The Amiens case (1746) is reported and attested by Father Charles
Louis Richard, Professor in Theology, a Dominican friar. The
haunted house was in the Rue de l'Aventure, parish of St. Jacques.
The tenant was a M. Leleu, aged thirty-six. The troubles had lasted
for fourteen years, and there was evidence for their occurrence
earlier, before Leleu occupied the house. The disturbances were of
the usual kind, a sound of heavy planks being tossed about, as in
the experience of Scott at Abbotsford, raps, the fastening of doors
so that they could not be opened for long, and then suddenly gave
way (this, also, is frequent in modern tales), a sound of sweeping
the floor, as in the Epworth case, in the Wesleys' parsonage, heavy
knocks and thumps, the dragging of heavy bodies, steps on the
stairs, lights, the dancing of all the furniture in the room of
Mlle. Marie de Latre, rattling of crockery, a noise of whirring in
the air, a jingling as of coins (familiar at Epworth), and, briefly,
all the usually reported tintamarre. Twenty persons, priests,
women, girls, men of all sorts, attest those phenomena which are
simply the ordinary occurrences still alleged to be prevalent.
The narrator believes in diabolical agency, but he gives the
explanations of common-sense. 1. M. Leleu is a visionary. But, as
no one says that all the other witnesses are visionaries, this helps
us little. 2. M. Leleu makes all the noise himself. That is, he
climbs to the roof with a heavy sack of grain on his shoulder, and
lets it fall; he runs up and down the chimneys with his heavy sack
on his shoulder, he frolics with weighty planks all over the house,
thumps the walls, makes furniture dance, and how? What is his
motive? His tenants leave him, he is called a fool, a devil, a
possessed person: his business is threatened, they talk of putting
him in jail, and that is all he has got by his partiality for making
a racket. 3. The neighbours make the noises, and again the
narrator asks 'how?' and 'why?' 4. Some priests slept in the house
once and heard nothing. But nobody pretends that there is always
something to hear. The Bishop of Amiens licenses the publication
'with the more confidence, as we have ourselves received the
depositions of ten witnesses, a number more than sufficient to
attest a fact which nobody has any interest in feigning'.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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