The Book of Dreams and Ghosts by Andrew Lang (the lemonade war series TXT) 📕

“Did you ever read Dr. Gregory’s Letters on Animal Magnetism?”

“The cove that invented Gregory’s Mixture?”

“Yes.”

“Beast he must have been.  No, I never read him.”

“He says that Major Buckley’s hypnotised subjects saw hidden objects in a blue light—mottoes inside a nut, for example.”

“Röntgen rays, for a fiver!  But Bolter said nothing about seeing blue light.  Well, after three or four séances Bolter used to be very nervous and unwilling to sleep alone, so I once went with him to his one-roomed hut.  We turned into the same bed.  I was awakened later by a noise and movement in the room.  Found the door open; the full moon streaming in, making light like day, and the place full of great big black dogs—well, anyhow there were four or five!  They were romping about, seemingly playing.  One jumped on the bed, another rubbed his muzzle on mine! (the bed was low, and I slept outside).  Now I never had anything but love for dogs of any kind, and as—n’est-ce pas?—love casts out fear, I simply got up, turned them all out, shut the door, and turned in again myself.  Of course my idea was that they were flesh and blood, and I allude to physical fear.

“I slept, but was anew awakened by a ghastly feeling that the blanket was being dragged and creeping off the bed.  I pulled it up again, but anew began the slow movement of descent.

“Rather surprised, I pulled it up afresh and held it, and must have dozed off, as I suppose.  Awoke, to feel it being pulled again; it was slipping, slipping, and then with a sudden, violent jerk it was thrown on the floor.  Il faut dire that during all this I had glanced several times at Bolter, who seemed profoundly asleep.  But now alarmed I tried to wake him.  In vain, he slept like the dead; his face, always a pasty white, now like marble in the moonlight.  After some hesitation I put the blanket back on the bed and held it fast.  The pulling at once began and increased in strength, and I, by this time thoroughly alarmed, put all my strength against it, and hung on like grim death.

“To get a better hold I had taken a turn over my head (or perhaps simply to hide), when suddenly I felt a pressure outside on my body, and a movement like fingers—they gradually approached my head.  Mad with fear I chucked off the blanket, grasped a Hand, gazed on it for one moment in silent horror, and threw it away!  No wonder, it was attached to no arm or body, it was hairy and dark coloured, the fingers were short, blunt, with long, claw-like nails, and it was minus a thumb!  Too frightened to get up I had to stop in bed, and, I suppose, fell to sleep again, after fresh vain attempts to awaken Bolter.  Next morning I told him about it.  He said several men who had thus passed the night with him had seen this hand.  ‘But,’ added he, ‘it’s lucky you didn’t have the big black dogs also.’  Tableau!

“I was to have slept again with him next night to look further into the matter, but a friend of his came from --- that day, so I could not renew the experiment, as I had fully determined to do.  By-the-bye, I was troubled for months after by the same feeling that the clothes were being pulled off the bed.

“And that’s the yarn of the Black Dogs and the Thumbless Hand.”

“I think,” said I, “that you did no harm in telling Bolter’s young woman.”

“I never thought of it when I told her, or of her interest in the kennel; but, by George, she soon broke off her engagement.”

“Did you know Manning, the Pakeha Maori, the fellow who wrote Old New Zealand?”

“No, what about him?”

“He did not put it in his book, but he told the same yarn, without the dogs, as having happened to himself.  He saw the whole arm, and the hand was leprous.”

“Ugh!” said the Beach-comber.

“Next morning he was obliged to view the body of an old Maori, who had been murdered in his garden the night before.  That old man’s hand was the hand he saw.  I know a room in an old house in England where plucking off the bed-clothes goes on, every now and then, and has gone on as long as the present occupants have been there.  But I only heard lately, and they only heard from me, that the same thing used to occur, in the same room and no other, in the last generation, when another family lived there.”

“Anybody see anything?”

“No, only footsteps are heard creeping up, before the twitches come off.”

“And what do the people do?”

“Nothing!  We set a camera once to photograph the spook.  He did not sit.”

“It’s rum!” said the Beach-comber.  “But mind you, as to spooks, I don’t believe a word of it.” {299}

The idiot Scotch laird in the story would not let the dentist put his fingers into his mouth, “for I’m feared ye’ll bite me”.  The following anecdote proves that a ghost may entertain a better founded alarm on this score.  A correspondent of Notes and Queries (3rd Sept., 1864) is responsible for the narrative, given “almost verbatim from the lips of the lady herself,” a person of tried veracity.

“Emma S---, one of seven children, was sleeping alone, with her face towards the west, at a large house near C---, in the Staffordshire moorlands.  As she had given orders to her maid to call her at an early hour, she was not surprised at being awakened between three and four on a fine August morning in 1840 by a sharp tapping at her door, when in spite of a “thank you, I hear,” to the first and second raps, with the third came a rush of wind, which caused the curtains to be drawn up in the centre of the bed.  She became annoyed, and sitting up called out, “Marie, what are you about?”

Instead, however, of her servant, she was astonished to see the face of an aunt by marriage peering above and between the curtains, and at the same moment—whether unconsciously she threw forward her arms, or whether they were drawn forward, as it were, in a vortex of air, she cannot be sure—one of her thumbs was sensibly pressed between the teeth of the apparition, though no mark afterwards remained on it.  All this notwithstanding, she remained collected and unalarmed; but instantly arose, dressed, and went downstairs, where she found not a creature stirring.  Her father, on coming down shortly afterwards, naturally asked what had made her rise so early; rallied her on the cause, and soon afterwards went on to his sister-in-law’s house, where he found that she had just unexpectedly died.  Coming back again, and not noticing his daughter’s presence in the room, in consequence of her being behind a screen near the fire, he suddenly announced the event to his wife, as being of so remarkable a character that he could in no way account for it.  As may be anticipated, Emma, overhearing this unlooked-for denouement of her dream, at once fell to the ground in a fainting condition.

On one of the thumbs of the corpse was found a mark as if it had been bitten in the death agony. {300}

We have now followed the “ghostly” from its germs in dreams, and momentary hallucinations of eye or ear, up to the most prodigious narratives which popular invention has built on bases probably very slight.  Where facts and experience, whether real or hallucinatory experience, end, where the mythopœic fancy comes in, readers may decide for themselves.

{0a}  Principles of Psychology, vol. ii., p. 115.  By Professor William James, Harvard College, Macmillan’s, London, 1890.  The physical processes believed to be involved, are described on pp. 123, 124 of the same work.

{0b}  Op. cit., ii., 130.

{4}  Story received from Miss ---; confirmed on inquiry by Drumquaigh.

{5a}  Phantasms of the Living, ii., 382.

{5b}  To “send” a dream the old Egyptians wrote it out and made a cat swallow it!

{8}  See “Queen Mary’s Jewels” in chapter ii.

{10}  Narrated by Mrs. Herbert.

{11a}  Story confirmed by Mr. A.

{11b}  This child had a more curious experience.  Her nurse was very ill, and of course did not sleep in the nursery.  One morning the little girl said, “Macpherson is better, I saw her come in last night with a candle in her hand.  She just stooped over me and then went to Tom” (a younger brother) “and kissed him in his sleep.”   Macpherson had died in the night, and her attendants, of course, protested ignorance of her having left her deathbed.

{11c}  Story received from Lady X.  See another good case in Proceedings of the Psychical Society, vol. xi., 1895, p. 397.  In this case, however, the finder was not nearer than forty rods to the person who lost a watch in long grass.  He assisted in the search, however, and may have seen the watch unconsciously, in a moment of absence of mind.  Many other cases in Proceedings of S.P.R.

{13}  Story received in a letter from the dreamer.

{16}  Augustine.  In Library of the Fathers, XVII.  Short Treatises, pp. 530-531.

{18}  St. Augustine, De Cura pro Mortuis.

{20}  The professor is not sure whether he spoke English or German.

{24}  From Some Account of the Conversion of the late William Hone, supplied by some friend of W. H. to compiler.  Name not given.

{28}  What is now called “mental telegraphy” or “telepathy” is quite an old idea.  Bacon calls it “sympathy” between two distant minds, sympathy so strong that one communicates with the other without using the recognised channels of the senses.  Izaak Walton explains in the same way Dr. Donne’s vision, in Paris, of his wife and dead child.  “If two lutes are strung to an exact harmony, and one is struck, the other sounds,” argues Walton.  Two minds may be as harmoniously attuned and communicate each with each.  Of course, in the case of the lutes there are actual vibrations, physical facts.  But we know nothing of vibrations in the brain which can traverse space to another brain.

Many experiments have been made in consciously transferring thoughts or emotions from one mind to another.  These are very liable to be vitiated by bad observation, collusion and other causes.  Meanwhile, intercommunication between mind and mind without the aid of the recognised senses—a supposed process of “telepathy”—is a current explanation of the dreams in which knowledge is obtained that exists in the mind of another person, and of the delusion by virtue of which one person sees another who is perhaps dying, or in some other crisis, at a distance.  The idea is popular.  A poor Highland woman wrote to her son in Glasgow: “Don’t be thinking too much of us, or I shall be seeing you some evening in the byre”.  This is a simple expression of the hypothesis of “telepathy” or “mental telegraphy”.

{31}  Perhaps among such papers as the Casket Letters, exhibited to the Commission at Westminster, and “tabled” before the Scotch Privy Council.

{35a}  To Joseph himself she bequeathed the ruby tortoise given to her by his brother.  Probably the diamonds were not Rizzio’s gift.

{35b}  Boismont was a distinguished physician and “Mad Doctor,” or “Alienist”.  He was also a Christian, and opposed a tendency, not uncommon in his time, as in ours,