d, the precautions we take,
ghosts will come, and nothing will drive them away. The only protection
I have ever found to be of any practical value in preventing them from
materialising is a powerful light. As a rule they cannot stand _that_,
and whenever I have turned a pocket flashlight on them, they have at
once dematerialised; often, however, materialising again immediately the
light has been turned off.

The cock was, at one time, (and still is in some parts of the world)
regarded as a psychic bird; it being thought that phantasms invariably
took their departure as soon as it began to crow. This, however, is a
fallacy. As ghosts appear at all hours of the day and night, in season
and out of season, I fear it is only too obvious that their
manifestations cannot be restricted within the limits of any particular
time, and that their coming and going, far from being subject to the
crowing of a cock, however vociferous, depend entirely on themselves.

CHAPTER XI

OCCULT INHABITANTS OF THE SEA AND RIVERS

_Phantom Ships_

From time to time, one still hears of a phantom ship being seen, in
various parts of the world. Sometimes it is in the Straits of Magellan,
vainly trying to weather the Horn; sometimes in the frozen latitudes of
the north, steering its way in miraculous fashion past monster icebergs;
sometimes in the Pacific, sometimes in the Atlantic, and only the other
day I heard of its being seen off Cornwall. The night was dark and
stormy, and lights being suddenly seen out at sea as of a vessel in
distress, the lifeboat was launched. On approaching the lights, it was
discovered that they proceeded from a vessel that mysteriously vanished
as soon as the would-be rescuers were within hailing. Much puzzled, the
lifeboat men were about to return, when they saw the lights suddenly
reappear to leeward. On drawing near to them, they again disappeared,
and were once more seen right out to sea. Utterly nonplussed, and
feeling certain that the elusive bark must be the notorious phantom
ship, the lifeboat men abandoned the pursuit, and returned home.

A fisherman of the same town--the town to which the lifeboat that had
gone to the rescue of the phantom ship belonged--told me, when I was out
with him one evening in his boat, that one of the oldest inhabitants of
the place had on one occasion, when the phantom ship visited the bay,
actually got his hands on her gunwales before she melted away, and he
narrowly es