to plays of this kind on their failing faculties; and one solemnity, or
cause of dread, thus being added to another, seems to give the strength of
reason to a superstitious feeling.

Concerning my own experience, which comes under the class of natural
ghost-seeing, above mentioned, I may mention in good faith that, if such
phantoms were worth recalling, I could fill up an hour with the narration
of those spectral sights and sounds which were most prominent among the
illusions of my childhood. Sights and sounds were equally distinct and
life-like. I have run up-stairs obedient to a spectral call. Every
successive night for a fortnight, my childish breath was stilled by the
proceedings of a spectral rat, audible, never visible. It nightly, at the
same hour, burst open a cupboard door, scampered across the floor, and
shook the chair by my bedside. Wide awake and alone in the broad daylight,
I have heard the voices of two nobodies gravely conversing, after the
absurd dream fashion, in my room. Then as for spectral sights: During the
cholera of 1832, I, then a boy, walking in Holborn, saw in the sky, the
veritable flaming sword which I had learned by heart out of a picture in
an old folio of "Paradise Lost." And round the fiery sword there was a
regular oval of blue sky to be seen through parted clouds. It was a fact
not unimportant, that this phantom sword did not move with my eye, but
remained for some time, apparently, only in one part of the heavens. I
looked aside and lost it. When I looked back there was the image still.
There are hallucinations which arise from a disordered condition of the
nervous system; they are the seeing or the hearing of what is not, and
they are not by any means uncommon. Out of these there must, undoubtedly,
arise a large number of well-attested stories of ghosts, seen by one
person only. Such ghosts ought to excite no more terror than a twinge of
rheumatism, or a nervous headache.

There can be no doubt, however, that, in our minds or bodies, there are
powers latent, or nearly latent, in the ordinary healthy man, which, in
some peculiar constitutions, or under the influence of certain agents, or
certain classes of disease, become active, and develop themselves in an
extraordinary way. It is not very uncommon to find people who have
acquired intuitive perception of each other's current thoughts, beyond
what can be ascribed to community of interests, or comprehension of
character.

Zschokke,