GHOSTS

Otago Witness, Issue 3772, 29 June 1926, Page 77

GHOSTS

By

Colonel Arthur Lynch.

(Fob th* Witness.) XXII. One of the best things I know about ghosts is the reply, of Coleridge, the poet, when he was asked if he believed in them. “No,” lie replied, “I have seen too many.” His opium-steeped brain must often have conjured up these eerie visitants, but he was intelligent enough to see that they had no external, or as one should say, “objective,” existence. That is the proper attitude to take up with regard to ghosts, for it is of no use to deny their existence to the man who has actually seen one. If he be intelligent, we may hope to persuade him that the appearance was entirely subjective—that is to say, caused not by an external reality, but produced by processes taking place within his own brain. If he be not intelligent, then the proper attitude depends to some extent on time and place. I was once talking with a young Irishman on a lonely road in the dusk, when lie said in a casual tone: “1 saw a ghost yesterday. An old woman came before me in the middle of the road not far from here, and then she hopped over the hedge; I often see her.” The situation that I took in at once included the fact that he was a tall, broad-shouldered, husky fellow, that I never had great faith in his mental balance, and that we were on a lonely road. I displayed enough interest in his remark to content him, but not enough to excite his imagination, and for the rest of the journey I followed the book of etiquette, which tells us to “make cheerful conversation,” and this I kept up till my hotel hove in sight. Now that man really did see a ghost —that is to say, there was an appearance of the kind, but had any normal person been then and there present also the ghost would not have been visible to him. It was subjective. Huxley tells of a lady friend of his who, when sitting quietly by the fireside, used to see a cat near by. She was an educated woman, and not a fool, and so she recognised that the cat had no objective existence; she treated it as a trick of her own mind, and it was not particularly detrimental. But all apparitions, the most banal or the most extraordinary and terrifying, are of that category. The fact is that in ordinary vision we do not see anything like the fullness and detail which we accept. There comes into our vision a horse’s head, a vague shape of a body, some part of the harness, and a couple of indistinct wheels, and the outline of a carriage; we say we have seen a horse and carriage, and in our imagination the details are completed. Numerous experiments in the field of phychologv have been carried out to prove this point; and if this simple matter be understood we will gain an inkling as to how the belief in ghosts arises.

Sir Walter Scott, once looking down his ball at the armour of an old knight, thought he saw Lord Byron; his “imagination” had filled in outlines by reason of the stimulation of what was actually there. It is in states of severe strain, mental and physical, coupled with anxiety or with some unusual exaltation that one is most apt to see ghosts. Anyone may be trained to see ghosts if they will go through an appropriate regime—semi-starvation, prolonged strain under stimulation, unusual suggestions, with appropriate time and place. What are we to do with ghosts? 1 am reminded of a story of Mr Yeats, the Irish poet, who once, when at a party in Oxford, said that he did not like a certain person, gave as his reason that when this person walked little green elephants came out under his feet. “Oh, yes,” said one of the bright young men present, “we all know that, but it is only his way!”