“It’s a very curious subject, this business of hauntings,” said Mr. Frith judicially. “For one thing it is a nice instance of the scepticism of men, when they want to be sceptical--how often they prefer the greatest credulity! Looked at dispassionately, the evidence for such phenomena is far more catholic and irrefutable than is the evidence for ninety-nine things out of a hundred which are accepted without question. Read that encyclopædic catalogue of Richet, _Thirty Years of Psychical Research_, if you want to know how full and detailed that evidence is. Yet the average man mocks at the suggestion that even one out of this multiplicity is anything but an invention or an hallucination.” “I think you have suggested the real reason,” said George Dunbar. “They pretend to refuse to believe because they’d vastly prefer to disbelieve, and comparatively very few have ever been compelled by personal experience to face such facts. Even then, when the intimidating vision is fading, they are satisfied to mutter something about ‘Subjective and Objective’--leave it at that and change the subject.” “If there is one certain thing,” said Mr. Partridge, “it is that they can be objective. The identical experience has been shared a thousand times, the same apparition has been viewed by dozens of different people at the same and different times. The evidence for that is beyond argument.” “I believe in such phenomena in a certain sense,” said Willie Cranmer, “but I am not prepared to allow them a supernatural--in the more esoteric sense of the word--existence. By some unexplained means, certain places, certain things, become impregnated, kinetic, sensitised. How or why one room, one chair, even one W.C., allows itself to be so impregnated is an utterly inexplicable mystery. One battlefield is ‘haunted’; a thousand are as placid as Port Meadow. Usually, I grant you, there is evidence that a potent emanation of some passion has at some time been released and operative in such disturbed areas, though not, I believe, by any means in every case. But the most singular thing to my mind about the supernatural is its caprice, its fortuitousness, its rarity--and indeed its essential lack of purpose. The eloquent and, considering its date, ingenious explanation of Lytton covers but a small percentage of the data and, even if one accepts it in its entirety, a vast legion of instances of hauntings and haunted would be left still as fortuitous, as unrelated, and as inexplicable.”