irresistibly drawn toward the cabinet.
Slowly, watchfully, fearfully, he approached the phantom. The figure
turned toward him, and a moment later they met--they clung together,
they appeared to coalesce, and the psychic fell through the curtain to
the floor of the cabinet, like a man smitten with death."

"What do you wish to imply?" asked Miller. "Do you mean that the man and
the ghost were united in some way?"

"Precisely so. The 'spirit' seemed drawn by some magnetic force toward
the psychic, and the psychic seemed under an immense strain to keep the
apparition exterior to himself. When they met the spectre vanished, and
the psychic's fall seemed inevitable--a collapse from utter exhaustion.
I was at the moment convinced that I had seen a vaporous entity born of
the medium. It seemed a clear case of projection of the astral body. In
the pause which followed the psychic's fall the young wife turned to me
and said: 'Sometimes, if my husband does not reach the spirit form in
time, he falls _outside_ the curtain.' She did not seem especially
alarmed.

"The young psychic himself, however, told me afterward that he was
undergoing a tremendous strain as he stood there commanding the spirit
to appear. 'I had a fierce pain in the centre of my forehead,' he said.
'I couldn't get my breath. I felt as if all my substance, my strength,
was being drawn out of me. My legs seemed about to give way. It is
always hard to produce a form so far away from me when I am on the
outside of the cabinet in the light. The greater the distance, the
greater the strain.' I asked him what happened when he and the form
rushed together, and he answered: 'As soon as I touched it, it
re-entered my body.'"[2]

"I wonder why the spirits are always clothed in that luminous gauze?"
queried Miller.

"They are not," replied Fowler. "More often they come in the clothing
which was their habitual wear."

"I asked this young psychic if drapery were used out of respect to us
mortals, and he replied: 'No; the forms are swathed not from sense of
propriety so much as to protect the body, which is often incomplete at
the extremities.' The wife and Jacob told me that at one of their
meetings a naked Hercules suddenly appeared before the curtain. The Pole
declared: 'He was of giant size and strength. I felt of his muscles (he
was clothed only in a loincloth), and I closely studied his tremendous
arms and shoulders. The medium, as you know, is a small, thin man.