tted around, and the Rev.
Joseph Glanvill could assure Lady Conway that he had been a witness
of some of these occurrences. He saw the 'little modest girls in
the bed, between seven and eight years old, as I guessed'. He saw
their hands outside the bed-clothes, and heard the scratchings above
their heads, and felt 'the room and windows shake very sensibly'.
When he tapped or scratched a certain number of times, the noise
answered, and stopped at the same number. Many more things of this
kind Glanvill tells. He denies the truth of a report that an
imposture was discovered, but admits that when Charles II. sent
gentlemen to stay in the house, nothing unusual occurred. But these
researchers stayed only for a single night. He denied that any
normal cause of the trouble was ever discovered. Glanvill told
similar tales about a house at Welton, near Daventry, in 1658.
Stones were thrown, and all the furniture joined in an irregular
corroboree. Too late for Lady Conway's party was the similar
disturbance at Gast's house of Little Burton June, 1677. Here the
careful student will note that 'they saw a hand holding a hammer,
which kept on knocking'. This _hand_ is as familiar to the research
of the seventeenth as to that of the nineteenth century. We find it
again in the celebrated Scotch cases of Rerrick (1695), and of
Glenluce, while 'the Rev. James Sharp' (later Archbishop of St.
Andrews), vouched for it, in 1659, in a tale told by him to
Lauderdale, and by Lauderdale to the Rev. Richard Baxter. {94}
Glanvill also contributes a narrative of the very same description
about the haunting of Mr. Paschal's house in Soper Lane, London:
the evidence is that of Mr. Andrew Paschal, Fellow of Queen's
College, Cambridge. In this case the trouble began with the arrival
and coincided with the stay of a gentlewoman, unnamed, 'who seemed
to be principally concerned'. As a rule, in these legends, it is
easy to find out who the 'medium' was. The phenomena here were
accompanied by 'a cold blast or puff of wind,' which blew on the
hand of the Fellow of Queen's College, just as it has often blown,
in similar circumstances, on the hands of Mr. Crookes, and of other
modern amateurs. It would be tedious to analyse all Glanvill's
tales of rappings, and of volatile furniture. We shall see that,
before his time, as after it, precisely similar narratives attracted
the notice of the curious. Glanvill generally tries to get his
stories at