[Footnote 28:  Miss Goodrich Freer’s “Essays,” p. 119.]

Study and inquiry should eradicate the superstition and the fraud called spiritism, and people should be protected against a most dangerous and cowardly form of crime—­criminal hypnotism.  It enfeebles the mind; and murder is hardly more serious to a man than a marriage that embitters his life, or the loss of a career that is the moral stay of his existence.  The knowledge that such a thing exists would, if it induced one per cent, more care, save many lives.  Apparitions of beneficent spirits can be easily accounted for.  They are cases of automatic visualisation.  Thus the children mentioned in the late Mr. Spurgeon’s Life, who went down an underground passage and saw a vision of their dead mother, who stopped them from falling into a well, felt as other children would feel, that they must think of the one person who is always ready to preserve her little children from terror and pain; and thinking of her, they visualised her.

Energy and intelligence are the worst enemies of criminal hypnotism, as they are of burglary, but social organisation alone can combat crime.

To note some particulars of the haunting of B——­ besides those already mentioned.  The butler, Sanders, lived with the H. family at B——­ the year before Miss Freer garrisoned the house.  Not one of the people who were at B——­ in 1896 were there with Miss Freer.  This bars one type of fraud being alleged.  Sanders, besides hearing thumping, groans, and the rustling of a lady’s dress, had his bedclothes lifted up and let fall again—­“first at the foot of my bed, but gradually coming towards the head.”  He held the clothes round his neck with his hands, but they were “gently lifted in spite of my efforts to hold them.”

This simply means that he had cramps, resulting from the effect of hypnotism on the muscles of his legs.  The writer believes that the force always acts from the feet, or rather one foot, upwards; obviously a man sitting or standing up must be approached that way, and habit causes the electric stream to flow in that direction.  But this cramp is not felt so keenly as is the case when cramp arises from a constrained position.  The consequence is that the kicks given to relieve it are not so violent and decisive.  They are repeated automatically, until the bedclothes fly up finally near the head, as is described.  The intervals between the flights of the clothes seem shorter than they are; this is again due to hypnotic influence, as in spiritistic performances and in conjuring, where, as M. Binet has recently remarked, a little hypnotism always comes in.