Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted MenHarris, J. W. (John William)
Science
Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men
Harris, J. W. (John William)
Ghosts; Hypnotism
Perhaps the Scin-laeca of Bulwer's "Harold," the apparition of Cerdic,
haunted the imaginations of generations of magicians. These were possibly
Celts; only one witch-rune on a Saxon sword was found; that was in the
Isle of Wight. It was, Professor Stephens said, a solitary instance, as
the brave Germans thought magic the art of a coward. The hypnotism from
which all the garrison suffered was a slight hypnotism; the eyes remained
open and people went about behaving almost normally. Father B. lost his
self-control for an instant. Some people would have to be tricked in a
complicated way. Thought transfer--audible to the person affected alone,
or even inaudible but perceptible like a thought--accounts for the whole
of Mrs. Piper's operations; she might have accomplices who would never be
seen speaking to her, and who would dictate actions, say, to one of the
Pelham or Howard family. These dictated actions, or inchoate plans, would
then be reported by Mrs. Piper writing as George Pelham. What Mrs. Piper
saw or felt or heard would be--at least at stated times--seen or felt or
heard by her fellow conspirators. As in conjuring everything found was
placed beforehand in the desired position. Thus facts recounted had been
induced. The blackguard who spoke to her as Phinuit was less educated
than the one who dictated George Pelham's communications.
Mrs. Piper's education was rather suited to receive the vulgar Phinuit's,
than the more refined pseudo Pelham's communications. But the progress
from the one stage so revolting to Miss Freer, to the other so
delightful, a sign of increased refinement to Mr. Myers, was hardly
more a change than the turning on a hot tap after a cold water tap into a
basin. The receptacle was the same. But as a strong hypnotist herself,
Mrs. Piper could bring off the Sutton matter; she could easily give Mrs.
Sutton visual hallucinations. The startling position taken up by Mr.
Myers in his article in the _National Review_, is easily explicable. He
and Dr. Hodgson were magnetised by Mrs. Piper, and were like wax in her
hands. Eusapia Palladius has the same power.
It is a sad declension in an eminent classic, that he, whose reference to
the primitive heathen Ulysses torturing the shade of his own mother is
rather revolting than elevating, should be full of wonder and delight at
it.
After all Ulysses was the worthy ancestor of many a pirate hanged at
Malta, more ferocious enemies of man than the Red Indian. Some
somnambulists should be perhaps protected from exploitation. Mrs. Piper's
trance is presumably feigned, as trances can easily be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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