The truth is, that magazine stories and superstitious exaggerations have spoiled us for ghosts.  When we hear of a haunted house, we imagine that the ghost is always on view, or that he has a benefit night, at certain fixed dates, when you know where to have him.  These conceptions are erroneous, and a house may be haunted, though nothing desirable occurs in presence of the committee.  Moreover the committee, as far as the writer is aware, have neglected to add a seer to their number.  This mistake, if it has been made, is really wanton.  It is acknowledged that not every one has ‘a nose for a ghost,’ as a character of George Eliot’s says, or eyes or ears for a ghost.  It is thought very likely that, where several people see an apparition simultaneously, the spiritual or psychical or imaginative ‘impact’ is addressed to one, and by him, or her (usually her) handed on to the rest of the society.  Now, if the committee do not provide themselves with a good ‘sensitive’ comrade, what can they expect, but what they get, that is, nothing?  A witch in an old Scotch trial says, of her ‘Covin,’ or ‘Circle,’ ‘We could do no great thing without our Maiden’.  The committee needs a Maiden, as a Covin needed one, and among the visionaries of the Psychical Society, there must be some young lady who should be on the House Committee.  Yet one writer in the Society’s Proceedings who has a very keen scent for an impostor, if not for a ghost, avers that, from the evidence, she believes that they are examining facts, and not the origin of fables.

These facts, as was said, differ from the stories in ’Christmas numbers’.  The ghost in typical reports seldom or never speaks.  It has no message to convey, or, if it has a message, it does not convey it.  It does not unfold some tragedy of the past:  in fact it is very seldom capable of being connected with any definite known dead person.  The figure seen sometimes ‘varies with the seer’. {139} In other cases, however, different people attest having seen the same phantasm.  Finally a new house seems just as likely to be haunted as an old house, and the committee appears to have no special knowledge of very ancient family ghosts, such as Pearlin Jean, the Luminous Boy of Corby, or the rather large company of spectres popularly supposed to make themselves at home at Glamis Castle.

What then is the type, the typical haunted house, from which, if narratives vary much, they are apt to break down under cross-examination?

The phenomena are usually phenomena of sight, or sound, or both.  As a rule the sounds are footsteps, rustling of dresses, knocks, raps, heavy bangs, noises as of dragging heavy weights, and of disarranging heavy furniture.  These sometimes occur freely, where nobody can testify to having seen anything spectral.  Next we have phantasms, mostly of figures beheld for a moment with ’the tail of the eye’ or in going along a passage, or in entering