a room where nobody is found, or standing beside a bed, perhaps in a kind of self-luminous condition.  Sometimes these spectres are taken by visitors for real people, but the real people cannot be found; sometimes they are at once recognised as phantasms, because they are semi-transparent, or look very malignant, or because they glide and do not walk, or are luminous, or for some other excellent reason.  The combination, in due proportions, of pretty frequent inexplicable noises, with occasional aimless apparitions, makes up the type of orthodox modern haunted house story.  The difficulty of getting evidence worth looking at (except for its uniformity) is obviously great.  Noises may be naturally caused in very many ways:  by winds, by rats, by boughs of trees, by water pipes, by birds.  The writer has known a very satisfactory series of footsteps in an historical Scotch house, to be dispelled by a modification of the water pipes.  Again he has heard a person of distinction mimic the noises made by his family ghosts (which he preserved from tests as carefully as Don Quixote did his helmet) and the performance was an admirable imitation of the wind in a spout.  There are noises, however, which cannot be thus cheaply disposed of, and among them are thundering whacks on the walls of rooms, which continue in spite of all efforts to detect imposture.  These phenomena, says Kiesewetter, were known to the Acadians of old, a circumstance for which he quotes no authority. {140a}

Paracelsus calls the knocks pulsatio mortuorum, in his fragment on ‘Souls of the Dead,’ and thinks that the sounds predict misfortune, a very common belief. {140b} Lavaterus says, that such disturbances, in unfinished houses are a token of good luck!

Again there is the noise made apparently by violent movement of heavy furniture, which on immediate examination (as in Scott’s case at Abbotsford) is found not to have been moved.  The writer is acquainted with a dog, a collie, which was once shut up alone in a room where this disturbance occurred.  The dog was much alarmed and howled fearfully, but it soon ceased to weigh on his spirits.  When phantasms are occasionally seen by respectable witnesses, where these noises and movements occur, the haunted house is of a healthy, orthodox, modern type.  But the phenomena are nothing less than modern, for Mather, Sinclair, Paracelsus, Wierus, Glanvill, Bovet, Baxter and other old writers are full of precisely these combinations of sounds and sights, while many cases occur in old French literature, old Latin literature, and among races of the lower barbaric and savage grades of culture.  One or two curious circumstances have rather escaped the notice of philosophers though not of Thyraeus.  First, the loudest of the unexplained sounds are occasionally not audible to all, so that (as when the noise seems to be caused by furniture dragged about) we may conjecture with Thyraeus, that there is no real movement of the atmosphere, that the apparent crash is an auditory hallucination.  The planks and heavy objects at Abbotsford had not been stirred, as the loud noises overhead indicated, when Scott came to examine them.