The Book of Dreams and Ghosts by Andrew Lang (inspirational books TXT) 📖

half-past one, alone, in Meresby Church, and receive a communication from the spectres.  All this she said that she had done, and in evidence of her journey enclosed her half ticket to Meresby, which a dream had warned her would not be taken on her arrival.  She also sent a white rose from a grave to Dr. Ferrier, a gentleman in no sympathy with the Jacobite cause, which, indeed, has no connection whatever with the matter in hand.

On hearing of this letter from Mrs. Claughton, I confess that, not knowing the lady, I remained purely sceptical.  The railway company, however, vouched for the ticket.  The rector of Meresby, being appealed to, knew nothing of the matter.  He therefore sent for his curate and parish clerk.

“Did a lady pass part of Sunday night in the church?”

The clerk and the curate admitted that this unusual event had occurred.  A lady had arrived from London on Saturday evening; had lodged with Wright, the parish clerk; had asked for the parish registers; had compared them with her note-book after morning service on Sunday, and had begged leave to pass part of the night in the church.  The curate in vain tried to dissuade her, and finally, washing his hands of it, had left her to Wright the clerk.  To him she described a Mr. George Howard, deceased (one of the ghosts).  He recognised the description, and he accompanied her to the church on a dark night, starting at one o’clock.  She stayed alone, without a light, in the locked-up church from 1.20 to 1.45, when he let her out.

There now remained no doubt that Mrs. Claughton had really gone to Meresby, a long and disagreeable journey, and had been locked up in the church alone at a witching hour.

Beyond this point we have only the statements of Mrs. Claughton, made to Lord Bute, Mr. Myers and others, and published by the Society for Psychical Research.  She says that after arranging the alarm bell on Monday night (October 9-10) she fell asleep reading in her dressing-gown, lying outside her bed.  She wakened, and found the lady of the white shawl bending over her.  Mrs. Claughton said: “Am I dreaming, or is it true?”  The figure gave, as testimony to character, a piece of information.  Next Mrs. Claughton saw a male ghost, “tall, dark, healthy, sixty years old,” who named himself as George Howard, buried in Meresby churchyard, Meresby being a place of which Mrs. Claughton, like most people, now heard for the first time.  He gave the dates of his marriage and death, which are correct, and have been seen by Mr. Myers in Mrs. Claughton’s note-book.  He bade her verify these dates at Meresby, and wait at 1.15 in the morning at the grave of Richard Harte (a person, like all of them, unknown to Mrs. Claughton) at the south-west corner of the south aisle in Meresby Church.  This Mr. Harte died on 15th May, 1745, and missed many events of interest by doing so.  Mr. Howard also named and described Joseph Wright, of Meresby, as a man who would help her, and he gave minute local information.  Next came a phantom of a man whose name Mrs. Claughton is not free to give; {182} he seemed to be in great trouble, at first covering his face with his hands, but later removing them.  These three spectres were to meet Mrs. Claughton in Meresby Church and give her information of importance on a matter concerning, apparently, the third and only unhappy appearance.  After these promises and injunctions the phantoms left, and Mrs. Claughton went to the door to look at the clock.  Feeling faint, she rang the alarum, when her friends came and found her in a swoon on the floor.  The hour was 1.20.

What Mrs. Claughton’s children were doing all this time, and whether they were in the room or not, does not appear.

On Thursday Mrs. Claughton went to town, and her governess was perturbed, as we have seen.

On Friday night Mrs. Claughton dreamed a number of things connected with her journey; a page of the notes made from this dream was shown to Mr. Myers.  Thus her half ticket was not to be taken, she was to find a Mr. Francis, concerned in the private affairs of the ghosts, which needed rectifying, and so forth.  These premonitions, with others, were all fulfilled.  Mrs. Claughton, in the church at night, continued her conversation with the ghosts whose acquaintance she had made at Rapingham.  She obtained, it seems, all the information needful to settling the mysterious matters which disturbed the male ghost who hid his face, and on Monday morning she visited the daughter of Mr. Howard in her country house in a park, “recognised the strong likeness to her father, and carried out all things desired by the dead to the full, as had been requested. . . .  The wishes expressed to her were perfectly rational, reasonable and of natural importance.”

The clerk, Wright, attests the accuracy of Mrs. Claughton’s description of Mr. Howard, whom he knew, and the correspondence of her dates with those in the parish register and on the graves, which he found for her at her request.  Mr. Myers, “from a very partial knowledge” of what the Meresby ghosts’ business was, thinks the reasons for not revealing this matter “entirely sufficient”.  The ghosts’ messages to survivors “effected the intended results,” says Mrs. Claughton.

* * * * *

Of this story the only conceivable natural explanation is that Mrs. Claughton, to serve her private ends, paid secret preliminary visits to Meresby, “got up” there a number of minute facts, chose a haunted house at the other end of England as a first scene in her little drama, and made the rest of the troublesome journeys, not to mention the uncomfortable visit to a dark church at midnight, and did all this from a hysterical love of notoriety.  This desirable boon she would probably never have obtained, even as far as it is consistent with a pseudonym, if I had not chanced to dine with Dr. Ferrier while the adventure was only beginning.  As there seemed to be a chance of taking a ghost “on the half volley,” I at once communicated the first part of the tale to the Psychical Society (using pseudonyms, as here, throughout), and two years later Mrs. Claughton consented to tell the Society as much as she thinks it fair to reveal.

This, it will be confessed, is a round-about way of obtaining fame, and an ordinary person in Mrs. Claughton’s position would have gone to the Psychical Society at once, as Mark Twain meant to do when he saw the ghost which turned out to be a very ordinary person.

There I leave these ghosts, my mind being in a just balance of agnosticism.  If ghosts at all, they were ghosts with a purpose.  The species is now very rare.

The purpose of the ghost in the following instance was trivial, but was successfully accomplished.  In place of asking people to do what it wanted, the ghost did the thing itself.  Now the modern theory of ghosts, namely, that they are delusions of the senses of the seers, caused somehow by the mental action of dead or distant people, does not seem to apply in this case.  The ghost produced an effect on a material object.

“PUT OUT THE LIGHT!”

The Rev. D. W. G. Gwynne, M.D., was a physician in holy orders.  In 1853 he lived at P--- House, near Taunton, where both he and his wife “were made uncomfortable by auditory experiences to which they could find no clue,” or, in common English, they heard mysterious noises.  “During the night,” writes Dr. Gwynne, “I became aware of a draped figure passing across the foot of the bed towards the fireplace.  I had the impression that the arm was raised, pointing with the hand towards the mantel-piece on which a night-light was burning.  Mrs. Gwynne at the same moment seized my arm, and the light was extinguished!  Notwithstanding, I distinctly saw the figure returning towards the door, and being under the impression that one of the servants had found her way into our room, I leaped out of bed to intercept the intruder, but found and saw nothing.  I rushed to the door and endeavoured to follow the supposed intruder, and it was not until I found the door locked, as usual, that I was painfully impressed.  I need hardly say that Mrs. Gwynne was in a very nervous state.  She asked me what I had seen, and I told her.  She had seen the same figure,” “but,” writes Mrs. Gwynne, “I distinctly saw the hand of the figure placed over the night-light, which was at once extinguished”.  “Mrs. Gwynne also heard the rustle of the ‘tall man-like figure’s’ garments.  In addition to the night-light there was moonlight in the room.”

“Other people had suffered many things in the same house, unknown to Dr. and Mrs. Gwynne, who gave up the place soon afterwards.”

In plenty of stories we hear of ghosts who draw curtains or open doors, and these apparent material effects are usually called part of the seer’s delusion.  But the night-light certainly went out under the figure’s hand, and was relit by Dr. Gwynne.  Either the ghost was an actual entity, not a mere hallucination of two people, or the extinction of the light was a curious coincidence. {186}

CHAPTER IX

Haunted Houses.  Antiquity of Haunted Houses.  Savage Cases.  Ancient Egyptian Cases.  Persistence in Modern Times.  Impostures.  Imaginary Noises.  Nature of Noises.  The Creaking Stair.  Ghostly Effects produced by the Living but Absent.  The Grocer’s Cough.  Difficulty of Belief.  My Gillie’s Father’s Story.  “Silverton Abbey.”  The Dream that Opened the Door.  Abbotsford Noises.  Legitimate Haunting by the Dead.  The Girl in Pink.  The Dog in the Haunted Room.  The Lady in Black.  Dogs Alarmed.  The Dead Seldom Recognised.  Glamis.  A Border Castle.  Another Class of Hauntings.  A Russian Case.  The Dancing Devil.  The Little Hands.

Haunted houses have been familiar to man ever since he has owned a roof to cover his head.  The Australian blacks possessed only shelters or “leans-to,” so in Australia the spirits do their rapping on the tree trunks; a native illustrated this by whacking a table with a book.  The perched-up houses of the Dyaks are haunted by noisy routing agencies.  We find them in monasteries, palaces, and crofters’ cottages all through the Middle Ages.  On an ancient Egyptian papyrus we find the husband of the Lady Onkhari protesting against her habit of haunting his house, and exclaiming: “What wrong have I done,” exactly in the spirit of the “Hymn of Donald Ban,” who was “sair hadden down by a bodach” (noisy bogle) after Culloden. {188a}

The husband of Onkhari does not say how she disturbed him, but the manners of Egyptian haunters, just what they remain at present, may be gathered from a magical papyrus, written in Greek.  Spirits “wail and groan, or laugh dreadfully”; they cause bad dreams, terror and madness; finally, they “practice stealthy theft,” and rap and knock.  The “theft” (by making objects disappear mysteriously) is often illustrated in the following tales, as are the groaning and knocking. {188b}  St. Augustine speaks of hauntings as familiar occurrences, and we have a chain of similar cases from ancient Egypt to 1896.  Several houses in that year were so disturbed that the inhabitants were obliged to leave them.  The newspapers were full of correspondence on the subject.

The usual annoyances are apparitions (rare), flying about of objects (not very common), noises of every kind (extremely frequent), groans, screams, footsteps and fire-raising.  Imposture has either been proved or made very probable in ten out of eleven cases of volatile objects between 1883 and 1895. {188c}  Moreover, it is certain that the noises of haunted houses are not equally audible by all persons present, even when