Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
On the 20th of April, at the time of applying the
leeches, Nicolai's room was full of figures moving about among each
other. They first began to have a less lively motion; shortly afterwards
their colours became paler--in another half hour fainter still, though
the forms still remained. About seven o'clock in the evening, the
figures had became colourless, and they moved scarcely at all, but their
outline was still tolerably perfect. Gradually that became less and less
defined. At last they disappeared, breaking into air, fragments only
remaining, which at last all vanished. By eight o'clock all were gone,
and Nicolai subsequently saw no more of them.
Other cases are on record in which there was still greater facility of
ghost-production than Nicolai evinced. One patient could, for instance,
by thinking of a person, summon his apparition to join the others. He
could not, however, having done this, subsequently banish him. The sight
is the sense most easily and frequently tricked; next, the hearing. In
some extraordinary cases the touch, also, has participated in the
delusion.
Herr von Baczko, already subject to visual hallucinations, of a diseased
nervous system, his right side weak with palsy, his right eye blind, and
the vision of the left imperfect, was engaged one evening, shortly after
the battle of Jena, as he tells us in his autobiography, in translating
a brochure into Polish, when he felt a poke in his loins. He looked
round, and found that it proceeded from a Negro or Egyptian boy,
seemingly about twelve years of age. Although he was persuaded the whole
was an illusion, he thought it best to knock the apparition down, when
he felt that it offered a sensible resistance. The Negro then attacked
him on the other side, and gave his left arm a particularly disagreeable
twist, when Baczko pushed him off again. The Negro continued to visit
him constantly during four months, preserving the same appearance, and
remaining tangible; then he came seldomer; and, after finally appearing
as a brown-coloured apparition with an owl's head, he took his leave.
The illusion and its principle having been thus elucidated, it is hardly
worth while to look into its operation in tales of vulgar terror. But it
is highly interesting to trace its effects on minds of a high order,
when its suggestions have been received and interpreted as the visits
and communications of superior beings. You have heard, I dare say, my
dear Archy, of the mysticism of Schwedenborg. Now that they are
explained, the details of his hallucinations are highly gratifying to
one's curiosity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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