Noises may be naturally caused in very many ways: by winds,
by rats, by boughs of trees, by water pipes, by birds. The writer
has known a very satisfactory series of footsteps in an historical
Scotch house, to be dispelled by a modification of the water pipes.
Again he has heard a person of distinction mimic the noises made by
_his_ family ghosts (which he preserved from tests as carefully as
Don Quixote did his helmet) and the performance was an admirable
imitation of the wind in a spout. There are noises, however, which
cannot be thus cheaply disposed of, and among them are thundering
whacks on the walls of rooms, which continue in spite of all efforts
to detect imposture. These phenomena, says Kiesewetter, were known
to the Acadians of old, a circumstance for which he quotes no
authority. {140a}

Paracelsus calls the knocks pulsatio mortuorum, in his fragment on
'Souls of the Dead,' and thinks that the sounds predict misfortune,
a very common belief. {140b} Lavaterus says, that such
disturbances, in unfinished houses are a token of good luck!

Again there is the noise made apparently by violent movement of
heavy furniture, which on immediate examination (as in Scott's case
at Abbotsford) is found not to have been moved. The writer is
acquainted with a dog, a collie, which was once shut up alone in a
room where this disturbance occurred. The dog was much alarmed and
howled fearfully, but it soon ceased to weigh on his spirits. When
phantasms are occasionally seen by respectable witnesses, where
these noises and movements occur, the haunted house is of a healthy,
orthodox, modern type. But the phenomena are nothing less than
modern, for Mather, Sinclair, Paracelsus, Wierus, Glanvill, Bovet,
Baxter and other old writers are full of precisely these
combinations of sounds and sights, while many cases occur in old
French literature, old Latin literature, and among races of the
lower barbaric and savage grades of culture. One or two curious
circumstances have rather escaped the notice of philosophers though
not of Thyraeus. First, the loudest of the unexplained sounds are
_occasionally_ not audible to all, so that (as when the noise seems
to be caused by furniture dragged about) we may conjecture with
Thyraeus, that there is no real movement of the atmosphere, that the
apparent crash is an auditory hallucination. The planks and heavy
objects at Abbotsford had _not_ been stirred, as the loud noises
overhead