One instance occurred some years ago. It was in my bedroom at Crowborough. I wakened in the night with the clear consciousness that there was someone in the room, and that the presence was not of this world. I was lying with my back to the room, acutely awake, but utterly unable to move. It was physically impossible for me to turn my body and face this visitor. I heard measured steps across the room. I was conscious (without seeing it) that someone was bending over me, and then I heard a voice saying in a loud whisper, “Doyle, I come to tell you that I am sorry.” A minute later my disability disappeared, and I was able to turn, but all was black darkness and perfectly still. My wife had not awakened, and knew nothing of what had passed.
It was no dream, I was perfectly conscious all the time. My visitor gave no name, but I felt that it was a certain individual to whom I had tried to give psychic consolation when he was bereaved. He rejected my advances with some contempt and died himself shortly afterwards. It may well be that he wished to express regret. As to my own paralysis it came, I have no doubt, from the fact that the power for the manifestation had been drawn out of ME. When spirit manifests upon the physical plane it has to draw its matter from a material source, and I was the obvious one. It is the one occasion upon which I have been used as a physical medium, and I am content that it should be the last.
I had a second interesting experience some years ago. There was a church in the neighbourhood which had the reputation of being haunted. There are reasons why it would be wrong for me to indicate it more precisely. The party consisted of my wife and myself, my two sons, my daughter, a friend, and a young London lady who is among our rising poets. It was ten o’clock when we presented ourselves at the door of the church, where we were met by an elderly villager. Swinging a lantern he led the way to the choir end, where we all seated ourselves in the stalls which the ancient monks once occupied. My own very angular throne was that which had been used by many priors, in far-off days when the old church was one of the shrines of England. Opposite me, and dimly lit by the lantern, was the altar, and behind it a blank wall unbroken by any window, but reflecting strange ghostly shadows and illuminations through the high clerestory windows on either side. When the lantern was extinguished and we sat in the darkness watching these strange shifting lights coming and going, the impression was quite ghostly enough, though I have no doubt at all that there was a physical cause, due to some reflection of passing lights in the distance. It was, however, sufficiently weird.
For two hours I had sat in the dark upon my hard seat, and wondered whether cushions were vouchsafed to the priors of old. The lights still came and went behind the altar, but they only flickered over the top of the high expanse which faced us, and all below was very black. And then suddenly, quite suddenly, there came that which no scepticism could explain away. It may have been forty feet from where I sat to the altar, and midway between, or roughly twenty feet from me, there was a dull haze of light, a sort of phosphorescent cloud, a foot or so across, and about a man’s height from the ground. We had been rustling and whispering, but the sudden utter silence showed me that my companions were as tense as I was. The light glimmered down, and hardened into a definite shape — or I should say shapes — since there were two of them. They were two perfectly clear-cut figures in black and white, with a dim luminosity of their own. The colouring and arrangement gave me a general idea of cassocks and surplices. Whether they were facing the altar or facing each other, was more than I could say, but they were not misty figures, but solid objective shapes. For two or three minutes we all gazed at this amazing spectacle. Then my wife said loudly, “Friends, is there anything which we can do to help you?” In an instant they were gone, and we were peering into unbroken darkness with the lights still flickering above.
Personally, I saw no more, but those of our party who sat upon the right, said that they could afterwards see a similar figure, but somewhat taller — a man alone — who stood on the left of the altar. For my own part nothing more occurred, and when midnight tolled forth above our heads, I thought it was time to make for the waiting motor.
Such was our experience. There was no possible room for error. Unquestionably we all saw these figures, and equally unquestionably the figures were not of this world. I was full of curiosity to know more of the matter, and presently my desire was gratified, for there came into my Psychic Bookshop a gentleman, Mr. Munro, who had had a similar experience some years before in the same place. He was possessed, however, of the great gift of clairvoyance, and his adventure was by day light, so that it was far more definite. He was going round the old church when he was suddenly aware of an ancient monk who was walking by his side, and he knew by his own sensations that it was a clairvoyant vision. The man was middle sized, with a keen, aristocratic, hawk-like face. So clear was he that Mr. Munro remembered how the sunlight shone upon the arched bone of his prominent nose. He walked for some time beside Mr. Munro, and he then vanished. What is noticeable is that he was wearing a gown of a peculiar tint of yellow. Some little time afterwards my informant was present at Bernard Shaw’s noble play of “Saint Joan.” In one act an English monk appears upon the stage. My friend instantly said to his wife, “That is the dress. That is what the dead man wore.” Mrs. Munro, who was in the shop at the time, confirmed this. I may say that they had broached the subject before I had told them of our own experience in the old church.
Then again there came yet another light upon the matter. It was, strange to say, in an Australian paper which was sent to me. It gave an account of the old church, and of the ghosts which haunt it. The chief spirit, the one with the masterful face, was, according to this narrative, the head of the community in the time of Henry the Eighth. He had hid some of the treasures of the church to prevent their spoliation, and his spirit was still earth-bound on account of his solicitude over these buried relics. His name was given, and it was stated that he had shown himself to many visitors. If this account be indeed true, then I should think that the spot in front of the altar, where we saw first the light, and then the two draped figures, might very possibly be worth the attention of the explorer.
I joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1893 or 1894 and must now be one of the oldest members. Shortly afterwards I was asked to form one of a small party to inspect a house at Charmouth. It was said to be haunted.
Dr. Scott of Norwood and Mr. Podmore, a determined and very unreasonable opponent of spiritualism, were my companions. The evidence in the case was so voluminous that it took us the whole of our railway journey to master it. It consisted mainly of a record of senseless noises which made the place hardly habitable for the unfortunate family who had it on a lease and could not afford to abandon it.
They proved to be charming people. An elderly mother, a grown-up son and a married daughter.
The house was a rambling place, a couple of centuries old. We sat up for two nights. On the first nothing occurred. On the second Dr. Scott left us, and I sat alone with Mr. Podmore and the young man. We had, of course, taken every precaution to checkmate fraud, put worsted thread across the stairs, and so on.
We had just begun to think that the second night would be as blank as the first and the ladies had already gone to bed when a fearsome noise broke out. It was like someone whacking a table with a heavy stick. The door of the sitting-room was open and the noise reverberated down the passage.
We rushed into the kitchen from which the sound appeared to come, but there was nothing to be seen there, and the threads on the stair were unbroken. The others returned to the sitting-room, but I remained waiting in the dark in the hope that the noise would break out once more. There was, however, no return and we were never able to cast a light upon the mystery. We could only say that what we had heard corroborated, up to a point, what we had read in the account of the disturbances.
There was, however, a curious sequel. Within a year or so the house was burnt down, which may or may not have had a connection with the mischievous sprite who appeared to ha
unt it. A suggestive thing, however, was that the skeleton of a child about ten years old was dug up in the garden. This I had from relatives of the family who were so plagued.
Some people think that a young life cut short in an unnatural fashion may leave, as it were, a store of unused vitality which may be put to strange uses.
I was never asked by the Society for a report of this case, but Podmore sent one in, ascribing the noises to the young man, though as a matter of fact, he was actually sitting with us in the parlour when the trouble began. Therefore, the explanation given by Podmore was absolutely impossible. I think that if we desire truth we should not only be critical of all psychic assertions, but equally so of all so-called exposures in this subject. I am sorry to say that in some cases the exposure means downright fraud upon the part of the critic.
One other curious experience comes back to my memory. Shortly after the War I had a letter from the widow of a distinguished soldier living at Alton, Hampshire, in which she stated that her life was made miserable by a noisy haunting of her house, which frightened the children and drove away the servants.
I visited her, however, to see what I could do. She had taken it as a furnished house with a lease of some years, and it was impossible for her to leave it.
I found that the lady was, herself, very psychic, and had the power of automatic writing. Through this it was that she received the name of the entity which haunted the house and she assured me that on making inquiries she found, after some time, that a person of that name had actually inhabited the house some sixty years before. On asking him why his spirit should be so restless she received the answer that some papers about which he was anxious were concealed in the rafters of the box-room.
This message had actually just come through and the box-room had not yet been explored. It was a terrible place, thick with dust and piled with all kinds of lumber, and for an hour or more, in my shirt and trousers, I crawled about under the rafters looking for these papers. I observed, however, that at some period, a bell wire had been passed along there, and it was clear to me that the men who fixed the wire would certainly have come upon any concealed packet. I therefore, made my way back to the sitting-room in a shocking state of dust and perspiration and then and there the lady and I held a table-sitting in which I addressed the unseen entity and explained to him that the papers, if they had ever been there, were certainly gone.
I remonstrated with him for the trouble which he had given to the household and I begged him to think no more of his worldly affairs, but to attune his mind to the higher life. When I asked him if he would do so the table spelt D.V.
I am conscious that this is very vague and open to criticism, but the direct sequel of it all was that from that day onwards the trouble entirely ceased, and the lady was able to write and to assure me that the atmosphere of her house had changed to one of deep peace.
Thus my visit to Alton was not entirely in vain.
VIII
DWELLERS ON THE BORDER
[Footnote: An expansion of this general argument is to be found in The Coming of the Fairies (Psychic Press, 2 Victoria Street, W.) ]
I propose in this essay to discuss the evidence for the existence of elemental forms of life, invisible to the normal eye, which inhabit the same planet as ourselves. It seems to me that our knowledge of the ether vibrations which govern wireless are a great help to us in this connection, and that we can readily understand now what would have been incomprehensible, because there was no existing analogy, a few years ago. Let us suppose that the London centre was the only one known, and that we were in touch with it through our own receiving apparatus. That represents our reaction to the material world and normally we know of no other, just as the wireless recipient would know only London. But we find that by a very small change of vibration or wave-length we get Paris, Berlin, or Constantinople, and London has vanished. Now if we apply that to psychic vibrations the analogy seems to me very close. As Paracelsus said, “Ut infra, ita supra” (As it is below so it is above). A uniformity runs through the scheme of creation. The clairvoyant whose various powers of receptivity enable him to contact different types of extra-corporeal creatures, corresponds to the man who can switch from one centre to another, and he has the same difficulty in getting his results accepted as the owner of a wave-adjustment set would have if all the normal world was confined to one vibration.
To vary the simile, we are accustomed to the idea of amphibious creatures who may dwell unseen and unknown in the depths of the waters, and then some day be spied sunning themselves upon a sandbank, whence they slip into the unseen once more. If such appearances were rare, and if it should so happen that some saw them more clearly than others, then a very pretty controversy would arise, for the sceptics would say with every show of reason, “Our experience is that only land creatures live on the land, and we utterly refuse to believe in things which slip in and out of the water; if you will demonstrate them to us we will begin to consider the question.” Faced by so reasonable an opposition the others could only mutter that they had seen them with their eyes, but that they could not command their movements. The sceptics would hold the field.
Something of the sort may exist in our psychic arrangements. One can well imagine that there is a dividing line, like the water edge, this line depending upon what we vaguely call a higher rate of vibrations. Taking the vibration theory as a working hypothesis, one could conceive that by raising or lowering them, creatures could move from one side to the other of this line of material visibility, as the tortoise moves from the water to the land, returning for refuge to invisibility as the reptile scuttles back to the surf. This, of course, is supposition, but intelligent supposition based on the available evidence is the pioneer of science, and it may be that the actual solution will be found in this direction. I am alluding, now, not to spirit return, where eighty years of close observation have given us some sort of certain and definite laws, but rather of those fairy and phantom phenomena which have been endorsed by so many ages, and even in these material days seem to break into some lives in the most unexpected fashion. Victorian science would have left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon, but this science is in truth but a little light in the darkness, and outside that limited circle of definite knowledge we see the loom and shadow of gigantic and fantastic possibilities around us, throwing themselves continually across our consciousness in such ways that it is difficult to ignore them.
There is much curious evidence of varying value concerning these borderland forms, which come or go either in fact or imagination — the latter most frequently no doubt. And yet there remains a residue which by all human standards should point to occasional facts. I pass in this essay the age-long tradition which is so universal and consistent, and come down to some modern instances which make one feel that this world is very much more complex than we had imagined, and that there may be upon its surface some very strange neighbours who will open up inconceivable lines of science for our posterity, especially if it should be made easier for them, by sympathy or other help, to emerge from the deep and manifest upon the margin.
Taking a large number of cases of fairy lore which lie before me, there are two points which are common to nearly all of them. One is that children claim to see these creatures far more frequently than adults. This may possibly come from greater sensitiveness of apprehension, or it may depend upon these little entities having less fear of molestation from the children. The other is that more cases are recorded in which they have been seen in the still shimmering hours of a very hot day than at any other time. “The action of the sun upon the brain,” the sceptic says. Possibly — and also possibly not. If it were a question of raising the slower vibrations of our surroundings one could imagine that still heat would be the very condition which might favour such a change. What is the mirage of the desert? What is that scene of hills and lakes which a whole caravan can see while it faces in a direction where for a thousand miles of desert th
ere is neither hill nor lake, nor any cloud or moisture to produce refraction? I can ask the question but I do not venture to give an answer. It is clearly a phenomenon which is not to be confused with the erect or often inverted image which is seen in a land of clouds and of moisture.
There are many people who have a recollection of these experiences of their youth and try afterwards to explain them away on material grounds which do not seem adequate or reasonable. Thus in his excellent book on Folklore the Rev. S. Baring-Gould gives us a personal experience which illustrates several of the points already mentioned.
“In the year 1838,” he says, “when I was a small boy, four years old, we were driving to Montpelier on a hot summer day over the long straight road that traverses a pebble and rubble-strewn plain on which grows nothing save a few aromatic herbs. I was sitting on the box with my father when to my great surprise I saw legions of dwarfs of about two feet high running along beside the horses — some sat laughing on the pole, some were scrambling up the harness to get on the backs of the horses. I remarked to my father what I saw, when he abruptly stopped the carriage and put me inside beside my mother, where, the conveyance being closed, I was out of the sun. The effect was that little by little the host of imps diminished in numbers till they disappeared altogether.”
Here certainly the advocates of sunstroke have a strong though by no means a final case. Mr. Baring-Gould’s next illustration is a stronger one.
“When my wife was a girl of fifteen,” he says, “she was walking down a lane in Yorkshire between green hedges, when she saw seated in one of the privet hedges a little green man, perfectly well made, who looked at her with his beady, black eyes. He was about a foot or fifteen inches high. She was so frightened that she ran home. She remembers that it was a summer day.”
Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated) Page 1383