"SIR,--A letter entitled 'On the Trail of a Ghost,' which you publish to-day, appears to suggest throughout that some statement has been made on behalf of the Society for Psychical Research with regard to the house which your correspondent visited. This, however, is not the case; and as a misleading impression may be created, I must ask you to allow me space to state that I visited B----, representing that society, before your correspondent's visit, and decided that there was no such evidence as could justify us in giving the results of the inquiry a place in our _Proceedings_. I had already communicated this judgment to Lord Bute, to the council of the society, and to Professor Sidgwick, the editor of our _Proceedings_, and it had been agreed to act upon it.--I am, Sir, your obedient servant, "FREDERICK W.H. MYERS, _Hon. Sec. of the Society for Psychical Research._ "LECKHAMPTON HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, _June 8_." One may gather from a comparison of this letter with the foregoing records that the standard of evidence is a somewhat variable quantity in the Society for Psychical Research. In attempting to explain the matter, Mr. Myers wrote to Lord Bute, June 11, 1897:-- "As to haunted houses recorded at length in _Proceedings_, there have been several minor ones, and one especially, 'Records of a Haunted House,' where I was instrumental in getting the account written. The great point there was the amount of coincidence of visions seen independently.... In the B---- case there is _some_ coincidence of vision, but so far as I know, not nearly so much as in the Records of a Haunted House, which did appear in _Proceedings_. We want to keep our level approximately the same throughout." Another point of view in relation to the same matter, is that taken by Miss Freer in an article in the _Nineteenth Century_, August 1897:-- "That the S.P.R. recognised that haunted houses were among the alleged facts of general interest, was proved by their early appointment of a Committee of Inquiry, on the management of which it is too late to reflect. At the end of a few months only, they practically dismissed a subject which, if considered at all, required years of patient research. They had come across the surprising number of twenty-eight cases which they considered worth inquiry; but these were presented to the public on the evidence of only forty witnesses--that is to say, an average of less than one and a half to each! The appearance of figures is recorded in twenty-four of these stories, whilst four record noises only. Ten years later the _Proceedings_ take up the subject again, and give us at some length an elaborate story on the evidence of two or three ladies, two servants, a charwoman, and a little boy. ['Records of a Haunted House.'] No proper journal was kept, and the Society for Psychical Research came upon the scene when all was practically over."