The Psychical Researchers Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist | Page 5

have just
described."
Myself. "He has probably been investigating the habits of the
Australian aborigines."
Spirit. "What are they?"
Myself. "Men, or, as you would say, spirits, like us in a few respects,
but utterly different in most."
Spirit. "Have you ever seen them?"
Myself. "No."
Spirit. "Or met anyone who has?"
Myself. "No."
Spirit. "Then this account of them tallies with nothing in your
experience."
Myself. "No, but they exist all right. There's no doubt of that."
Spirit. "I question it. In any case, I could not accept your word as
evidence, seeing that you have neither seen them yourself nor met with
anyone who has."
And so on, you know (the Researcher muttered, flicking over the pages
of his note-book).
He was infernally sceptical about those aborigines. It seems that he had

had a tremendous argument with the other investigator about the
possibility of "spirits" being black and naked, and he was dead set on
proving that he had been right. I think, as a matter of fact, that what I
said tended to confirm him in his theory. He put it that if there were
such spirits on this plane, I must have seen them or have had some
quite first-hand evidence of their existence; and when I said that I had
seen black people, Indians, and so on, he cross-examined me until I got
confused. You see, I had to confess that they weren't, strictly speaking,
black, that they wore clothes, and washed, and lived in houses; and he
got me involved in apparent contradictions--you have no idea how easy
it is, when you are trying to be very lucid--and then he changed the
subject with the remark that I was a very poor witness.
It was about this time that I began to lose my temper. It was after three
o'clock when we got to that point, and I was getting very tired, and,
strange as it may appear, curiously doubtful about my own existence. I
had for some time been coming to the conclusion that he did not quite
believe in my reality; and after he had dismissed my account of the
black races as being untrustworthy, he said, half to himself, that quite
probably I was nothing more than an hallucination, a thought projection
of his own mind. And after that I got more and more annoyed--partly, I
think, because I had a kind of haunting fear that what he had said might
be true. When you have been talking to a spirit for over three hours in
the middle of the night, you are liable to doubt anything.
But it was foolish of me to try and prove to him that I had a real
objective existence, because obviously it wasn't possible. I tried to
touch him, and my hand went through him as if he were nothing more
than a patch of mist. Then I got right out of bed and moved various
articles about the room, but, as he said, that proved nothing, for if he
had an hallucination about me, he might equally well have one about
the things I appeared to move. And then we drifted into a futile
argument as to what I looked like.
It began as a sort of test, to try if my own conception of myself tallied
with his; and it didn't--not in the very least. In fact, the description he
gave of me would have done very well for the typical goblin of

fairy-tale, which, as I told him, was precisely how I saw him. He
laughed at that, and told me that, as a matter of fact, he had no shape at
all, and that my conception of him proved his description of me was the
correct one, because I had visualised myself. He said that he would
appear to me in any shape that I happened to be thinking of, and
naturally I should be thinking of my own. And I could not disprove a
thing he said; and when I looked at myself in the cheval glass, I was not
at all sure that I did not look like the traditional goblin.
Well, I assure you that I felt just then as if the one possible way left to
demonstrate my sanity, my very existence, was to lose my temper; and
I did it very thoroughly. I raved up and down the room, knocked the
furniture about, chucked my boots through him, and called him a
damned elemental. And although it had no more effect upon him than if
I had been in another world--as I suppose in a sense I actually was--that
outbreak did help to restore my sanity.
Perhaps you may have noticed that if a man is worsted in an argument
he invariably loses his temper? It is