The writer has no doubt, from personal and observed experience, that sometimes transfer is used, but is doubtful to what extent.

Boxes on the ear, slaps on the back, nay a flip as with a towel on the bare back, are felt, the last even by a clothed person.  In Poltergeist cases, as in Alice’s, a slap on the back was felt; perhaps she hypnotised Miss K. and slapped her on the back and transferred the slap to her (Alice’s) mother.

This would be like the two engineer students’ case, where the hypnotised one appeared to a friend.

In Poltergeist cases, one person perhaps does the mischief; in inferior haunted house cases two would be enough.  The Poltergeist raisers are often subject to fits; the people who are vicious attackers, like the assailants of the occupants of B——­, must be semi-maniacs.  The terror is sometimes brought about by two people operating; one producing a terrifying effect, the other intensifying the terror.  In attempting to weaken a person to whom speech has been made intelligible at a distance, a sensation would be transferred after the speech, so that he might believe it affected him, and cease jeering at and despising the operator.  A man with some knowledge of mesmerism, and living a life with good interests in it, could defy them:  such a case has happened.  For nearly fifty years a gentleman was tormented at times, and died and lived sane.

The attack has perhaps been more developed in the last twenty or thirty years, the influence of above-board hypnotism acted upon that practised by criminal scoundrels.  A combination possible is, for instance, one rascal showing a faint image of a fiend, and another transmitting a sound like a scratching at a window; this was a failure, the percipient believing that the devil acted under the authority of the Almighty, and had no business with innocent people.  It was given to a person in a semi-sleeping condition.  Pain combined was efficient.  The pain is partly by affection of cutaneous nerves—­partly by affection of the ear; but no one on the watch would be driven into lunatic acts by it.  Of course after exhaustion (and pain makes this easier) the victim may be in a stupefied condition and obey:  this is the post-hypnotic state, which will not come off with people who have been instructed against this villainous game.  Miss Freer’s admirable nerve was doubtless due to the habit of studying phenomena.  The worn features at breakfast, mentioned before, included those of two secular priests.  Miss Freer had failed to get permission for three well—­known priests belonging to societies (perhaps Jesuits) to come.  The gentleman already mentioned who had first told Lord Bute of the haunting of B——­ was among these.

An interesting light on the effect of prayer would probably be brought out by struggles against witchcraft, struggles doubtless very common amongst early Christians.  Indeed, the devils who were cast out must sometimes have been baffled hypnotists confronted by One who was stronger than they; the departing into the swine is much more intelligible on this hypothesis than on Dean Farrar’s, of the swine’s terror, which suppresses the “devils’” request.