exist on
its own when the body was destroyed? Not only did impressions come
from a distance in the case of those who were just dead, but the same
evidence proved that actual appearances of the dead person came with
them, showing that the impressions were carried by something which was
exactly like the body, and yet acted independently and survived the
death of the body. The chain of evidence between the simplest cases of
thought-reading at one end, and the actual manifestation of the spirit
independently of the body at the other, was one unbroken chain, each
phase leading to the other, and this fact seemed to me to bring the
first signs of systematic science and order into what had been a mere
collection of bewildering and more or less unrelated facts.

About this time I had an interesting experience, for I was one of three
delegates sent by the Psychical Society to sit up in a haunted house.
It was one of these poltergeist cases, where noises and foolish tricks
had gone on for some years, very much like the classical case of John
Wesley's family at Epworth in 1726, or the case of the Fox family at
Hydesville near Rochester in 1848, which was the starting-point of
modern spiritualism. Nothing sensational came of our journey, and yet
it was not entirely barren. On the first night nothing occurred. On
the second, there were tremendous noises, sounds like someone beating a
table with a stick. We had, of course, taken every precaution, and we
could not explain the noises; but at the same time we could not swear
that some ingenious practical joke had not been played upon us. There
the matter ended for the time. Some years afterwards, however, I met a
member of the family who occupied the house, and he told me that after
our visit the bones of a child, evidently long buried, had been dug up
in the garden. You must admit that this was very remarkable. Haunted
houses are rare, and houses with buried human beings in their gardens
are also, we will hope, rare. That they should have both united in one
house is surely some argument for the truth of the phenomena. It is
interesting to remember that in the case of the Fox family there was
also some word of human bones and evidence of murder being found in the
cellar, though an actual crime was never established. I have little
doubt that if the Wesley family could have got upon speaking terms with
their persecutor, they would also have come upon some motive for the
persecuti