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Since the first edition of this book appeared (1897) a considerablenumber of new and startling ghost stories, British, Foreign and Colonial,not yet published, have reached me. Second Sight abounds. Crystal Gazing has also advanced in popularity. For a singularseries of such visions, in which distant persons and places, unknownto the gazer, were correctly described by her, I may refer to my book,The Making of Religion (1898). A memorial stone has beenerected on the scene of the story called “The Foul Fords”(p. 269), so that tale is likely to endure in tradition.
July, 1899.
The chief purpose of this book is, if fortune helps, to entertainpeople interested in the kind of narratives here collected. Forthe sake of orderly arrangement, the stories are classed in differentgrades, as they advance from the normal and familiar to the undeniablystartling. At the same time an account of the current theoriesof Apparitions is offered, in language as free from technicalities aspossible. According to modern opinion every “ghost”is a “hallucination,” a false perception, the perceptionof something which is not present.
It has not been thought necessary to discuss the psychological andphysiological processes involved in perception, real or false. Every “hallucination” is a perception, “as good andtrue a sensation as if there were a real object there. The objecthappens not to be there, that is all.” {0a} We are not here concerned with the visions of insanity, delirium, drugs,drink, remorse, or anxiety, but with “sporadic cases of hallucination,visiting people only once in a lifetime, which seems to be by far themost frequent type”. “These,” says Mr. James,“are on any theory hard to understand in detail. They areoften extraordinarily complete; and the fact that many of them are reportedas veridical, that is, as coinciding with real events, such asaccidents, deaths, etc., of the persons seen, is an additional complicationof the phenomenon.” {0b} A ghost, if seen, is undeniably so far a “hallucination”that it gives the impression of the presence of a real person, in flesh,blood, and usually clothes. No such person in flesh, blood, andclothes, is actually there. So far, at least, every ghost is ahallucination, “that” in the language of CaptainCuttle, “you may lay to,” without offending science, religion,or common-sense. And that, in brief, is the modern doctrine ofghosts.
The old doctrine of “ghosts” regarded them as actual“spirits” of the living or the dead, freed from the fleshor from the grave. This view, whatever else may be said for it,represents the simple philosophy of the savage, which may be corrector erroneous. About the time of the Reformation, writers, especiallyProtestant writers, preferred to look on apparitions as the work ofdeceitful devils, who masqueraded in the aspect of the dead or living,or made up phantasms out of “compressed air”. Thecommon-sense of the eighteenth century dismissed all apparitions as“dreams” or hoaxes, or illusions caused by real objectsmisinterpreted, such as rats, cats, white posts, maniacs at large, sleep-walkers,thieves, and so forth. Modern science, when it admits the possibilityof occasional hallucinations in the sane and healthy, also admits, ofcourse, the existence of apparitions. These, for our purposes,are hallucinatory appearances occurring in the experience of peoplehealthy and sane. The difficulty begins when we ask whether theseappearances ever have any provokin