GHOSTS

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21886, 12 September 1936, Page 17

GHOSTS

SUPERNATURAL FEARS

(arECIALLT WHITTEN EOE THE P 8835.)

IBy W.E.M.]

I once woke up to the music of a cat fight under my bed. For the space of a minute I was back in the cradle of my species; witches and warlocks were more real than the twentieth century and progress; and even when every available missile had sent two grey' shadowy forms in headlong rout, it seemed impossible that mere animals should have produced such extraordinary sounds. It is a strange thing, this fear of the supernatural that we all feel sometimes. It is intelligible that we should be roused by the blood and revolvers of a conventional thriller. We know that such things exist in real life, and it is not absolutely impossible that we should one day be involved in them; we read with a painful anxiety, hoping that by vicarious experience we may avoid the blunders and disasters to which all heroes seem inevitably subject.

But why should we feel the same thrill when black magic takes the place of the pldts of international criminals? Reason and experience alike cry out that such things cannot be; but we are more scared than ever. What is based on reason can be met by reason; what has been experienced before can be endured again; but this is a new and mysterious region, where we can never be at home.

By her denial, reason only sets herself a fresh problem. When we read of danger by sea or land, or love or hate, or any of the myriad things that we find in books, the author is working on something which is already in us; we say to ourselves. “Yes, that is it; that is the feeling I have known.” Here — if we are to believe reason —the thing he works on has no real existence, yet the thrill is more real than ever; can an arrangement of words in a book have power to create? A certain man went to a seance. It had Deen announced that the medium would put the enquirer in touch with his friends in the spirit world, besides giving him an outline of his character and a list of the more important events which he was to meet in the course of the next few months. To do so she required to have in her hand some article which he had worn recently; so the man put a tie in an envelope (it happened to be a black one) and handed it up to the platform. The service was free: but there was a collecting box at the door. In earlier days, one may recall in passing, the ghosts were more exacting before thev would speak with living men. When Odysseus went to consult the soul of Theban Teiresias, he sailed out over the river Oceanus until he came to the land of th? dead. Then he drew his sword and with it he dug a pit; and into it he poured offerings, milk and honey, and wine, and water, and sprinkled white barley above. Then, after prayer to the souls of the dead, he took sheep and cut their throats, so that the dark blood flowed into the pit. And the souls flocked up from Hades, and when they had drunk of the offering they spoke with him.

But at this seance there was nothing of the sort. In due course the prophetess held up his tie; the man held up his hand, sheepishly. First she told him his character; she told it well, so well that to this day he blushes to recall it—perhaps she had observed that he was not an initiate and thought him fair game. So far she was victorious; had she stopped there she would have won the match. But she was ambitious. “There is a spirit here.” she said, “with a square beard. Do you know who he is?” “My grandfather has a square beqrd,” the man replied; “but I did not know that he was dead.”

“Well, he is,” said she, “and he wants to talk to you.” And talk he did, as spirits do at seances. Now it happened that the man was in New Zealand and his grandfather was in England. A cablegram would have settled the matter promptly; but he decided to wait for a letter. It came in time; and his grandfather was still alive. It must have been someone else’s grandfather. But in the meantime he had told the tale to an old friend of the family who was living in New Zealand at the time, and she had been much impressed.

About a year later, the grandfather died; he was ripe old age, and his end was peaceful. And when the friend learnt of it, she said, “Well! Ever since you told me about that seance. ‘I felt sure that something was going to happen.”

Now this is sad reasoning—unless indeed thfe journey to the other side is a very lengthy one—but I have never heard of a ghost appearing a year before his death. Is it of such stuff that believers are made? Are our heads filled with such a whirling mass of magazine stories and arguments that we cannot distinguish fallacy from logic? When judge and jury pit witness against witness, sift out the truth by all the science of law, we know that they sometimes make mistakes. When a man reads a ghost story, and through lapse of time his memory gets muddled, so that he thinks it happened to himself; when he tells it to a friend, and that friend to another friend, and in time the tale reaches us, then we say, “there must be something in it.” It is easy to be sceptical, hard to be certain. Before the days of science—Greek science—all human opinions were a chaos of prejudice or faith; this is its last stronghold. We like our world to be orderly. If only Aristotle had thought it worthy of a treatise! Then it would have taken its place among modern sciences; we should at least have had a standard bf orthodoxy, firm ground from which to start discussion-

We swing like a pendulum from prejudice to prejudice. We think of the extremest forms of good and ill which we have seen or heard of; above and below us, there is an immeasurable distance on the scale of infinity. We think of the world that physicists describe; in the atoms of the densest metals, tiny points of energy swing in an ocean of void. In the interstices of the space which we inhabit, there is room for a myriad worlds—can we believe that space is for us alone? Man has a busy brain; its destiny and duty is to find out all things. Some day we shall know.