Before the Restoration it was distinctly dangerous to laugh at witchcraft, ghosts and hauntings.  But the laughers came in with the merry monarch, and less by argument than by ridicule, by inveighing against the horror, too, of the hideous witch prosecutions, the laughers gradually brought hauntings and apparitions into contempt.  Few educated people dared to admit that their philosophy might not be wholly exhaustive.  Even ladies sneered at Dr. Johnson because he, having no dread of common-sense before his eyes, was inclined to hold that there might be some element of truth in a world-old and world-wide belief; and the romantic Anna Seward told, without accepting it, Scott’s tale of ‘The Tapestried chamber’.  That a hundred years after the highday and triumph of common-sense, people of education should be found gravely investigating all that common-sense had exploded, is a comfortable thought to the believer in Progress.  The world does not stand still.

A hundred years after the blue stockings looked on Johnson as the last survivor, the last of the Mohicans of superstition, the Psychical Society can collect some 400 cases of haunted houses in England.

Ten years ago, in 1884, the society sifted out nineteen stories as in ‘the first class,’ and based on good first-hand evidence.  Their analysis of the reports led them to think that there is a certain genuine type of story, and, that when a tale ’differs widely from the type, it proves to be incorrect, or unattainable from an authentic source’.  This is very much the conclusion to which the writer is brought by historical examination of stories about hauntings.  With exceptions, to be indicated, these tales all approximate to a type, and that is not the type of the magazine story.

It may be well, in the first place, to make some negative statements as to what the committee does not discover.  First, it has never yet hired haunted house in which the sights and sounds continued during the tenancy of the curious observers. {137} The most obvious inference is that the earlier observers who saw and heard abnormal things were unscientific, convivial, nervous, hysterical, or addicted to practical joking.  This, however, is not the only possible explanation.  As a celebrated prophet, by his own avowal had been ‘known to be steady for weeks at a time,’ so, even in a regular haunted house, the ghost often takes a holiday.  A case is well known to the writer in which a ghost began his manoeuvres soon after a family entered the house.  It made loud noises, it opened doors, turning the handle as the lady of the house walked about, it pulled her hair when she was in bed, plucked her dress, produced lights, and finally appeared visibly, a hag dressed in grey, to several persons.  Then as if sated, the ghost struck work for years, when it suddenly began again, was as noisy as ever, and appeared to a person who had not seen it before, but who made a spirited if unsuccessful attempt to run it to earth.