Real Ghost Stories by William Thomas Stead (best non fiction books to read txt) 📖

Chapter I.

The Astral Camera.

When I was staying at Orchard Lea, in Windsor Forest, I did most of my writing in a spacious window on the first floor looking out over the garden. It opened French fashion, and thereby occasioned a curious optical illusion, which may perhaps help to shed some light upon the phenomena now under consideration. For when the sun was high in the sky and the French window was set at a certain angle, the whole of the flowers, figures, etc., on my right hand appeared reflected upon the lawn on the left hand as vividly as if they actually existed in duplicate. So real was the illusion that for some hours I was under the impression that a broad yellow gravel path actually stretched across the lawn on my left. It was only when a little dog ran along the spectral path and suddenly vanished into thin air that I discovered the illusion. Nothing could be more complete, more life-like. The real persons who walked up the gravel to the house walked across the spectral gravel, apparently in duplicate. Both could be seen at one and the same time. I instantly thought that they could be photographed, so as to show the duplication produced by the illusion. Unfortunately, although the spectral path was distinctly visible through the glass to the eye, no impression whatever was left on the sensitive plate. My friend writes:—

"I have tried the phantom path, and I am sorry to say it is too phantom to make any impression on the plate. All that you get is the blaze of light from the glass window, some very faint trees, and no path at all. Possibly, with a June sun, it might have been different; but I doubt it, as one is told never to put the camera facing a window. It is having to take through the glass window which is fatal."

This set me thinking. It was a simple optical illusion, no doubt, similar to that which enabled Pepper to produce his ghosts at the Polytechnic. But what was the agency which enabled me to see the figures and flowers, and trees and gravel, all transferred, as by the cunning act of some magician, from the right to the left? Simply a swinging pane of perfectly transparent glass. To those who have neither studied the laws of optics nor seen the phenomenon in question, it must seem impossible that a pellucid window-pane could transfer so faithfully that which happened at one end of the garden to the other as to cause it to be mistaken for reality. Yet there was the phenomenon before my eyes. The dog ran double—the real dog to the right, the spectral dog to the left—and no one could tell at first sight "t'other from which." Now, may it not be that this supplies a suggestion as to the cause of the phenomenon of clairvoyance? Is it not possible that there may exist in Nature some as yet undiscovered analogue to the swinging windowpane which may enable us to see before our eyes here and now events which are transpiring at the other end of the world? In the mysterious, subconscious world in which the clairvoyant lives, may there not be some subtle, sympathetic lens, fashioned out of strong affection or some other relation, which may enable some of us to see that which is quite invisible to the ordinary eye?

A Surrey Laundry Seen in Cornwall.

Such thoughts came to my mind when I asked the Housekeeper whether she had ever seen any of the phantasmal apparitions of her mistress, my hostess, Mrs. M. The housekeeper, a comfortable, buxom Cornish woman, smiled incredulously. No, she had seen nothing, heard nothing, believed nothing. "As to phantasmal bodies, she would prefer to see them first." "Had she ever seen a ghost?" "No, never." "Had ever had any hallucinations?" "No." But one thing had happened, "rather curious" now that she came to think of it. Last year, when living on the coast far down in the west country, she had suddenly seen as in a dream the house in Hindhead where we were now standing. She had never been in Surrey in her life. She had no idea that she would ever go there, nor did she know that it was in Surrey. What she saw was the laundry. She was standing inside it, and remarked to her husband how strange and large it looked. She looked out at the windows and saw the house and the surroundings with strange distinctness. Then the vision faded away, leaving no other impress on the mind than that she had seen an exceptionally large laundry close to a small country-house in a place where she had never been in before.

Six months passed; she and her husband had decided to leave the west country and take a housekeeper and gardener's post elsewhere. They replied to an advertisement, were appointed by my hostess; they transferred themselves to Hindhead, where they arrived in the dead of winter. When they reached their new quarters she saw, to her infinite astonishment, the precise place she had seen six months before. The laundry was unmistakable. There is not such another laundry in the county of Surrey. There it was, sure enough, and there was the house, and there were all the surroundings exactly as she had seen them down on the south-west coast. She did not believe in ghosts or phantasmal bodies or such like things, but one thing she knew beyond all possibility of doubt. She had seen her new home and laundry on the top of Hindhead, when living in the west country six months before she ever set foot in Surrey, or even knew of the existence of Mrs. M. "The moment I saw it I recognised it and told my husband that it was the identical place I had seen when in our old home."

William Howitt's Vision.

The Housekeeper's story is very simple, and almost too commonplace. But its significance lies in those very characteristics. Here was no consuming passion, no bond of sympathy, nothing whatever material or sentimental to act as the refracting medium by which the Hindhead laundry could have been made visible in South Devon. Yet similar phenomena are of constant occurrence. A very remarkable case in point is that of William Howitt who, when on a voyage out to Australia, saw his brother's house at Melbourne so plainly that he described it on board ship, and recognised it the moment he landed. Here is his own version of this remarkable instance of clairvoyance:—

"Some weeks ago, while yet at sea, I had a dream of being at my brother's at Melbourne, and found his house on a hill at the further end of the town, and next to the open forest. His garden sloped a little down the hill to some brick buildings below; and there were greenhouses on the right hand by the wall, as you look down the hill from the house. As I looked out of the window in my dream, I saw a wood of dusky-foliaged trees having a somewhat segregated appearance in their heads—that is, their heads did not make that dense mass like our trees. 'There,' I said to some one in my dream, 'I see your native forest of eucalyptus!'

"This dream I told to my sons and to two of my fellow-passengers at the time, and on landing, as we walked over the meadows, long before we reached the town, I saw this very wood. 'There,' I said, 'is the very wood of my dream. We shall see my brother's house there! And so we did. It stands exactly as I saw it, only looking newer; but there, over the wall of the garden, is the wood, precisely as I saw it and now see it as I sit at the dining-room window writing. When I looked on this scene I seem to look into my dream." (Owen's "Footfalls," p. 118.)

The usual explanation of these things is that the vision is the revival of some forgotten impressions on the brain. But in neither of the foregoing cases will that explanation suffice, for in neither case had the person who saw ever been in the place of which they had a vision. One desperate resource, the convenient theory of pre-existence, is useless here. The fact seems to be that there is a kind of invisible camera obscura in Nature, which at odd times gives us glimpses of things happening or existing far beyond the range of our ordinary vision. The other day when in Edinburgh I climbed up to the Camera Obscura that stands near the castle, and admired the simple device by which, in a darkened room upon a white, paper-covered table, the whole panorama of Edinburgh life was displayed before me. There were the "recruities" drilling on the Castle Esplanade; there were the passers-by hurrying along High Street; there were the birds on the housetops, and the landscape of chimneys and steeples, all revealed as if in the crystal of a wizard's cave. The coloured shadows chased each other across the paper, leaving no trace behind. Five hundred years ago the owner of that camera would have been burned as a wizard; now he makes a comfortable living out of the threepennypieces of inquisitive visitors. Is it possible to account for the phenomena of clairvoyance other than by the supposition that there exists somewhere in Nature a gigantic camera obscura which reflects everything, and to which clairvoyants habitually, and other mortals occasionally, have access?

Seen and Heard at 150 Miles Range.

The preceding incidents simply record a prevision of places subsequently visited. The following are instances in which not only places, but occurrences, were seen as in a camera by persons at a distance varying from 150 to several thousand miles. Space seems to have no existence for the clairvoyant. They are quoted from the published "Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society":

On September 9th, 1848, at the siege of Mooltan, Major-General R——, C.B., then adjutant of his regiment, was most severely and dangerously wounded; and supposing himself to be dying, asked one of the officers with him to take the ring off his finger and send it to his wife, who at the time was fully 150 miles distant, at Ferozepore.

"On the night of September 9th, 1848," writes his wife, "I was lying on my bed between sleeping and waking, when I distinctly saw my husband being carried off the field, seriously wounded, and heard his voice saying, 'Take this ring off my finger and send it to my wife.' All the next day I could not get the sight or the voice out of my mind. In due time I heard of General R—— having been severely wounded in the assault of Mooltan. He survived, however, and is still living. It was not for some time after the siege that I heard from General L——, the officer who helped to carry General R—— off the field, that the request as to the ring was actually made to him, just as I heard it at Ferozepore at that very time." (Vol. I. p. 30.)

A Royal Deathbed in France seen in Scotland.

The above case is remarkable because the voice was transmitted as well as the spectacle. In the next story the ear heard nothing, but the scene itself was very remarkable. A correspondent of the Psychical Research Society writes that whilst staying with her mother's cousin, Mrs. Elizabeth Broughton, wife of Mr. Edward Broughton, Edinburgh, and daughter of the late Colonel Blanckley, in the year 1844, she told her the following strange story:—

"She awoke one night and aroused her husband, telling him that something dreadful had happened in France. He begged her to go to sleep again and not to trouble him. She assured him that she was