common, Frederica, her sister, and a maid servant saw a lighted candle,
apparently of its own volition, move up and down the table on which it
was burning. The sister and the servant saw nothing more; but Frederica
the next instant beheld a thin, grayish cloud, which presently resolved
into the form of a man, about fifty years old, attired in the costume of
a medieval knight. Approaching, this strange apparition gazed
steadfastly at her, and in a low but clear tone urged her to rise and
follow it, saying that she alone could loosen its bonds. Overcome with
terror, she cried out that she would not follow, then ran across the
room and hid herself in the bed where her sister and the servant lay
panic-stricken. That night she saw no more of the apparition: but the
maid, whom they sent to sleep in the bed she had so hurriedly vacated,
declared that the coverings were forcibly drawn off her by an unseen
hand.
The next night the apparition appeared to Frederica again, and to her
alone. This time it seemed not sorrowful but angry, and threatened that
if she did not rise and follow she would be hurled out of the window. At
her bold retort, "In the name of Jesus, do it!" the apparition vanished,
to return a few nights later, and after that to show itself to her by
day as well as by night.
It now informed her that it was the ghost of a nobleman named Weiler,
who had slain his brother and for that crime was condemned to wander
ceaselessly until it recovered a certain piece of paper hidden in a
vault under the cathedral. On hearing this, she solemnly assured it that
by prayer alone could its sins be forgiven and pardon obtained, and
thereupon she set herself to teach it to pray. Ultimately, with a most
joyous countenance, the ghost told her that she had indeed led it to its
Redeemer and won its release; and at the same time seven tiny
spirits--the spirits of the children it had had on earth--appeared in a
circle about it and sang melodiously. Nor did they leave her until the
protecting apparition of her grandmother interrupted their thanksgivings
and bade them be gone.
Whether or no the happy ghost notified others in kindred plight of the
success that had attended her efforts, it is certain that, if the
contemporary records are to be accepted, the few short years of life
remaining to her were largely occupied in ministering to the wants of
distressed spirits. Phantom monks, nobles, peasants, pressed upon her
with terrible tales of misdeeds unatoned, and begged her to instruct
them in the prayers which were essential to salvation. There was one
specially importunate group, the apparitions of a young man, a young
woman, and a new-born child wrapped in ghostly rags, which gave her no
peace for months. The child, they said, was theirs and had been murdered
by them, and the young woman in her turn had been murdered by the young
man. Naturally, they were in an unhappy frame of mind, and until she was
able to send them on their way rejoicing their conduct and language were
so extravagant that they appalled her more than did any other of the
numerous seekers for grace and rest.
The dead were not the only ones to whom she ministered. Side by side
with the gift of ghost-seeing and ghost-conversing, and with the no less
remarkable gift of speaking in an unknown tongue and of setting forth
the mysteries of the hereafter, she developed the peculiar faculty of
peering into the innermost being of spirits still in the flesh,
detecting the obscure causes of disease, and prescribing remedies.
Strange to say, her own health remained poor, and gradually she became
so feeble that from day to day her death seemed imminent. But her
parents were resolved to do all they could for her, and at last
bethought themselves of placing her in the hands of the much talked of
physician, Justinus Kerner, who lived in the pleasant valley town of
Weinsberg and was said to be an adept in every branch of the healing
art, notably in the mesmerism which alone appeared to benefit her. To
Kerner, therefore, she was sent; and it is not difficult to imagine the
delight with which she exchanged the gloomy mountain forests for the
verdant meadows and fragrant vineyards of Weinsberg.
Kerner, who is better known to the present generation as mystic and poet
than as physician, was justly accounted one of the celebrities of the
day. Eccentric and visionary, he was yet a man of solid learning and an
intense patriot. It was owing to him, as his biographers fondly recall,
that Weinsberg's most glorious monument, the well named Weibertrube, was
not suffered to fall into utter neglect, but was instead restored to
remind all Germans of that distant day, in the long gone twelfth
century, when the women of Weinsberg, securing from the conqueror the
promise that their lives would be spared, and that they might take with
them from the doomed city their most precious belongings, staggered
forth under the burden not of jewels and treasure but of their husbands,
whom they carried in their arms or on their backs. Thus was a massacre
averted, and thus did the name of "Woman's Faithfulness" attach itself
to the castle in the shadow of which Kerner spent his days. But at the
time of which we write neither the castle nor poetry held first place in
his thoughts; instead, he was absorbed in the practice of his
profession. And so, with the ardor of the enthusiast and the sympathy of
the true physician, he welcomed to Weinsberg the sufferer of whom he had
heard much and of whom he was to become both doctor and biographer.[M]
It was in November, 1826, that he first met her. She was then
twenty-five, and thus had been for six years in a state of almost
constant ill health. Her very appearance moved him profoundly. Her
fragile body, he relates in the graphic word picture he drew, enveloped
her spirit but as a gauzy veil. She was extremely small, with Oriental
features and dark-lashed eyes that were at once penetrating and
"prophetic." When she spoke his conviction deepened that he was looking
on one who belonged more to the world of the dead than to the world of
the living; and he speedily became persuaded that she actually did, as
she claimed, commune with the dead.
Less than a month after her arrival at Weinsberg, and being in the
trance condition that was now frequent with her, she announced to him
that she had been visited by a ghost, which insisted on showing her a
sheet of paper covered with figures and begged her to give it to his
wife, who was still alive and would understand its significance and the
duty devolving upon her of making restitution to the man he had wronged
in life.
Kerner was thunderstruck at recognizing from her description a Weinsberg
lawyer who had been dead for some years and was thought to have
defrauded a client out of a large sum of money. Eagerly he plied
Frederica with questions, among other things asking her to endeavor to
locate the paper of which the ghost spoke.
"I see it," said she, dreamily. "It lies in a building which is sixty
paces from my bed. In this I see a large and a smaller room. In the
latter sits a tall gentleman, who is working at a table. Now he goes
out, and now he returns. Beyond these rooms there is one still larger,
in which are some chests and a long table. On the table is a wooden
thing--I cannot name it--and on this lie three heaps of paper; and in
the center one, about the middle of the heap, lies the sheet which so
torments him."
Knowing that this was an exact account of the office of the local
bailiff, Kerner hastened to that functionary with the astonishing news,
and was still more astonished when the bailiff told him that he had been
occupied precisely as she said. Together they searched among the papers
on the table; but could find none in the lawyer's handwriting.
Frederica, however, was insistent, adding that one corner of the paper
in question was turned down and that it was enclosed in a stout brown
envelope. A second search proved that she was right, and on opening the
paper it was found to contain not only figures but an explicit reference
to a private account book of which the lawyer's widow had denied all
knowledge. Still more striking was the fact, according to Kerner's
narrative, that when the bailiff, as a test, placed the paper in a
certain position on his desk and went to Frederica, pretending that he
had it with him, she correctly informed him where it was and read it off
to him word by word.
Although the sequel was rather unsatisfactory, inasmuch as the widow
persisted in asserting that she knew nothing of a private account book
and refused to yield a penny to the injured client, Kerner was so
impressed by this exhibition of supernatural power that, in order to
study his patient more closely, he had her removed from her lodgings to
his own house. Thither also, as soon as he learned that their presence
seemed to increase her susceptibility to the occult influences by which
she was surrounded, he brought her sister and the maid servant of the
dancing candle episode.
Then ensued greater marvels than had ever bewitched the family at
Oberstenfeld. Invisible hands threw articles of furniture at the
enthusiastic doctor and his friends; ghostly fingers sprinkled lime and
gravel on the flooring of his halls and rooms; spirit knuckles beat
lively tattoos on walls, tables, chairs, and bedsteads. And all the
while ghosts with criminal pasts flocked in and out, seeking consolation
and advice. Only once or twice, however, did the physician himself see
anything even remotely resembling a ghost. On one occasion a cloudy
shape floated past his window; and on another he saw at Frederica's
bedside a pillar of vapor, which she afterward told him was the specter
of a tall old man who had visited her twice before.
But if he neither saw the ghosts nor heard them speak, it was
sufficiently demonstrated to him that they were really in evidence. The
knocking, furniture throwing, and gravel sprinkling were the least of
the wonders of which it was permitted him to be a witness. Once, when
Frederica was taking an afternoon nap, a spirit that was evidently
solicitous for her comfort drew off her boots, and in his presence
carried them across the room to where her sister was standing by a
window. Again at midnight, after a preliminary knocking on the walls, he
observed another spirit, or possibly the same, open a book she had been
reading which was lying on her bed.
Most marvelous of all, when her father died she herself enacted the role
of ghost, the news of his death being conveyed to her supernaturally and
her cry of anguish being supernaturally conveyed back to the room where
his corpse lay, in Oberstenfeld, and where it was distinctly heard by
the physician who had attended him in his last moments. After this
crowning piece of testimony the good Kerner felt that no doubt of her
unheard of powers could remain in the most skeptical mind.
Judge, then, of his dismay and grief when he saw her visibly fading
away, daily growing more ethereal of form and feature, more weak in body
and spirit. It was his belief that the ghosts were robbing her of her
vitality, and earnestly but vainly he strove to banish them. She herself
declared, with a tone of indescribable relief, that she knew the end was
near, and that she welcomed it, as she longed to attain the quiet of the
grave with her father and Grandfather and Grandmother Schmidgall. When
Kerner sought to cheer her by the assurance that she yet had many years
to live, she silenced him with the tale of a gruesome vision. Three
times, she said, there had appeared to her at dead of night a female
figure, wrapped in black and standing beside an open and empty coffin,
to which it beckoned her. But before she died she wished to see again
the mountains of her childhood; and to the mountains Kerner carried her.
There, on August 5, 1829, peacefully and happily, to the singing of
hymns and the sobbing utterance of prayers, her soul took its flight.
But, unlike Kerner, who hastened back to Weinsberg to write the
biography of this "delicate flower who lived upon sunbeams," we must
shake off the spell of her strange personality and ask seriously what
manner of mortal she was. This inquiry is the more imperative since the
doings of the tambourine players and automatic writers, of whom so much
is made in certain quarters to-day, pale into insignificance beside the
story of her remarkable career.
Now, in point of fact, the evidence bearing out the claim that she saw
and talked with the dead is practically confined to the account written
by the mourning Kerner, whom no one would for a moment call an
unprejudiced witness. Already deeply immersed in the study of the
marvelous, his mind absorbed in the weird phenomena of the recently
discovered science of animal magnetism, she came to him both as a
patient and as a living embodiment of the mysteries that held for him a
boundless fascination, and once he found reason to believe in her
alleged supernormal powers, there was nothing too fantastic or
extravagant to which he would not give ready credence and assent.
His lengthy record of "facts" includes not only what he himself saw or
thought he saw, but every tale and anecdote related to him by the
seeress and her friends, and also includes so many incidents of
supernaturalism on the part of others that it would well seem that half
the peasant population of Wuertemberg were ghost seers. Besides this,
detailed as his narrative is, it is lacking in precisely those details
which would give it evidential value; so lacking, indeed, that even such
a spiritistic advocate as the late F. W. H. Myers pronounced it "quite
inadequate" for citation in support of the spiritistic theory.
Nevertheless, taking his extraordinary document for what it is worth,
careful consideration of it leads to the conclusion that it contains the
story not so much of a great fraud as of a great tragedy. It is obvious
that there was frequent and barefaced trickery, particularly on the part
of Frederica's sister and the ubiquitous servant girl; but it is equally
certain that Frederica herself was a wholly abnormal creature, firmly
self-deluded, one might say self-hypnotized, into the belief that the
dead consorted with her. And it is hardly less certain that in her
singular state of body and mind she gave evidence not indeed of
supernatural but of telepathic and clairvoyant powers on which she and
those about her, in that unenlightened age, could not but put a
supernatural interpretation.
It is not difficult to trace the origin of the nervous and mental
disease from which she suffered. Kerner's account of her childhood shows
plainly that she was born temperamentally imaginative and unstable and
that she was raised in an environment well calculated to exaggerate her
imaginativeness and instability. Ghosts and goblins were favorite topics
of conversation among the peasantry of Prevorst, while the children with
whom she played were many of them unstable like herself, neurotic,
hysterical, and the victims of St. Vitus's dance. The weird and uneasy
ideas and feelings which thus early took possession of her were given
firmer lodgment by her unfortunate sojourn with grave-haunting
Grandfather Schmidgall. After this, it seems, she suffered for a year
from some eye trouble, and every physician knows how close the
connection is between optical disease and hallucinations. Then came a
brief period of seeming normality, the lull before the storm which
burst in full force with her marriage to a man she did not love. From
that time, the helpless victim of hysteria in its most deep-seated and
obstinate form, she gave herself unreservedly to the delusions which
both arose from and intensified her physical ills--ills which after all
had a purely mental basis. "If I doubted the reality of these
apparitions," she once told Kerner, "I should be in danger of insanity;
for it would make me doubt the reality of everything I saw."
It does not affect this view of the case that she unquestionably
cooperated with her conscienceless sister and the servant girl in the
production of the fraudulent phenomena to which Kerner testifies. Their
cheating was probably done for the sole purpose of making sure of the
comfortable berth in which the physician's credulity had placed them.
Hers, on the other hand, was the deceit of an irresponsible mind, of one
living in such an atmosphere of unreality that she could readily
persuade herself that the knockings, candle dancings, book openings, and
similar acts were the work not of her own hands but of the ghosts which
tormented her. Indeed, researches of recent years in the field of
abnormal psychology show it is quite possible that she was absolutely
ignorant of any personal participation in the movements and sounds which
caused such wide-spread mystification. Sympathy and pity, therefore,
should take the place of condemnation when we follow the course of her
eventful and unhappy life.
FOOTNOTES:
[M] Kerner's account of Frederica Hauffe is found in his "Die Seherin
von Prevorst," accessible in an English translation by Mrs. Catharine
Crowe. Students of the supernatural, it may be added, will find a great
deal of interesting material in Mrs. Crowe's "The Night Side of
Nature."
VIII
THE MYSTERIOUS MR. HOME
"So you've brought the devil to my house, have you?"
"No, no, aunty, no! It's not my fault."
With an angry gesture the woman, tall, large boned, harsh visaged,
pushed back her chair and advanced threateningly toward the pale, anemic
looking youth of seventeen, who sat cowering at the far end of the
breakfast table.
"You know this is your doing. Stop it at once!"
The other gazed helplessly about him, while from every side of the room
came a volley of raps and knocks. "It is not my doing," he muttered. "I
cannot help it."
"Begone then! Out of my sight!"
Left to herself and to silence,--for with her nephew's departure the
noise instantly ceased,--she fell into gloomy meditation. She was an
exceedingly ignorant, but a profoundly religious woman. She had heard
much of the celebrated Fox sisters, with tales of whose strange actions
in the neighboring State of New York the countryside was then ringing,
and she recognized, or imagined she recognized, a striking similarity
between their performances and the tumult of the last few minutes. It
was her firm belief that the Fox girls were victims of demoniac
influence, and no less surely did she deem it impossible to attribute
the recent disturbance to human agency. Her nephew was not given to
practical jokes; there had been nothing unusual in his manner; he had
greeted her cheerily as usual, and quietly taken his seat. But with his
advent, and she shuddered at the remembrance, the knockings had begun.
There could be only one explanation--the boy, however unwittingly, had
placed himself in the power of the devil. What to do, however, she knew
not, and fumed and fretted the entire morning, until upon his
reappearance at noon the knockings broke out again. Then her mind was
quickly made up.
"Look you!" said she to him. "We must rid you of the evil that is in
you. I will have the ministers reason with you and pray for you, and
that at once."
True to her word, she despatched a messenger to the three clergymen of
the little Connecticut village in which she made her home, and all three
promptly responded to her request. But their visits and their prayers
proved fruitless. Indeed, the more they prayed the louder the knocks
became; and presently, to their astonishment and dismay, the very
furniture appeared bewitched, dancing and leaping as though alive.
"Verily," said one to his irate aunt, "the boy is possessed of the
devil." To make matters worse, the neighbors, hearing of the weird
occurrences, besieged the house day and night, their curiosity whetted
by a report that, exactly as in the case of the Fox sisters,
communications from the dead were being received through the knockings.
Incredible as it seemed, this report found speedy confirmation. Before
the week was out the lad told his aunt:
"Last night there came raps to me spelling words, and they brought me a
message from the spirit of my mother."
"And what, pray, was the message?"
"My mother's spirit said to me, 'Daniel, fear not, my child. God is with
you, and who shall be against you? Seek to do good. Be truthful and
truth loving, and you will prosper, my child. Yours is a glorious
mission--you will convince the infidel, cure the sick, and console the
weeping.'"
"A glorious mission," mocked the aunt, her patience utterly
exhausted,--"a glorious mission to bedevil and deceive, to plague and
torment! Away, away, and darken my doors no more!"
"Do you mean this, aunty?"
"Mean it, Daniel? Never shall it be said of me that I gave aid and
comfort to Satan or child of Satan's. Pack, and be off!"
In this way was Daniel Dunglas Home launched on a career that was to
prove one of the most marvelous, if not the most marvelous, in the
annals of mystification. But at the time there was no reason to
anticipate the remarkable achievements which the future held in store
for him. He was fitted for no calling. Ever since his aunt had adopted
him in far-away Scotland, where he was born of obscure parentage in
1833, he had led a life of complete dependence, not altogether cheerless
but deadening to initiative and handicapping him terribly for the task
of making his way in the world. His health was broken, his pockets were
empty, he was without friends. Cast upon his own resources under such
conditions, it seemed but too probable that failure and an early death
would be his portion.
Two things only were in his favor. The first was his native
determination and optimism; the second, the interest aroused by
published reports of the phenomena that had led to his expulsion from
his aunt's house. Already, although only a few days had elapsed since
the knockings were first heard, the newspapers had given the story great
publicity, and their accounts were greedily devoured by an ever-widening
circle of readers, quite willing to regard such happenings as evidence
of the intervention of the dead in the affairs of the living. It was, it
must be remembered, an era of wide-spread enthusiasm and credulity, the
heyday period of spiritism. So soon, therefore, as it became known that
young Home was at liberty to go where he would, invitations were
showered on him.
Among these was one from the nearby town of Willimantic, and thither
Home journeyed in the early spring of 1851. It was determined that an
attempt should be made to demonstrate his mediumship by the table
tilting process then coming into vogue among spiritists, and the result
exceeded all expectations. The table, according to an eye-witness of the
first seance, not only moved without physical contact, but on request
turned itself upside down, and overcame a spectator's efforts to prevent
its motion. True, when this spectator "grasped its leg and held it with
all his strength" the table "did not move so freely as before." Still,
it moved, and Home's fame mounted apace. From town to town he traveled,
holding seances at which, if contemporary accounts are to be believed,
he gave exhibitions of supernatural power far and away ahead of all
other of the numerous mediums who were by this time springing up
throughout the Eastern States. On one occasion, we are told, the spirits
communicated through him the whereabouts of missing title deeds to a
tract of land then in litigation; on another, they enabled him to
prescribe successfully for an invalid for whom no hope was entertained;
and time after time they conveyed to those in his seance room messages
of more or less vital import, besides vouchsafing to them "physical"
phenomena of the greatest variety.