It is difficult to write with perfect seriousness about haunted houses.  The writer will frankly confess that, when living in haunted houses (as he has done at various times when suffering from illness and overwork), he takes a very solemn view of the matter about bed-time.  If ‘expectant attention’ on a mind strained by the schools, and a body enfeebled by bronchitis, could have made a man, who was the only occupant of the haunted wing of an old Scotch castle, see a ghost, the writer would have seen whatever there was to see.  To be sure he could not rationally have regarded a spectre beheld in these conditions, as a well-authenticated ghost. {151} As far as his experience of first-hand tales is concerned, the persons known to him who say they have seen ghosts in haunted houses, were neither unhealthy, nor, except in one solitary case, imaginative, nor were they expecting a ghost.  The apparition was ’a little pleasant surprise’.  The usual seer is not an invalid, nor a literary person who can always be dismissed as ‘imaginative,’ though he is generally nothing of the kind.  But it cannot be denied that ladies either see more ghosts than men or are less reluctant to impart information.  The visionary lady who keeps up a regular telepathic correspondence with several friends is likely to see a ghost, and should certainly be entered at ‘fixed local ghosts,’ but there are slight objections to such evidence, as not free from suspicion of fancifulness.

Turning from the seers to the seen, it is difficult or impossible even to suggest an hypothesis which will seem to combine the facts.  The most plausible fancy is that which likens the apparitions to figures in a feverish dream.  Could we imagine a more or less bad man or woman dead, and fitfully living over again, ’in that sleep of death,’ old events among old scenes, could we go further and believe that these dreams were capable of being made objective and visible to the living, then we might find a kind of theory of the process.  But even if it were possible to demonstrate the existence of such a process, we are as far as ever from accounting for the force which causes noises, or hallucinations of noises, a force of considerable vigour, according to observers.  Still less could we explain the rare cases in which a ghost produces a material effect on the inanimate or animate world, as by drawing curtains, or pulling people’s hair and clothes,—­all phenomena as well vouched for as the others.  A picture projected by one mind on another, cannot conceivably produce these effects.  They are such as ghosts have always produced, or been said to produce.  Since the days of ancient Egypt, ghosts have learned, and have forgotten nothing.  Unless we adopt the scientific and popular system of merely saying ‘Fudge!’ we find no end to the conundrums of the ghostly world.  Ghosts seem to know as little about themselves as we do, so that, if we are to discover anything, we must make haste, before we become ghosts ourselves.