Real Ghost Stories | Page 4

air, and will be discussed and is being discussed, whether we take notice of it or not. That it has its dangers those who have studied it most closely are most aware, but these dangers will exist in any case, and if those who ought to guide are silent, these perils will be encountered without the safeguards which experience would dictate and prudence suggest. It seems to me that it would be difficult to do better service in this direction than to strengthen the hands of those who have for many years past been trying to rationalise the consideration of the Science of Ghosts.
It is idle to say that this should be left for experts. We live in a democratic age and we democratise everything. It is too late in the day to propose to place the whole of this department under the care of any Brahmin caste; the subject is one which every common man and woman can understand. It is one which comes home to every human being, for it adds a new interest to life, and vivifies the sombre but all-pervading problem of death.
W. T. Stead.
London, 1891.

CONTENTS
PAGE

Part I.--The Ghost That Dwells in Each of Us.

Chapter I.
The Unconscious Personality 17
" II. Louis V. and His Two Souls 32
" III. Madame B. and Her Three Souls 45
" IV. Some Suggested Theories 52

Part II.--The Thought Body, or the Double.

Chapter I.
Aerial Journeyings 56
" II. The Evidence of the Psychical Research Society 72
" III. Aimless Doubles 86
" IV. The Hypnotic Key 101

Part III.--Clairvoyance.--The Vision of the Out of Sight.

Chapter I.
The Astral Camera 108
" II. Tragic Happenings Seen in Dreams 127
" III. My Own Experience 141

Part IV.--Premonitions and Second Sight.

Chapter I.
My Own Extraordinary Premonitions 145
" II. Warnings Given in Dreams 160
" III. Premonitory Warnings 179
" IV. Some Historical and Other Cases 192

Part V.--Ghosts of the Living on Business.

Chapter I.
Warnings of Peril and Death 199
" II. A Dying Double Demands its Portraits! 211

Part VI.--Ghosts Keeping Promise.

Chapter I.
My Irish Friend 222
" II. Lord Brougham's Testimony 231
Appendix.--Some Historical Ghosts 240

REAL GHOST STORIES.


PART I.
THE GHOST THAT DWELLS IN EACH OF US.
Chapter I.
The Unconscious Personality.
"Real Ghost Stories!--How can there be real ghost stories when there are no real ghosts?"
But are there no real ghosts? You may not have seen one, but it does not follow that therefore they do not exist. How many of us have seen the microbe that kills? There are at least as many persons who testify they have seen apparitions as there are men of science who have examined the microbe. You and I, who have seen neither, must perforce take the testimony of others. The evidence for the microbe may be conclusive, the evidence as to apparitions may be worthless; but in both cases it is a case of testimony, not of personal experience.
The first thing to be done, therefore, is to collect testimony, and by way of generally widening the mind and shaking down the walls of prejudice which lead so many to refuse to admit the clearest possible evidence as to facts which have not occurred within their personal experience, I preface the report of my "Census of Hallucinations" or personal experiences of the so-called supernatural by a preliminary chapter on the perplexing subject of "Personality." This is the question that lies at the root of all the controversy as to ghosts. Before disputing about whether or not there are ghosts outside of us, let us face the preliminary question, whether we have not each of us a veritable ghost within our own skin?
Thrilling as are some of the stories of the apparitions of the living and the dead, they are less sensational than the suggestion made by hypnotists and psychical researchers of England and France, that each of us has a ghost inside him. They say that we are all haunted by a Spiritual Presence, of whose existence we are only fitfully and sometimes never conscious, but which nevertheless inhabits the innermost recesses of our personality. The theory of these researchers is that besides the body and the mind, meaning by the mind the Conscious Personality, there is also within our material frame the soul or Unconscious Personality, the nature of which is shrouded in unfathomable mystery. The latest word of advanced science has thus landed us back to the apostolic assertion that man is composed of body, soul and spirit; and there are some who see in the scientific doctrine of the Unconscious Personality a welcome confirmation from an unexpected quarter of the existence of the soul.
The fairy tales of science are innumerable, and, like the fairy tales of old romance, they are not lacking in the grim, the tragic, and even the horrible. Of recent years nothing has so fascinated the imagination even of the least imaginative of men as the theory of disease which transforms every drop