to bring their tour to a sudden end, and to press on as rapidly as the
bad roads would permit to some Norwegian port, where they hoped to find
a ship that would carry them back to Scotland. Accordingly, leaving
Goeteborg early in the morning of December 19, they journeyed steadily
until after midnight, when they came to an inn that seemed to promise
comfortable sleeping accommodations. Stuart lost no time in going to
bed; but Brougham decided to wait until a hot bath could be prepared
for him.
Plunging into it, and forgetful of everything save the warmth that was
doubly welcome after the cold of the long drive, he suddenly became
aware that he was not alone in the room. No door had opened, not a
footstep had been heard; but in the light of the flickering candles he
plainly saw the figure of a man seated in the chair on which he had
carelessly thrown his clothes. And this figure he instantly recognized
as that of his early playmate, the forgotten chum who, as he well knew,
had years before gone from the land of the heather to the land of the
blazing sun. Yet here he sat, in the quaintly furnished sleeping chamber
of a Swedish roadside inn, gazing composedly at his astounded friend. At
once there flashed into Brougham's mind remembrance of the death pact,
and he leaped from the bath, only to lose all consciousness and fall
headlong to the floor. When he revived, the apparition had disappeared.
There was little sleep for the hard headed Scotchman that night. The
vision had been too definite, the shock too intense. But, dressing, he
sat down and strove to debate the matter in the light of cold reason.
He must, he argued, have dozed off in the bath and experienced a strange
dream. To be sure, he had not been thinking of his old comrade, and for
years had had no communication with him. Nor had anything taken place
during the tour to bring to memory either him or any member of his
family, or to turn Brougham's mind to thoughts of India. Still, he found
it impossible to believe that he had seen a ghost. At most, he
reiterated to himself, it could have been nothing more than an
exceptionally clear cut dream. And to this opinion he stubbornly
adhered, notwithstanding the receipt, soon after his return to
Edinburgh, of a letter from India announcing the death of the friend who
had been so mysteriously recalled to his recollection, and giving
December 19 as the date of death. More than sixty years later we find
him, in his autobiography commenting on the experience anew, granting
that it was a strange coincidence but refusing to admit that it was
anything more than the coincidence of a dream.
It was in his autobiography, by the way, that he first referred to the
confirmatory letter. This fact, taken in connection with his reputation
for holding the truth in light esteem and with several vague and
puzzling statements contained in the detailed account of the experience
itself as set forth in his journal of the Scandinavian tour, has led
some critics to make the suggestion that his narrative partakes of the
nature of fiction rather than of a sober recital of facts. Against this,
however, must be set Brougham's complete and invincible repugnance to
accept at face value anything bordering on the supernatural. He took no
pleasure in the thought that he had possibly been the recipient of a
visit from a departed spirit. On the contrary, it annoyed him, and he
sought earnestly to find a natural explanation for an occurrence which
remained unique throughout his long life. No one would have been readier
to point out the futility of the apparition if the absent friend had
really continued hale and hearty after December 19. And it is therefore
reasonable to assume that had he wished to falsify at all, he would have
given an altogether different sequel to the story of his vision or
dream, as he preferred to call it, though the evidence which he himself
furnishes shows that he was not asleep.
The question still remains, of course, whether he was justified in
dismissing it as a sheer chance coincidence. If it stood by itself, it
would obviously be permissible to accept this explanation as all
sufficient. But the fact is that it is only one of many similar
instances. This was strikingly brought out only a few years ago through
a far reaching inquiry, a "census of hallucinations," instituted by a
special committee of the Society for Psychical Research.
Enlisting the services of some four hundred "collectors," the committee
instructed each of these to address to twenty-five adults, selected at
random, the query, "Have you ever, when believing yourself to be
completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a
living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which
impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external
physical cause?" In all, seventeen thousand people were thus questioned,
and almost ten per cent. of the answers received proved to be in the
affirmative. More than this, it appeared that out of a total of three
hundred and fifty recognized apparitions of living persons, no fewer
than sixty-five were "death coincidences," in which the hallucinatory
experience occurred within from one hour to twelve hours after the death
of the person seen.
Sifting these death coincidences carefully, the committee for various
reasons rejected more than half, and at the same time raised the total
of recognized apparitions of living persons from three hundred and fifty
to thirteen hundred. This was done in order to make generous allowance
for the number of such apparitions forgotten by those to whom the
question had been put, investigation showing that the great majority of
hallucinations reported were given as of comparatively recent
occurrence, and that there was a rapid decrease as the years of
occurrence became more remote.
As a final result, therefore, the committee found about thirty death
coincidences out of thirteen hundred cases, or a proportion of one in
forty-three. Computing from the average annual death-rate for England
and Wales, it was calculated that the probability that any one person
would die on a given day was about one in nineteen thousand; in other
words, out of every nineteen thousand apparitions of living persons,
there should occur, by chance alone, one death coincidence. The actual
proportion, however, as established by the inquiry, was equivalent to
about four hundred and forty in nineteen thousand, or four hundred and
forty times the most probable number, and this when the apparitions
reported were considered merely collectively as having been seen at any
time within twelve hours after death. Not a few, as a matter of fact,
were reported as having been seen within one hour after death, and for
these the improbability of occurrence by chance alone was manifestly
twelve times four hundred and forty. In view of these considerations the
committee felt warranted in declaring that "between deaths and
apparitions of dying persons a connection exists which is not due to
chance."[J]
Had Lord Brougham lived to study the statistics of this remarkable
census of hallucinations, he might have formed a higher opinion of his
ghost; but he would also have been in a better position to deny its
supernatural attributes. For, if the Society for Psychical Research has
made it impossible to doubt the existence of such ghosts as that which
he beheld during his travels in Sweden, it has likewise made discoveries
which afford a really substantial reason for asserting that they no more
hail from the world beyond than do ghosts that are unmistakably the
creations of fancy or fraud. This results from the society's
investigations of thought transference or telepathy, to use the term now
commonly employed.
At an early stage of the experiments undertaken to determine the
possibility of transmitting thought from mind to mind without the
intervention of any known means of communication, it was found that when
success attended the efforts of the experimenters the telepathic message
was frequently received not in the form of pure thought but as a
hallucinatory image; and what is still more important in the present
connection, it was further found possible so to produce not merely
images of cards, flowers, books, and other inanimate objects, but also
images of living persons.
Thus, as chronicled with corroborative evidence in the society's
"Proceedings," an English clergyman named Godfrey telepathically caused
a distant friend to see an apparition of him one night; the same result
was achieved by a Mr. Sinclair of New Jersey, who, during a visit to New
York, succeeded in projecting a phantasm of himself which was clearly
seen by his wife in Lakewood; and similarly a Mr. Kirk, while seated in
his London office, paid a telepathic visit to the home of a young woman,
who saw him as distinctly as though he had gone there in the flesh. In
all of these, as in other cases recorded by the society, the persons to
whom the apparitions were vouchsafed had no idea that any experiment of
the kind was being attempted.
Indeed, there is on record an apparently well authenticated instance of
the experimental production of an apparition not of the living but of
the dead. This occurred in Germany many years ago, when a certain Herr
Wesermann undertook to "will" a military friend into dreaming of a woman
who had long been dead. The sequel may be related in Herr Wesermann's
own words:
"A lady, who had been dead five years, was to appear to Lieutenant N. in
a dream at 10.30 P.M., and incite him to good deeds. At half-past ten,
contrary to expectation, Herr N. had not gone to bed but was discussing
the French campaign with his friend Lieutenant S. in the ante-room.
Suddenly the door of the room opened, the lady entered dressed in white,
with a black kerchief and uncovered head, greeted S. with her hand three
times in a friendly manner; then turned to N., nodded to him, and
returned again through the doorway.
"As this story, related to me by Lieutenant N., seemed to be too
remarkable from a psychological point of view for the truth of it not to
be duly established, I wrote to Lieutenant S., who was living six miles
away, and asked him to give me his account of it. He sent me the
following reply:
"'On the thirteenth of March, 1817, Herr N. came to pay me a visit at my
lodgings about a league from A----. He stayed the night with me. After
supper, and when we were both undressed, I was sitting on my bed and
Herr N. was standing by the door of the next room on the point also of
going to bed. This was about half-past ten. We were speaking partly
about indifferent subjects and partly about the events of the French
campaign. Suddenly the door of the kitchen opened without a sound, and
a lady entered, very pale, taller than Herr N., about five feet four
inches in height, strong and broad of figure, dressed in white, but with
a large black kerchief which reached to below the waist.
"'She entered with bare head, greeted me with the hand three times in
complimentary fashion, turned round to the left toward Herr N., and
waved her hand to him three times; after which the figure quietly, and
again without any creaking of the door, went out. We followed at once in
order to discover whether there were any deception, but found nothing.
The strangest thing was this, that our night-watch of two men whom I had
shortly found on the watch were now asleep, though at my first call they
were on the alert; and that the door of the room, which always opens
with a good deal of noise, did not make the slightest sound when opened
by the figure.'"[K]
It is also significant that, as was made evident by the census of
hallucinations, by far the larger number of apparitions reported are
those of persons still alive and well. In these cases, nobody being
dead, it is absurd[L] to raise the cry of spirits, and the only tenable
hypothesis is that, through one of the several causes which seem to
quicken telepathic action, a spontaneous telepathic hallucination has
been produced. Now, the experiments conducted by the society and by
independent investigators have shown that telepathic messages often lie
dormant for hours beneath the threshold of the receiver's consciousness,
being consciously apprehended only when certain favoring conditions
arise; as, for example, when the receiver has fallen asleep, or into a
state of reverie, or when, tired out after a long day's work, he has
utterly relaxed mentally. This is technically known as "deferred
percipience," and, considered in conjunction with the discoveries
mentioned, it is amply sufficient to dislodge from the realm of the
supernatural the ghost seen by Lord Brougham, and every ghost that is
not a mere imposter.
In the Brougham case the exciting cause of the hallucination seems to
have been the death pact. As he lay dying in India, the mind of the
whilom schoolboy would, consciously or unconsciously, revert to that
agreement with the friend of his youth, and thence would arise the
desire to let him know that the plighted word had not been forgotten.
Across the vast intervening space, by what mechanism we as yet do not
know, the message would flash instantaneously, to remain unapprehended,
perhaps for hours after the death of the sender, until, in the quiet of
the Swedish inn and resting from the fatigues of the journey, Brougham's
mental faculties passed momentarily into the condition necessary for its
objective realization.
Then, precisely as in experimental telepathy the receiver sees a
hallucinatory image of the trinket or the book; with a suddenness and
vividness that could not fail to shock him, the message would find
expression by the creation before Brougham's startled eyes of a
hallucinatory image of the friend who, as he was to learn later, had
died that same day thousands of miles from Sweden. Knowing nothing of
the possibilities of the human mind, as revealed, if only faintly, by
the labors of a later generation, it was inevitable he should believe he
had no alternative between dismissing the experience as a peculiar dream
or admitting that in very truth he had looked upon a ghost.
FOOTNOTES:
[J] The committee's report will be found in the tenth volume of the
"Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research."
[K] Translation from the "Journal of the Society for Psychical
Research," Vol. IV. p. 218.
[L] I had originally written "impossible," but a critic of my "Riddle of
Personality," in which this point was taken up, has convinced me that
"absurd" is the better word. The critic in question writes: "what
evidence has the author that an apparition of the living is not a
spirit? Why may not the spirit of the living person have left his body
and appeared to his friend? Such is the view of many people, and it
coincides with certain phenomena in dreams." But, to raise only one
objection: If the apparition appear at a moment when the person seen is
actively engaged elsewhere--it may be in writing a book, or preaching a
sermon--what is it that is seen, and what is it that is writing or
preaching? Is the "spirit" present in both places at the same time--in
the shadowy apparition, and in the living, breathing, busily-occupied
human entity? Assuredly, if it be not "impossible" to raise the cry of
spirits in such a case, it would at all events seem "absurd" to do so.
VII
THE SEERESS OF PREVORST
Modern spiritism, as every student of that fascinating if elusive
subject is aware, dates from the closing years of the first half of the
nineteenth century. But the celebrated Fox sisters, whose revelations at
that time served to crystallize into an organized religious system the
idea of the possibility of communication between this world and the
world beyond, were by no means the first of spiritistic mediums. Long
before their day there were those who professed to have cognizance of
things unseen and to act as intermediaries between the living and the
dead; and although lost to sight amid the throng of latter-day claimants
to similar powers, the achievements of some of these early adventurers
into the unknown have not been surpassed by the best performances of the
Fox girls and their long line of successors.
Especially is this true of the mediumship of a young German woman,
Frederica Hauffe, who in the course of her short, pitiful, and tragic
career is credited with having displayed more varied and picturesque
supernatural gifts than the most renowned wonder-worker of to-day. Like
many modern mediums she was of humble origin, her birthplace being a
forester's hut in the Wuertemberg mountain village of Prevorst; and
here, among wood-cutters and charcoal-burners, she passed the first
years of her life. Even while still a child she seems to have attracted
wide-spread attention on account of certain peculiarities of temperament
and conduct. It was noticed that though naturally gay and playful she
occasionally assumed a strangely intent and serious manner; that in her
happiest moments she was subject to unaccountable fits of shuddering and
shivering; and that she seemed keenly alive not merely to the sights and
sounds of every-day life but to influences unfelt by those about her.
This last trait received a sudden and unexpected development when, at
the age of twelve or thirteen, she was sent to the neighboring town of
Loewenstein to be educated under the care of her grand-parents, a worthy
couple named Schmidgall.
Grandfather Schmidgall was an exceedingly superstitious old man, with a
singular fondness for visiting solitary and gloomy places, particularly
churchyards; and he soon began to take the little girl with him on such
strolls. But he discovered, much to his amazement, that though she
listened with avidity to the tales he told her of the romantic and
mysterious events that had occurred within the somber ruins with which
the countryside was liberally endowed, she was reluctant to explore
those ruins or wander among the graves where he delighted to resort. At
first he was inclined to ascribe her reluctance to weak and sentimental
timidity, but he speedily found reason to adopt an altogether different
view. He noticed that whenever he took her to graveyards or to churches
in which there were graves, her frail form became greatly agitated, and
at times she seemed rooted to the ground; and that there were certain
places, especially an old kitchen in a nearby castle, which he could not
persuade her to enter, and the mere sight of which caused her to quake
and tremble. "The child," he told his wife, "feels the presence of the
dead, and, mark you, she will end by seeing the dead."
He was, therefore, more alarmed than surprised when one midnight, long
after he had fancied her in bed and asleep, she ran to his room and
informed him that she had just beheld in the hall a tall, dark figure
which, sighing heavily, passed her and disappeared in the vestibule.
With awe, not unmixed with satisfaction, Schmidgall remembered that he
had once seen the self-same apparition; but he prudently endeavored to
convince her that she had been dreaming and sent her back to her room,
which, thenceforward, he never allowed her to leave at night.
In this way Frederica Hauffe's mediumship began. But several years were
to pass before she saw another ghost or gave evidence of possessing
supernormal powers other than by occasional dreams of a prophetic and
revelatory nature. In the meanwhile she rejoined her parents and moved
with them from Prevorst to Oberstenfeld, where, in her nineteenth year,
she was married. It was distinctly a marriage of convenience, arranged
without regard to her wishes, and the moment the engagement was
announced she secluded herself from her friends and passed her days and
nights in weeping. For weeks together she went without sleep, ate
scarcely anything, and became thin, pale, and feeble. It was rumored
that she had set her affections in another quarter: but her relatives
angrily denied this and asserted that once married she would soon become
herself again.
They were mistaken. From her wedding day, which she celebrated by
attending the funeral of a venerable clergyman to whom she had been
warmly attached, her health broke rapidly. One morning she awoke in a
high fever that lasted a fortnight and was followed by convulsive
spasms, during which she beheld at the bedside the image of her
grandmother Schmidgall, who, it subsequently developed, was at that
moment dying in distant Loewenstein. The spasms continuing, despite the
application of the customary rude remedies of the time, it was decided
to send for a physician with some knowledge of mesmerism, which was then
becoming popular in Germany. To the astonishment of those who thronged
the sick room, the first touch of his hand on her forehead brought
relief. The convulsions ceased, she became calm, and presently she fell
asleep. But on awaking she was attacked as before, and try as he might
the physician could not effect a permanent cure. To all his "passes" she
responded with gratifying promptitude, only to suffer a relapse the
moment she was released from the mesmeric influence.
At this juncture aid was received from a most extraordinary source,
according to the story Frederica told her wondering friends. With benign
visage and extended hand, the spirit of her grandmother appeared to her
for seven successive nights, mesmerized her, and taught her how to
mesmerize herself. The results of this visitation, if not altogether
fortunate, were at least to some extent curative. There were periods
when she was able not merely to leave her bed but to attend to household
duties and indulge in long walks and drives. But it was painfully
apparent that she was still in a precarious condition.
From her infancy she had always been powerfully affected by the touch of
different metals, and now this phenomenon was intensified a
thousand-fold. The placing of a magnet on her forehead caused her
features to be contorted as though by a stroke of paralysis; contact
with glass and sand made her cataleptic. Once she was found seated on a
sandstone bench, unable to move hand or foot. About this time also she
acquired the faculty of crystal-gazing; that is to say, by looking into
a bowl of water she could correctly describe scenes transpiring at a
distance. More than this, she now declared that behind the persons in
whose company she was she perceived ghostly forms, some of which she
recognized as dead acquaintances.
Unlike her grandmother, these new visitants from the unknown world did
not provide her with the means of regaining her lost health. On the
contrary, from the time they first put in their appearance she grew far
worse, suffering not so much from convulsive attacks as from an
increasing lassitude. She complained that eating was a great tax on her
strength, and that rising and walking were out of the question. Unable
to comprehend this new turn of affairs, her attendants lost all
patience, declared that if she had made up her mind to die she might as
well do so as at once, and tried to force her to leave her bed. Finally
her parents intervened, and at their request she was brought back to
Oberstenfeld.
Here she found an altogether congenial environment, and for a while
showed marked improvement. Here too, and in a most sensational way, her
mediumship blossomed into full fruition. She had been home for only a
short time when the family began to be disturbed by mysterious noises
for which they could find no cause. A sound like the ringing of glasses
was frequently heard, as were footsteps and knockings on the walls. Her
father, in particular, asserted that sometimes he felt a strange
pressure on his shoulder or his foot. The impression grew that the
house, which was part of the ancient, picturesque, and none too well
preserved cathedral of Oberstenfeld, was haunted by the spirits of its
former occupants.