ss, might doubtless cause an
hallucination to a person who felt uncomfortable in a house with a name to
be 'haunted,' though, as we have seen, the effect is far less common than
the cause. All these sorts of causes are undoubtedly more apt to be
prevalent among superstitious savages than among educated Europeans.
And it stands to reason that savages, where one man 'thinks he sees
something,' will be readier than we are to think they 'see something' too.
Yet collective hallucinations, which are shared by several persons at
once, are especially puzzling. Even if they occur when all are in a
strained condition of expectancy, it is odd that all see them in _the same
way_.[12] Examples will occur later. When there is no excitement, the
mystery is increased. We may note that, among the expectant multitudes who
looked on while Bernadette was viewing the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes, not
one person, however superstitious or hysterical, pretended to share the
vision. Again, only one person, and he on doubtful evidence, is asserted
to have shared, once, the visions of Jeanne d'Arc. In both cases all the
conditions said to produce collective hallucination were present in the
highest degree. Yet no collective hallucination occurred.

Narratives about hallucinations coincident with a death, narratives well
attested, are abundant in modern times, so abundant that one need only
refer the curious to Messrs. Gurney and Myers's two large volumes,
'Phantasms of the Living,' and to the S.P.R 'Report of Census of
Hallucinations' (1894). Mr. Tylor says: 'The spiritualistic theory
specially insists on cases of apparitions, where the person's death
corresponds more or less nearly with the time when some friend perceives
his phantom.' But visionaries, he remarks truly, often see phantoms of
living persons when nothing occurs. That is the case, and the question
arises whether more such phantoms are viewed (_not_ by 'visionaries')
in connection with the death or other crisis of the person whose
hallucinatory appearance is perceived, than ought to occur, if there be no
connection of some unknown cause between deaths and appearances. As Mr.
Tylor observes, 'Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, came to
associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be
connected in fact.'[13] Did early man, then, find _in experience_ that
apparitions of his friends were 'connected in fact' with their deaths?
And, if so, was that discovered conn