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

with one arm on the table.  It was his dead sister.  He sprang up to embrace her (for even on meeting a stranger whom we take for a dead friend, we never realise the impossibility in the half moment of surprise) but she was gone.  Mr. G. stood there, the ink wet on his pen, the cigar lighted in his hand, the name of his sister on his lips.  He had noted her expression, features, dress, the kindness of her eyes, the glow of the complexion, and what he had never seen before, a bright red scratch on the right side of her face.

Mr. G. took the next train home to St. Louis, and told the story to his parents.  His father was inclined to ridicule him, but his mother nearly fainted.  When she could control herself, she said that, unknown to any one, she had accidentally scratched the face of the dead, apparently with the pin of her brooch, while arranging something about the corpse.  She had obliterated the scratch with powder, and had kept the fact to herself.  “She told me she knew at least that I had seen my sister.”  A few weeks later Mrs. G. died. {75}

Here the information existed in one living mind, the mother’s, and if there is any “mental telegraphy,” may thence have been conveyed to Mr. F. G.

Another kind of cases which may be called veracious, occurs when the ghost seer, after seeing the ghost, recognises it in a portrait not previously beheld.  Of course, allowance must be made for fancy, and for conscious or unconscious hoaxing.  You see a spook in Castle Dangerous.  You then recognise the portrait in the hall, or elsewhere.  The temptation to recognise the spook rather more clearly than you really do, is considerable, just as one is tempted to recognise the features of the Stuarts in the royal family, of the parents in a baby, or in any similar case.

Nothing is more common in literary ghost stories than for somebody to see a spectre and afterwards recognise him or her in a portrait not before seen.  There is an early example in Sir Walter Scott’s Tapestried Chamber, which was told to him by Miss Anna Seward.  Another such tale is by Théophile Gautier.  In an essay on Illusions by Mr. James Sully, a case is given.  A lady (who corroborated the story to the present author) was vexed all night by a spectre in armour.  Next morning she saw, what she had not previously observed, a portrait of the spectre in the room.  Mr. Sully explains that she had seen the portrait unconsciously, and dreamed of it.  He adds the curious circumstance that other people have had the same experience in the same room, which his explanation does not cover.  The following story is published by the Society for Psychical Research, attested by the seer and her husband, whose real names are known, but not published. {76}

THE VISION AND THE PORTRAIT

Mrs. M. writes (December 15, 1891) that before her vision she had heard nothing about hauntings in the house occupied by herself and her husband, and nothing about the family sorrows of her predecessors there.

“One night, on retiring to my bedroom about 11 o’clock, I thought I heard a peculiar moaning sound, and some one sobbing as if in great distress of mind.  I listened very attentively, and still it continued; so I raised the gas in my bedroom, and then went to the window on the landing, drew the blind aside, and there on the grass was a very beautiful young girl in a kneeling posture, before a soldier in a general’s uniform, sobbing and clasping her hands together, entreating for pardon, but alas! he only waved her away from him.  So much did I feel for the girl that I ran down the staircase to the door opening upon the lawn, and begged her to come in and tell me her sorrow.  The figures then disappeared gradually, as in a dissolving view.  Not in the least nervous did I feel then; went again to my bedroom, took a sheet of writing-paper, and wrote down what I had seen.” {77}

Mrs. M., whose husband was absent, began to feel nervous, and went to another lady’s room.

She later heard of an old disgrace to the youngest daughter of the proud family, her predecessors in the house.  The poor girl tried in vain to win forgiveness, especially from a near relative, a soldier, Sir X. Y.

“So vivid was my remembrance of the features of the soldier, that some months after the occurrence [of the vision] when I called with my husband at a house where there was a portrait of him, I stepped before it and said, ‘Why, look! there is the General!’  And sure enough it was.”

Mrs. M. had not heard that the portrait was in the room where she saw it.  Mr. M. writes that he took her to the house where he knew it to be without telling her of its existence.  Mrs. M. turned pale when she saw it.  Mr. M. knew the sad old story, but had kept it to himself.  The family in which the disgrace occurred, in 1847 or 1848, were his relations. {78}

This vision was a veracious hallucination; it gave intelligence not otherwise known to Mrs. M., and capable of confirmation, therefore the appearances would be called “ghosts”.  The majority of people do not believe in the truth of any such stories of veracious hallucinations, just as they do not believe in veracious dreams.  Mr. Galton, out of all his packets of reports of hallucinations, does not even allude to a veracious example, whether he has records of such a thing or not.  Such reports, however, are ghost stories, “which we now proceed,” or continue, “to narrate”.  The reader will do well to remember that while everything ghostly, and not to be explained by known physical facts, is in the view of science a hallucination, every hallucination is not a ghost for the purposes of story-telling.  The hallucination must, for story-telling purposes, be veracious.

Following our usual method, we naturally begin with the anecdotes least trying to the judicial faculties, and most capable of an ordinary explanation.  Perhaps of all the senses, the sense of touch, though in some ways the surest, is in others the most easily deceived.  Some people who cannot call up a clear mental image of things seen, say a saltcellar, can readily call up a mental revival of the feeling of touching salt.  Again, a slight accidental throb, or leap of a sinew or vein, may feel so like a touch that we turn round to see who touched us.  These familiar facts go far to make the following tale more or less conceivable.

THE RESTRAINING HAND

“About twenty years ago,” writes Mrs. Elliot, “I received some letters by post, one of which contained £15 in bank notes.  After reading the letters I went into the kitchen with them in my hands.  I was alone at the time. . . .  Having done with the letters, I made an effort to throw them into the fire, when I distinctly felt my hand arrested in the act.  It was as though another hand were gently laid upon my own, pressing it back.  Much surprised, I looked at my hand and then saw it contained, not the letters I had intended to destroy, but the bank notes, and that the letters were in the other hand.  I was so surprised that I called out, ‘Who’s here?’” {80a}

Nobody will call this “the touch of a vanished hand”.  Part of Mrs. Elliot’s mind knew what she was about, and started an unreal but veracious feeling to warn her.  We shall come to plenty of Hands not so readily disposed of.

Next to touch, the sense most apt to be deceived is hearing.  Every one who has listened anxiously for an approaching carriage, has often heard it come before it came.  In the summer of 1896 the writer, with a lady and another companion, were standing on the veranda at the back of a house in Dumfriesshire, waiting for a cab to take one of them to the station.  They heard a cab arrive and draw up, went round to the front of the house, saw the servant open the door and bring out the luggage, but wheeled vehicle there was none in sound or sight.  Yet all four persons had heard it, probably by dint of expectation.

To hear articulate voices where there are none is extremely common in madness, {80b} but not very rare, as Mr. Galton shows, among the sane.  When the voices are veracious, give unknown information, they are in the same case as truthful dreams.  I offer a few from the experience, reported to me by himself, of a man of learning whom I shall call a Benedictine monk, though that is not his real position in life.

THE BENEDICTINE’S VOICES

My friend, as a lad, was in a strait between the choice of two professions.  He prayed for enlightenment, and soon afterwards heard an internal voice, advising a certain course.  “Did you act on it?” I asked.

“No; I didn’t.  I considered that in my circumstances it did not demand attention.”

Later, when a man grown, he was in his study merely idling over some books on the table, when he heard a loud voice from a corner of the room assert that a public event of great importance would occur at a given date.  It did occur.  About the same time, being abroad, he was in great anxiety as to a matter involving only himself.  Of this he never spoke to any one.  On his return to England his mother said, “You were very wretched about so and so”.

“How on earth did you know?”

“I heard ---’s voice telling me.”

Now --- had died years before, in childhood.

In these cases the Benedictine’s own conjecture and his mother’s affection probably divined facts, which did not present themselves as thoughts in the ordinary way, but took the form of unreal voices.

There are many examples, as of the girl in her bath who heard a voice say “Open the door” four times, did so, then fainted, and only escaped drowning by ringing the bell just before she swooned.

Of course she might not have swooned if she had not been alarmed by hearing the voices.  These tales are dull enough, and many voices, like Dr. Johnson’s mother’s, when he heard her call his name, she being hundreds of miles away, lead to nothing and are not veracious.  When they are veracious, as in the case of dreams, it may be by sheer accident.

In a similar class are “warnings” conveyed by the eye, not by the ear.  The Maoris of New Zealand believe that if one sees a body lying across a path or oneself on the opposite side of a river, it is wiser to try another path and a different ford.

THE MAN AT THE LIFT

In the same way, in August, 1890, a lady in a Boston hotel in the dusk rang for the lift, walked along the corridor and looked out of a window, started to run to the door of the lift, saw a man in front of it, stopped, and when the lighted lift came up, found that the door was wide open and that, had she run on as she intended, she would have fallen down the well.  Here part of her mind may have known that the door was open, and started a ghost (for there was no real man there) to stop her.  Pity that these things do not occur more frequently.  They do—in New Zealand. {82}

These are a few examples of useful veracious waking dreams.  The sort of which we hear most are “wraiths”.  A, when awake, meets B,