During the year 1863, when the ghost illusion was one of the topics of the day, the famous George Cruikshank wrote a pamphlet, entitled—“A Discovery concerning Ghosts, with a Rap at the ‘Spirit Rappers,’ illustrated with Cuts, and dedicated to the ‘Ghost Club.’” Curious to say, he says nothing respecting the Polytechnic ghost, but is exercised chiefly with famous stories of ghosts and apparitions, which it is alleged have appeared to various persons. The author examines analytically a number of them, and comes to the conclusion that the persons relating them usually deceived themselves or other people, and that most of the stories are mental hallucinations. The inimitable George, as his friends delighted to call him, treats with profound contempt the spirit rappers, and all the cheats and fortune-telling mendicants who try to impose on innocent people with their bad conjuring tricks—people who might have got through the world safely; but the fatal chord is struck, and they go from bad to worse, until they end in a mad house. The whole tribe of persons who made money directly or indirectly out of what they called spirit mediums, &c., fairly howled upon me in the lecture room, and, threatening personal violence, I was for some time attended home at night by the most stalwart of our Polytechnic employés; for, like Cruikshank, I vigorously denounced the traders in spirits, founding my arguments on the belief that God was too merciful to us to add to the troubles of this world the fear and trembling brought about by pretended communication with the invisible world. The first story I told at my Polytechnic “Strange Lecture” had a very simple plot. It represented the room of a student who was engaged burning the midnight oil, and, looking up from his work, sees an apparition of a skeleton. Resenting the intrusion he rises, seizes a sword or a hatchet which is ready to his hand, and aims a blow at the ghost; which instantly disappeared again and again to return. This ghost was admirably performed by my assistant, whom we called Ye Perringe, who, wearing a cover of black velvet, held the real skeleton in his arms and made the fleshless bones assume the most elegant attitudes, the lower part from the pelvis downward being attired in white linen, and the white skeleton ghost assuming a sitting posture, so that it appeared to come out of the floor. Although this exhibition only lasted a few minutes, it drew hundreds and thousands of pounds to the treasury of the Polytechnic. In fact, as already stated, I was obliged to remove to the larger theatre of the Institute. The next ghost story was told in the large theatre; and it illustrated Charles Dickens’s story of the “Haunted Man.” At the same time was shown “Cupid and the Love-Letter.” When the curtain drew up, a peasant girl was discovered using her spinning-wheel and demurely thinking of something not told to the audience.