unconscious feeling, acting through his imagination, gave form and shape
to the impressions made upon his nerves.
In another case the principal person was a candidate of divinity,
Billing, well known as being of a highly sensitive disposition and given
to hallucinations; the extreme suffering which the presence of human
remains caused to his whole system had been previously already observed.
The great German fabulist, Pfeffel, a blind man, once took Billing's arm
and went with him into the garden to take an airing. The poet noticed
that when they came to a certain place, the young man hesitated and his
arm trembled as if it had received an electric shock. When he was asked
what was the matter, he replied, "Oh, nothing!" But upon passing over
the spot a second time, the same tremor made itself felt. Pressed by
Pfeffel, the young man at last acknowledged that he experienced at that
spot the sensation which the presence of a corpse always produced in
him, and offered to go there with the poet at night in order to prove to
him the correctness of his feelings. When the two friends went to the
garden after dark, Billing perceived at once a faint glimmer of light
above the spot. He stopped at a distance of about ten yards, and after a
while declared that he saw a female figure hovering above the place,
about five feet high, with the right arm across her bosom and the left
hand hanging down by her side. When the poet advanced and stood on the
fatal spot, the young man affirmed that the image was on his right or
his left, before or behind him, and when Pfeffel struck around him with
his cane, it produced the effect as if he were cutting through a flame
which instantly reunited. The same phenomena were witnessed a second
time by a number of Pfeffel's relations. Several days afterwards, while
the young man was absent, the poet caused the place in the garden to be
dug up, and at a depth of several feet, beneath a layer of lime, a human
skeleton was discovered. It was removed, the hole filled up, and all
smoothed over again. After Billing's return the poet took him once more
into the garden, and this time the young man walked over the fatal spot
without experiencing the slightest sensation (_Kieser, Archiv._, etc.,
p. 326).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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