ils
which would give it evidential value; so lacking, indeed, that even such
a spiritistic advocate as the late F. W. H. Myers pronounced it "quite
inadequate" for citation in support of the spiritistic theory.

Nevertheless, taking his extraordinary document for what it is worth,
careful consideration of it leads to the conclusion that it contains the
story not so much of a great fraud as of a great tragedy. It is obvious
that there was frequent and barefaced trickery, particularly on the part
of Frederica's sister and the ubiquitous servant girl; but it is equally
certain that Frederica herself was a wholly abnormal creature, firmly
self-deluded, one might say self-hypnotized, into the belief that the
dead consorted with her. And it is hardly less certain that in her
singular state of body and mind she gave evidence not indeed of
supernatural but of telepathic and clairvoyant powers on which she and
those about her, in that unenlightened age, could not but put a
supernatural interpretation.

It is not difficult to trace the origin of the nervous and mental
disease from which she suffered. Kerner's account of her childhood shows
plainly that she was born temperamentally imaginative and unstable and
that she was raised in an environment well calculated to exaggerate her
imaginativeness and instability. Ghosts and goblins were favorite topics
of conversation among the peasantry of Prevorst, while the children with
whom she played were many of them unstable like herself, neurotic,
hysterical, and the victims of St. Vitus's dance. The weird and uneasy
ideas and feelings which thus early took possession of her were given
firmer lodgment by her unfortunate sojourn with grave-haunting
Grandfather Schmidgall. After this, it seems, she suffered for a year
from some eye trouble, and every physician knows how close the
connection is between optical disease and hallucinations. Then came a
brief period of seeming normality, the lull before the storm which
burst in full force with her marriage to a man she did not love. From
that time, the helpless victim of hysteria in its most deep-seated and
obstinate form, she gave herself unreservedly to the delusions which
both arose from and intensified her physical ills--ills which after all
had a purely mental basis. "If I doubted the reality of these
apparitions," she once told Kerner, "I should be in danger of insanity;
for it would make me doubt the reality of everything I saw."

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