The Book of Dreams and Ghosts

“He did not put it in his book, but he told the same yarn, without the dogs, as having happened to himself. He saw the whole arm, and the hand was leprous.”

“Ugh!” said the Beach-comber.

“Next morning he was obliged to view the body of an old Maori, who had been murdered in his garden the night before. That old man’s hand was the hand he saw. I know a room in an old house in England where plucking off the bed-clothes goes on, every now and then, and has gone on as long as the present occupants have been there. But I only heard lately, and they only heard from me, that the same thing used to occur, in the same room and no other, in the last generation, when another family lived there.”

“Anybody see anything?”

“No, only footsteps are heard creeping up, before the twitches come off.”

“And what do the people do?”

“Nothing! We set a camera once to photograph the spook. He did not sit.”

“It’s rum!” said the Beach-comber. “But mind you, as to spooks, I don’t believe a word of it.” [137 - Cornhill Magazine, 1896.]

THE GHOST THAT BIT

The idiot Scotch laird in the story would not let the dentist put his fingers into his mouth, “for I’m feared ye’ll bite me”. The following anecdote proves that a ghost may entertain a better founded alarm on this score. A correspondent of Notes and Queries (3rd Sept., 1864) is responsible for the narrative, given “almost verbatim from the lips of the lady herself,” a person of tried veracity.

“Emma S-, one of seven children, was sleeping alone, with her face towards the west, at a large house near C-, in the Staffordshire moorlands. As she had given orders to her maid to call her at an early hour, she was not surprised at being awakened between three and four on a fine August morning in 1840 by a sharp tapping at her door, when in spite of a “thank you, I hear,” to the first and second raps, with the third came a rush of wind, which caused the curtains to be drawn up in the centre of the bed. She became annoyed, and sitting up called out, “Marie, what are you about?”

Instead, however, of her servant, she was astonished to see the face of an aunt by marriage peering above and between the curtains, and at the same moment – whether unconsciously she threw forward her arms, or whether they were drawn forward, as it were, in a vortex of air, she cannot be sure – one of her thumbs was sensibly pressed between the teeth of the apparition, though no mark afterwards remained on it. All this notwithstanding, she remained collected and unalarmed; but instantly arose, dressed, and went downstairs, where she found not a creature stirring. Her father, on coming down shortly afterwards, naturally asked what had made her rise so early; rallied her on the cause, and soon afterwards went on to his sister-in-law’s house, where he found that she had just unexpectedly died. Coming back again, and not noticing his daughter’s presence in the room, in consequence of her being behind a screen near the fire, he suddenly announced the event to his wife, as being of so remarkable a character that he could in no way account for it. As may be anticipated, Emma, overhearing this unlooked-for denouement of her dream, at once fell to the ground in a fainting condition.

On one of the thumbs of the corpse was found a mark as if it had been bitten in the death agony. [138 - This story should come under the head of “Common Deathbed Wraiths,” but, it is such an uncommon one!]

We have now followed the “ghostly” from its germs in dreams, and momentary hallucinations of eye or ear, up to the most prodigious narratives which popular invention has built on bases probably very slight. Where facts and experience, whether real or hallucinatory experience, end, where the mythopœic fancy comes in, readers may decide for themselves.

notes

1

Principles of Psychology, vol. ii., p. 115. By Professor William James, Harvard College, Macmillan’s, London, 1890. The physical processes believed to be involved, are described on pp. 123, 124 of the same work.

2

Op. cit., ii., 130.

3

Story received from Miss – ; confirmed on inquiry by Drumquaigh.

4

Phantasms of the Living, ii., 382.

5

To “send” a dream the old Egyptians wrote it out and made a cat swallow it!

6

See “Queen Mary’s Jewels” in chapter ii.

7

Narrated by Mrs. Herbert.

8

Story confirmed by Mr. A.

9

This child had a more curious experience. Her nurse was very ill, and of course did not sleep in the nursery. One morning the little girl said, “Macpherson is better, I saw her come in last night with a candle in her hand. She just stooped over me and then went to Tom” (a younger brother) “and kissed him in his sleep.” Macpherson had died in the night, and her attendants, of course, protested ignorance of her having left her deathbed.

10

Story received from Lady X. See another good case in Proceedings of the Psychical Society, vol. xi., 1895, p. 397. In this case, however, the finder was not nearer than forty rods to the person who lost a watch in long grass. He assisted in the search, however, and may have seen the watch unconsciously, in a moment of absence of mind. Many other cases in Proceedings of S.P.R.

11

Story received in a letter from the dreamer.

12

Augustine. In Library of the Fathers, XVII. Short Treatises, pp. 530-531.

13

St. Augustine, De Cura pro Mortuis.

14

The professor is not sure whether he spoke English or German.

15

From Some Account of the Conversion of the late William Hone, supplied by some friend of W. H. to compiler. Name not given.

16

What is now called “mental telegraphy” or “telepathy” is quite an old idea. Bacon calls it “sympathy” between two distant minds, sympathy so strong that one communicates with the other without using the recognised channels of the senses. Izaak Walton explains in the same way Dr. Donne’s vision, in Paris, of his wife and dead child. “If two lutes are strung to an exact harmony, and one is struck, the other sounds,” argues Walton. Two minds may be as harmoniously attuned and communicate each with each. Of course, in the case of the lutes there are actual vibrations, physical facts. But we know nothing of vibrations in the brain which can traverse space to another brain.

Many experiments have been made in consciously transferring thoughts or emotions from one mind to another. These are very liable to be vitiated by bad observation, collusion and other causes. Meanwhile, intercommunication between mind and mind without the aid of the recognised senses – a supposed process of “telepathy” – is a current explanation of the dreams in which knowledge is obtained that exists in the mind of another person, and of the delusion by virtue of which one person sees another who is perhaps dying, or in some other crisis, at a distance. The idea is popular. A poor Highland woman wrote to her son in Glasgow: “Don’t be thinking too much of us, or I shall be seeing you some evening in the byre”. This is a simple expression of the hypothesis of “telepathy” or “mental telegraphy”.

17

Perhaps among such papers as the Casket Letters, exhibited to the Commission at Westminster, and “tabled” before the Scotch Privy Council.