I have not yet experimented with sheep, goats, or pigs, but I do not doubt but that they are more or less sensitive to superphysical influences, and possess the psychic faculty of scenting the Unknown--though not, perhaps, in so great a degree as any of the other animals I have enumerated. PART II WILD ANIMALS AND THE UNKNOWN CHAPTER V WILD ANIMALS AND THE UNKNOWN _Apes_ The following case of animal hauntings was recorded in automatic writing:-- "I sank wearily into my easy chair before the fire, which burned with a fitful and sullen glow in the tiny grate of my one room--bare and desolate as only the room of an unsuccessful author can be. "My condition was pitiable. For the past twelve months I had not earned a cent, and of my small capital there now remained but two pounds to ward the hound of starvation from my door. In the moonlight I could perceive all the bareness of the apartment. Would to God Fancy would ride to me on this moonbeam and give me inspiration! 'Twas indeed weird--this silver ethereal path connecting the moon with the earth, and the more I gazed along it, the more I wished to leave my body and escape to the star-lighted vaults. Certainly, from a conversation I had once had with a member of the New Occult Society, I believed it possible by concentrating all the mental activities in one channel, so to overcome the barriers which prevent the soul visiting scenes of the ethereal world, as to pass materialized to the spot upon which the ideas are fixed. But although I had essayed--how many times I do not like to confess--to gain that amount of concentration necessary for the separation of the soul from the body, up to the present all my attempts had been fruitless. Doubtless there had been a something--too minute even for definition--that had interrupted my self-abstraction--a something that had wrecked my venture, just when I felt it to be on the verge of completion. And was it likely that now, when my ideas were misty and vague, I should be more successful? I wanted to quit the cruel bonds of nature and be free--free to roam and ramble. But where?