The Epworth Phenomena | Page 3

be expected, there are slight variations from the earlier narratives, but the variations are surprisingly small and non-essential. Comparison of these earlier and later accounts is sufficient to assure us that the people concerned were not of very imaginative temperament, or they would have embroidered their recollections more. And of course even when they do refer to something which was not mentioned in the earlier accounts, we cannot be sure that the new detail is a trick of the creative faculty-a hallucination of memory-for it might have been overlooked and omitted in the first instance. The authors of those early documents did not write them with the anticipation that they would be subjected to the analysis of an S.P.R. They were writing to son and brother at a time when correspondence was a slow and tedious and rather uncommon task, and we cannot assume that the letters described everything that happened. In fact it is clear that they did not. But the point is that in essentials the later accounts give quite satisfactory corroboration of the earlier ones.
3. Second-hand contemporary accounts, as when Emily Wesley says that Hetty heard something like a man trailing a loose nightgown coming down the stairs behind her. This kind of evidence, though Possibly true, must be regarded as much weaker than (1) and (2), being one remove further away from actual experience.
The Wesley family at home Consisted of the parents and seven daughters (two being young children, Patty and Keziah), with a man-servant and maid. Mr. Podmore dwelt on the fact that of the Wesley adults Hetty is the only one who has left no written record, though the phenomena tended to happen more particularly in her vicinity. But it is rather absurd to regard this as a suspicious fact. The narratives were written mostly as letters to the brothers Samuel and John, and there is nothing surprising in one member of the household being a bad correspondent. I know one member of a family of two who never writes to-day what can be put off till to-morrow. And it is likely that Hetty Wesley, aged nineteen, if she wrote any letters at all, would find more appreciative correspondents than her own brothers.
The witnesses being numerous and-as even Mr. Podmore admits-sober-minded, and quick to write their accounts almost contemporaneously with the experiences, we are not justified in any hasty assumption of undiscovered trickery, and we naturally ask, "Do these things occur at other times and places?" If they do, and trickery is still undiscovered, the Wesley evidence Will seem stronger, the antecedent improbability being lessened. And this is what we do find. Without insisting on the Cock Lane (London) ghost of 1762,* or the Stockwell disturbances of 1772, described in Mrs. Crowe's Night Side of Nature, or the bell-ringing at Bealings, Suffolk, at the residence of Major Moor, F.R.S., who described them and was convinced of supernormal agency-without dwelling on these and many others that could be mentioned, we may come down to more recent times and more stringent methods, and still find the things happening, and happening inexplicably.
* Cock Lane and Common Sense by Andrew Lang.
There was a case at Worksop in 1883. Tables moved, candles Were Upset, knives, forks, and crockery were thrown about, damage to the extent of ��9 being done, footsteps were heard, bottles jumped four feet into the air, basins rose slowly and sailed up and down with a "wobbling" motion, and so forth. The Society for Psychical Research heard of these doings, and Mr. Podmore visited the scene of action. Apparently the phenomena had then ceased, but Mr. Podmore interviewed eleven eye-witnesses, and it is amusing to note how even the champion sceptic was nonplussed.* The witnesses were impressive in their intelligence and apparent honesty, and there had not been much time for exaggeration by tricks of memory, for Mr. Podmore'e visit was on April 7, and the phenomena had begun early in March. Six of the seven, principal eye-witnesses were interrogated separately, and the minor discrepancies in their accounts were no greater than would be expected in descriptions by different people of any ordinary event. At first Mr. Podmore was inclined to suspect the owner of the house; but this became untenable, when it was proved that he was not always present when the phenomena occurred. Moreover, there seemed no reason why he should smash his own crockery to the value of ��9. Later, Mr. Podmore finds his usual naughty little girl, Eliza Rose, daughter of an imbecile mother, and thinks that she may have done it somehow, though not one of the, eye-witnesses would allow that either the girl or the owner of the house could have been the cause, or that any normal explanation would suffice. Mr. Podmore admits that this case "is one of