The Unknown Guest | Page 6

and, as
the most violent emotion which man can undergo is that which grips
and overwhelms him at the approach or at the very moment of death, it
is nearly always this supreme emotion which he sends forth and directs
with incredible precision through space, if necessary across seas and
continents, towards an invisible and moving goal. Again, though this
occurs less frequently, a grave danger, a serious crisis can beget and
transmit to a distance a similar hallucination. This is what the S. P. R.
calls "phantasms of the living." When the hallucination takes place
some time after the decease of the person whom it seems to evoke, be
the interval long or short, it is classed among the "phantasms of the
dead."
The latter, the so-called "phantasms of the dead," are the rarest. As F.
W. H. Myers pointed out in his Human Personality, a consideration of
the proportionate number of apparitions observed at various periods
before and after death shows that they increase very rapidly for the few
hours which precede death and decrease gradually during the hours and
days which follow; while after about a year's time they become
extremely rare and exceptional.
However exceptional they may be, these apparitions nevertheless exist
and are proved, as far as anything can be proved, by abundant
testimony of a very precise character. Instances will be found in the
Proceedings, notably in vol. vi., pp. 13-65, etc.
Whether it be a case of the living, the dying, or the dead, we are

familiar with the usual form which these hallucinations take. Indeed
their main outlines hardly ever vary. Some one, in his bedroom, in the
street, on a journey, no matter where, suddenly see plainly and clearly
the phantom of a relation or a friend of whom he was not thinking at
the time and whom he knows to be thousands of miles away, in
America, Asia or Africa as the case may be, for distance does not count.
As a rule, the phantom says nothing; its presence, which is always brief,
is but a sort of silent warning. Sometimes it seems a prey to futile and
trivial anxieties. More rarely, it speaks, though saying but little after all.
More rarely still, it reveals something that has happened, a crime, a
hidden treasure of which no one else could know. But we will return to
these matters after completing this brief enumeration.
2
The phenomenon of haunted houses resembles that of the phantasms of
the dead, except that here the ghost clings to the residence, the house,
the building and in no way to the persons who inhabit it. By the second
year of its existence, that is to say, 1884, the Committee on Haunted
Houses of the S. P. R. had selected and made an analysis of some
sixty-five cases out of hundreds submitted to it, twenty-eight of which
rested upon first-hand and superior evidence.[1] It is worthy of remark,
in the first place, that these authentic narratives bear no relation
whatever to the legendary and sensational ghost-stories that still linger
in many English and American magazines, especially in the Christmas
numbers. They mention no winding-sheets, coffins, skeletons,
graveyards, no sulphurous flames, curses, blood-curdling groans, no
clanking chains, nor any of the time-honoured trappings that
characterize this rather feeble literature of the supernatural. On the
contrary, the scenes enacted in houses that appear to be really haunted
are generally very simple and insignificant, not to say dull and
commonplace. The ghosts are quite unpretentious and go to no expense
in the matter of staging or costume. They are clad as they were when,
sometimes many years ago, they led their quiet, unadventurous life
within their own home. We find in one case an old woman, with a thin
grey shawl meekly folded over her breast, who bends at night over the
sleeping occupants of her old home, or who is frequently encountered
in the hall or on the stairs, silent, mysterious, a little grim. Or else it is
the gentleman with a lacklustre eye and a figured dressing-gown who

walks along a passage brilliantly illuminated with an inexplicable light.
Or again we have another elderly lady, dressed in black, who is often
found seated in the bay window of her drawing-room. When spoken to,
she rises and seems on the point of replying, but says nothing. When
pursued or met in a corner, she eludes all contact and vanishes. Strings
are fastened across the staircase with glue; she passes and the strings
remain as they were. The ghost--and this happens in the majority of
cases--is seen by all the people staying in the house: relatives, friends,
old servants and new. Can it be a matter of suggestion, of collective
hallucination? At any rate, strangers, visitors who have had nothing
said