envied man his carnal body and the possibilities that
have been permitted him of eventually reaching a higher spiritual plane.
It is envy, perhaps, that has made them mischievous, and generated in
them an insatiable thirst to torment and frighten man. Another probable
explanation of them is, that they may be inhabitants of one of the other
planets that have the power granted, under certain conditions at present
unknown to us, of making themselves seen and heard by certain dwellers
on the earth; and it is, of course, possible that they are but one of
many types of spirits inhabiting a superphysical sphere that encloses or
infringes on our own. They may be only another form of life, a form that
is neither carnal nor immortal, but which has to depend for its
existence on a superphysical food. They may be born in a fashion that,
apart from its peculiarity and extravagance, bears some resemblance to
the generation of physical animal life; and they may die, too, as man
dies, and their death may be but the passing from one stage to another,
or it may be for eternity.

But enough of possibilities, of probable and improbable theories. For
the present not only poltergeists but all other phantoms are seen as
through a glass darkly, and, pending the discovery of some definite
data, we do but flounder in a sea of wide, limitless, and infinite
speculation.

CHAPTER V

SYLVAN HORRORS

I believe trees have spirits; I believe everything that grows has a
spirit, and that such spirits never die, but passing into another state,
a state of film and shadow, live on for ever. The phantasms of vegetable
life are everywhere, though discernible only to the few of us. Often as
I ramble through thoroughfares, crowded with pedestrians and vehicles,
and impregnated with steam and smoke and all the impurities arising from
over-congested humanity, I have suddenly smelt a different atmosphere,
the cold atmosphere of superphysical forest land. I have come to a halt,
and leaning in some doorway, gazed in awestruck wonder at the nodding
foliage of a leviathan lepidodendron, the phantasm of one of those
mammoth lycopods that flourished in the Carboniferous period. I have
watched it swaying its shadowy arms backwards and forwards as if keeping
time to some ghostly music, and the breeze it has thus created has
rustled through my hair, while the sweet scent of its resin has
pleasantly tickled my nostrils. I have seen, too, suddenly open before
me