GLIMPSES OF THE SUPERNATURAL.*
IT is a sad pity that collectors of ghost stories cannot be induced to exercise a little economy of belief. Not a few of us would willingly go with them a mile, but they always perversely try to compel us to go,—not twain,—but twenty. Beginning with tales plausible enough to pass with some rational acquiescence, they soon lead us a dance through a very thicket of absurdities, wherein every shred of common-sense is quickly left behind. In these matters the rule of the "premier pas" needs to be altogether reversed, for it is the later steps of the ghost- mongers which it costs us so much to follow. There must always exist for believers in the immortality of the soul a certain prima fade probability that the dead should revisit the living. The wonder, the distressing wonder, is that those who loved us so fondly but a few weeks or hours ago, and for whom vie know there can be no full joy in heaven while we are weeping below, should yet leave us in our desolation without affording us the consolation of the assurance of their existence and happi- ness and the promise of reunion. Every tale of apparition of the loving and beloved departed spirit to the surviving friend, must of necessity carry with it more of likelihood and natural- ness than even of awe. Either Love "strong as the grave" or else Repentance, and the desire to clear another of a suspected crime, or to crave for pardon, afford motives for the return of the dead, so powerful, and apparently so likely to prevail in a higher and purer state of being, that the mystery is why (supposing the soul to be free and conscious after death) we do not hear every day of ghosts appearing on such errands. Let us take, for example, an incident which the present writer found recorded almost contemporaneously among some private family memo- randa. Time Countess of Moira (daughter of Selina, Countess • Glimpses of the Supernatural. Edited by Bev. ItrederIck George Lee. D.C.L., Vicar of -All 'Sainte', Lambeth. 2 vole. London Henry S. King and Co. 18M.
of Huntingdon—the Methodist—and wife of John, first Earl of Moira), was a prominent figure in Irish society in the beginning of this century, and held hospitable house in a mansion then known as Moira House, since used as the Mendicity Institution. For some forgotten reason, Lady Moira entertained grave dis- pleasure against her younger son, Colonel Rawdon, and had not seen him for several years, when one night she beard (sleeping or waking, who shall say?) his step traversing the hall, and ascending the staircase. Presently he seemed to approach her bedroom, and knocked at the door. Lady Moira bade him enter, and Colonel Raw don came in, approached her bed, and fervently begged her for- giveness. The mother threw her arms round him and kissed him, assuring hint of her entire reconciliation, and then asked how it came to pass that he visited her at such an hour ? His reply was, "I am going a long journey, dear mother, but I could not begin it till I had asked your pardon." After this, Colonel Bowdon left the room, his steps again sounding down the corri- dors and stairs, and (as the reader will anticipate) Lady Moira shortly learned that he had died (it is believed, in England) on the night in question.
Now we may surely treat this—or the beautiful story of Miss Caroline Lee, vouched for by Bishop Warburton, or the Wynyard ghost—as typical instances of apparitions which are so far from being a priod incredible, that we want nothing but their greater frequency (to bring them under some kind of law) to make them actually antecedently probable. But by some sinister chance, these noble and worthy cases of the return of the departed are precisely the rarest of all ; and are almost lost among a mass of stories wherein the motives of the apparition are even ludicrously inappropriate to the conditions of disembodied existence. Let it be granted, frankly, that if departed spirits really return, they probably do so not by any exceptional Divine " permission "
given for adequate reason, as our fathers generally assumed, but because they are free to follow their own inclinations, —which, of course, may be elevated and dignified, or altogether the reverse. Still, unless we are willing to suppose that death indefinitely degrades, instead of raising, mankind, and even renders those who were once wise little better than fools, it is impossible to con- template the majority of ghost-stories without noticing that they harmonise with the paltry and childish imaginations of the living, far better than with any characteristics we can attribute to the dead. One of the very best authenticated ghost-stories of which we have heard, for example, is One which refers to a certain parsonage between Bath and Bristol, wherein a lady, dressed in blue, and with the most mournful countenance, has been beheld over
and over again by most respectable witnesses, affording apparently independent testimony of one another. But what is the alleged origin of this Blue Lady's grief and disquietude? Neither the desire for forgiveness of any trespasses, nor yet the love for surviving dear ones ; but intense interest in a certain store of jewels, said to have been robbed from her in that house a century ago ; and a "concern" to hover round the spot where she was murdered ! If it were treasure she herself had stolen, which she desired to restore to the heirs of the rightful owner, or her own crime of homicide to whose scene her remorseful spirit remained chained, there would be some moral verisimilitude in the tale. But what has an innocent sufferer who has been for a hundred years in the world of pardon to do with the offence of which she was so long ago only the victim ? Or what interest can a soul which has entered among the realities feel in the hiding-place of a box of trinkets ? Arc diamonds and rubies, then, of great account beyond the tomb ? Truly we should need to reverse the poet's dictum :—
"They sin who tell us Love can die ; With life all other passions fly, All others are but vanity.
In heaven Ambition cannot dwell, Nor Avarice in the vaults of hell."
If the ghostmong,ers be right, Revenge and even childish spite lire carried by ninety-nine people into Hades, for one who bears the Lore "whose holy flame for ever burneth."
Hither thus the prima facie probability that the dead may return tousle practically destroyed by the baseness of the greater number of the stories of apparitions. Even the best authenticated class 'of ghost-stories—the accounts of "fetches," or appearances of persons at the moment of their death to distant friends or acquaintances—lose much force by the singular fatality whereby such visions seem to be vouchsafed most frequently to those in whom the dead had only a secondary kind of interest, and scarcely ever to those in whom their hearts were wrapped up in the bonds of tenderest affection. A servant is reportedto have seen his master; a mistress her maid ; a nephew-his uncle ; a sailorhis fellow-taariner ; a student his tutor, and so on, ad infini- gum, and (it must be confessed) with amazing weight of testimony in favour of the reality of the impression on the mind of the seer, —if of nothing more. But when we ask ourselves to Whom would our dying spirits fly for our last glance of farewell, were we quit- ting the shores of earth, it becomes altogether absurd to imagine that We should flit about exhibiting ourselves in that supreme crisis of existence between two worlds for the benefit of such remotely concerned spectators. Thus as regards all ghost-stories, w e find that those which we would most readily believe are rarely offered for our credence, While we are overwhelmed with a mass of tales whose antecedent improbability far outweighs the slender and unsifted testimony in their favour.
In the book before us, Dr. Lee has, we think, illustrated the truth of these observations. He has collected with great industry, and recorded in a lively and interesting way, two volumes full of anecdotes, of which the vast majority assume that the dead are still animated bythOse lower pasaorts which must needs be extinct in the grave, and yet have somehow lost those nbbler and purer affections which—if anything in us can survive dissolution—must surely live for ever. There are, for example, the Chester le-Street apparition of 1632, of.the woman who could not rest till her mur- derers were hanged ; the story of the Australian grazier, to whom the ghost of his murdered partner showed the hole where his ebtpte was hid; the story of the German lady who saw the sailor- ghost in the Paris hotel ; the story of the English clergyman in Scotland in the house where a woman had been murdered ; and at least two-thirds of the stories of haunted houses which refer either to Murders or concealment of treasure. Besides these, there are indeed in these volumes a few stories—those of Captain Dyke, Nicholas Ferrier, Lord Chedworth, &e.— 'wherein the object of the returning spirit was to convert the surviving sceptical friend to a belief in a futuee life; and a few, like the Welsh ghost, and the touching story of the lady who died in Egypt, and visited her children in Torquay, wherein the 4' fad' " appeared to the nearest and most beloved relations ; or -wherein, as in the curious case of Lord Brougham's vision (authen- ticated by himself), and the Beresfbrd ghost story, there was a solemn promise to be redeemed.* But as we have remarked, the great preponderance of testimony is in favour of ghosts recalled solely by motives which it is quite incredible should really linger in a soul which has quitted for ever the petty interests of earth.
Regarding the remainder of Dr. Lee's volumes, which are filled with the Wildest histories of magic and witchcraft, we can really make no remark beyond asking the question,—Is the respected vicar himself an instance of the return of departed spirits? Surely the man who penned many of these pages must have been born, at the very latest, in the seventeenth century ?
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