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Sceptical Poltergeist, by J. D. Beresford

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Title: The Psychical Researcher's Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist
From "The New Decameron", Volume III.

Author: J. D. Beresford

Release Date: August 31, 2007 [EBook #22479]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER'S TALE--THE SCEPTICAL POLTERGEIST

From "The New Decameron"--Volume III.

By J. D. Beresford

There was once a time (he began) when I decided that I was a fraud; that
I could not be a psychical researcher any longer. I determined to give
it all up, to investigate no more phenomena nor attend another seance,
nor read a word about psychical research for the remainder of my life.
On the contrary, I planned an intensive study of the works of the later
Victorians, of that blissful period in the history of Europe when
we could believe in the comforting doctrine of materialism. "Oh!" I
thought, "that one had a Haeckel or a Huxley living now to console
us with their beautiful faith in the mortality of the soul!" The
Neo-Darwinians failed to convince me; the works of H. G. Wells left me
cold.

I will tell you the events that brought me to this evil pass.

It is not likely that anyone here will remember the Slipperton case. It
attracted little attention at the time. In 1905 there was still a little
sanity left in the world. A few even of the London dailies were nearly
sane then, and refused to report ghost stories unless they were known to
be untrue. And the Slipperton case had hardly any publicity--an inch
in the _Daily Mail_, headed "Family Evicted by Ghosts," was the only
newspaper report that I saw; though there may have been others. In these
days the story would be given a couple of columns opposite the leader
page; and the Sunday papers...

I was connected with the thing because Edgar Slipperton and his wife
were friends of mine; quiet, old-fashioned people who believed that when
you were dead you _were_ dead, and that that was the end of it.

The phenomena that drove them out of t