sented by other
phantasms, having migrated to the higher plane. Let me take, as another
example, the case which I personally investigated, and which interested
me deeply. The house was then haunted (and, as far as I know to the
contrary, is still haunted) by a blurred figure, suggestive of something
hardly human and extremely nasty, that bounded up the stairs two steps
at a time; by a big, malignant eye--only an eye--that appeared in one of
the top rooms; and by a phantasm resembling a lady in distinctly modern
costume. The house is old, and as, according to tradition, some crime
was committed within its walls many years ago, the case may really be an
instance of separate hauntings--the bounding figure and the eye (the
latter either belonging to the figure or to another phantasm) being the
phantasms of the principal, or principals, in the ancient tragedy; the
lady, either the phantasm of someone who died there comparatively
recently, or of someone still alive, who consciously, or unconsciously,
projects her superphysical ego to that spot. On the other hand, the
three different phenomena might be three different phantasms of one
person, that person being either alive or dead--for one can
unquestionably, at times, project phantasms of one's various
personalities before physical dissolution. The question of occult
phenomena, one may thus see, is far more complex than it would appear to
be at first sight, and naturally so,--the whole of nature being complex
from start to finish. Just as minerals are not composed of one atom but
of countless atoms, so the human brain is not constituted of one cell
but of many; and as with the material cerebrum, so with the
immaterial--hence the complexity. With regard to the phenomena of
superphysical bestialities such as dogs, bears, etc., it is almost
impossible to say whether the phantasm would be that of a dead person,
or rather that representing one of some dead person's several
personalities--the phantasm of a genuine animal, of a vagrarian, or of
some other type of elemental.

One can only surmise the identity of such phantasms, after becoming
acquainted with the history of the locality in which such manifestations
appear. The case to which I referred in my previous works, _Some Haunted
Houses of England and Wales_, and _Ghostly Phenomena_, namely, that of
the apparition of a nude man being seen outside an unused burial-ground
in Guilsborough, Northamptonshire, furnishes a good exampl