She would answer other questions, now right, and now wrong. She
called her father John, while his real name was Thomas. In fact she
was what Porphyry, the Neoplatonist, would have called a 'deceitful
demon'. Her chief effects were raps, scratchings, and a sound as of
whirring wings, which filled the room. This phenomenon occurs in a
'haunted house' mentioned in the Journal of the Psychical Society.
It is infinitely more curious to recall, that, when Mr. Im Thurn, in
British Guiana, submitted to the doctoring of a peayman (see p. 39),
he heard a sound, 'at first low and indistinct, and then gathering
in volume as if some big winged thing came from far toward the
house, passed through the roof, and then settled heavily on the
floor, and again, after an interval, as if the same winged thing
rose and passed away as it had come'. Mr. Im Thurn thinks the
impression was caused by the waving of boughs. These Cock Lane
occurrences were attributed to ventriloquism, but, after a surgeon
had held his hand on the child's stomach and chest while the noises
were being produced, this probable explanation was abandoned. 'The
girl was said to be constantly attended by the usual noises, though
bound and muffled hand and foot, and that without any motion of her
lips, and when she appeared to be asleep.' {166} This binding is
practised by Eskimo Angakut, or sorcerers, as of old, by mediums
([Greek]) in ancient Greece and Egypt, so we gather from Iamblichus,
and some lines quoted from Porphyry by Eusebius. {167} A kind of
'cabinet,' as modern spiritualists call a curtain, seems to have
been used. In fact the phenomena, luminous apparition, 'tumultuous
sounds,' and all, were familiar to the ancients. Nobody seems to
have noted this, but one unusually sensible correspondent of a
newspaper quoted cases of knockings from Baxter's Certainty of the
Worlds of Spirits, and thought that Baxter's popular book might have
suggested the imposture. Though the educated classes had buried
superstition, it lived, of course, among the people, who probably
thumbed Baxter and Glanvill.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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