u go with us to Joe's, and you will see something you have
never seen before?" I went; and when I got into the house Joe went and
shut the cupboard doors. No sooner had he done so than the doors flew
open again, and an ordinary sized glass jar flew across the kitchen, out
of the door into the yard. A sugar jar also flew out of the cupboard
unseen. In fact, we saw nothing and heard nothing until we heard it smash.
The distance travelled by the articles was about seven yards. I stood
a minute or two, and then the glass which I noticed on the drawers jumped
off the drawers a yard away, and broke in about a hundred bits. The next
thing was a cup, which stood on the flour-bin just beyond the yard
door. It flew upwards, and then fell to the ground and broke. The girl
said that this cup had been on the floor three times, and that she had
picked it up just before it went off the bench. I said, "I suppose the cup
will be the next." The cup fell a distance of two yards away from the
flour-bin. Dr. Lloyd had been in the next house lancing the back of a
little boy who had been removed there. He now came in, and we began
talking, the doctor saying, "It is a most mysterious thing." He turned
with his back to the flour-bin, on which stood a basin. The basin flew up
into the air obliquely, went over the doctor's head, and fell at his feet
in pieces. The doctor then went out. I stood a short time longer, but
saw nothing farther. There were six persons in the room while these things
were going on, and so far as I could see, there was no human agency at
work. I had not the slightest belief in anything appertaining to the
super-natural. I left just before one o'clock, having been in the
house thirty minutes.'

As the policeman says, there was nothing 'super-natural,' but there was an
appearance of something rather supernormal. On the afternoon of Saturday
White sent the girl Rose away, and a number of people watched in his house
till after midnight. Though the sceptical reporter thought that objects
were placed where they might easily be upset, none were upset. The ghost
was laid. 'Excited expectation' was so false to its function as to beget
no phenomena.

The newspaper reports contain no theory that will account for White's
breaking his furniture and crockery, nor for Rose's securing her own
dismissal from a house where she was kindly received by wilfully
destroying the property of her hostess. An amateur published a theory
of silken th