was smoking a cigar, when he became conscious that some one was sitting on his left,