the horse shies, or the dog turns craven, in sympathy with its master’s exhibition of fear.  Owners of dogs and horses may counterfeit horror and see whether their favourites do sympathise.  Cats don’t.  In one of three cases known to us where a cat showed consciousness of a spectral presence, the apparition took the form of a cat.  The evidence is only that of Richard Bovet, in his Pandemonium; or, the Devil’s Cloyster (1684).  In Mr. J. G. Wood’s Man and Beast, a lady tells a story of being alone, in firelight, playing with a favourite cat, Lady Catherine.  Suddenly puss bristled all over, her back rose in an arch, and the lady, looking up, saw a hideously malignant female watching her.  Lady Catherine now rushed wildly round the room, leaped at the upper panels of the door, and seemed to have gone mad.  This new terror recalled the lady to herself.  She shrieked, and the phantasm vanished.  She saw it on a later day.  In a third case, a cat merely kept a watchful eye on the ghost, and adopted a dignified attitude of calm expectancy.  If beasts can be telepathically affected, then beasts have more of a ‘psychical’ element in their composition than they usually receive credit for; whereas if a ghost is actually in view, there is no reason why beasts should not see it.

The best and most valid proof that an abnormal being is actually present was that devised by the ghost of Sir Richard of Coldinghame in the ballad, and by the Beresford ghost, who threw a heavy curtain over the bed-pole.  Unluckily, Sir Richard is a poetical figment, and the Beresford ghost is a myth, like William Tell:  he may be traced back through various mediaeval authorities almost to the date of the Norman Conquest.  We have examined the story in a little book of folklore, Etudes Traditionistes.  Always there is a compact to appear, always the ghost burns or injures the hand or wrist of the spectator.  A version occurs in William of Malmesbury.

What we need, to prove a ghost, and disprove an exclusively telepathic theory, is a ghost who is not only seen, heard, or even touched, but a ghost who produces some change in physical objects.  Most provokingly, there are agencies at every successful seance, and in every affair of the Poltergeist, who do lift tables, chairs, beds, bookcases, candles, and so forth, while others play accordions.  But then nobody or not everybody sees these agencies at work, while the spontaneous phantasms which are seen do not so much as lift a loo-table, generally speaking.  In the spiritualistic cases, we have the effect, with no visible cause; in ghost stories, we have the visible presence, but he very seldom indeed causes any physical change in any object.  No ghost who does not do this has any strict legal claim to be regarded as other than a telepathic hallucination at best, though, as we shall see, some presumptions exist in favour of some ghosts being real entities.