there is certainly no scientific evidence of the fact. The Psychical
Society, which has faced some ridicule for its serious attempt to find
out the truth about these matters, have announced that investigations
of so-called haunted houses have produced no evidence whatever. They
seem to be a wholly unreliable type of stories, which always break down
under careful inquiry. I am inclined myself to believe that such
stories arose in a perfectly natural way. It is perfectly natural to
simple people to believe that the spirit which animated a mortal body
would, on leaving it, tend to linger about the scene of suffering and
death. Indeed, it is impossible not to feel that, if the spirit has any
conscious identity, it would be sure to desire to remain in the
neighbourhood of those whom it loved so well. But the unsatisfactory
element in these stories is that it generally appears to be the victim
of some heinous deed, and not the perpetrator, who is condemned to make
its sad presence known, by wailing and by sorrowful gestures, on the
scene of its passion. But once given the belief that a spirit might
tend to remain for a time in the place where its earthly life was
lived, the terrors of man, his swift imagination, his power of
self-delusion, would do the rest.

The only class of stories, say the investigators, which appear to be
proved beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt, is the class of
stories dealing with apparitions at the time of death; and this they
explain by supposing a species of telepathy, which is indeed an obscure
force, but obviously an existing one, though its conditions and
limitations are not clearly understood. Telepathy is the power of
communication between mind and mind without the medium of speech, and
indeed in certain cases exercised at an immense distance. The theory is
that the thought of the dying person is so potently exercised on some
particular living person, as to cause the recipient to project a figure
of the other upon the air. That power of visualization is not a very
uncommon one; indeed, we all possess it more or less; we can all
remember what we believe we have seen in our dreams, and we remember
the figures of our dreams as optical images, though they have been
purely mental conceptions, translated into the terms of actual sight.
The impression of a dream-figure, indeed, appears to us to be as much
the impression of an image received upon the retina of the eye, as our
impressions of i