176 



The Review of Reviews, 



THE SECRET OF HAUNTED HOUSES. 

 Mr. R. H. Benson's Explanation. 



In the Dublin Rn'iew appeares an article on the 

 phantasms of the dead, by Mr. R. H. Benson. He 

 says : — 



I have listened p.-iliently to every ghost-story that has come 

 my way — 1 have read all the literature I could lay hards on ; 

 I have slept in haunted houses ; I nnce took a suicide's room, 

 with a bloodstain under the bed, and slept in it for a whole year 

 in the hope of seeing a ghost— and the total effect of all my 

 pathetic attempts to arrive at some conclusion on the matter, to 

 Ibrmulate some theory that should satisfy myself at any rate, 

 has been that I stand now in a position of entire and complete 

 agnosticism. 



His agnosticism has its Hmits, however. He 

 declares : — 



Strictly scientific investigation up to the present lime has 

 resulted in this— that while it is scarcely possible for an educated 

 man in these days to deny that at the time of death it is ctrm- 

 paratively common for the dying person to be able to project an 

 image of himself, or a violent impression of his personality, 

 upon some sympathetic friend at a distance — it is not possible to 

 demand from fair-minded and educated persons that they should 

 extend anything like the same kind of belief towards stories 

 related of so-called haunted houses. Telepathy is now as much 

 an established fact amongst psychologists as the law of gravita- 

 tion amongst physical scientists. 



A CURIOUS GHOST STORY, 



Here is a curious instance : — 



I am acquainted with a certain house in England, so badly 

 " haunted" that the family has been forced at last to leave it 

 and to build a new house in the same park a quarter of a mile 

 away. This haunting has been expeiienced again and again 

 by all kinds of people. Mass has been said in the house 

 repeatedly, but with no efl'ect. It is a beautiful old house, but 

 so terrible are the apparently ghostly events that take place 

 there that at least one member of the family, a normal and 

 courageous person, entirely refuses to pass a single night there, 

 even with servants sleeping in the room, because it is against 

 him always that the princip.al force is directed. 



Many others as well have experienced the attacks. In one 

 case a perfectly normal man went to stay, with the family for a 

 week. He was put in a room two doors away from the haunted 

 room, but such was the effect upon him merely of hearing half- 

 a-dozen inexplicable footsteps p.ass his door that he left early 

 next morning and has declined to set foot in the house since. 

 The supposed " ghost " has been seen on many occasions ; there 

 is an extraordinary sensation of evil, felt even by sceptical 

 persons— and, in ctTect, as I have said, the best concrete 

 evidence of the facts is found in the leaving of this old and 

 ancestral house by the family and the inhabiting of the other, 

 'i'he most startling manifestations take the form of actually 

 physical force. The niend>er of the family has on many 

 occasions been thrown to the ground, and once, at any rate, in 

 the presence of three friends. I know these facts well. 



aroumknt from relics. 

 Mr. Benson passes over the idea that the soul itself 

 is present in the haunted house, or that the pheno- 

 mena are the work of an unl.unian fallen spirit He 

 inclines to the theory suggested in tlie following 

 excerpts : — 



.\11 Catholics are perfectly familiar with the fact that spiritual 

 impressions can be made upon material objects, and that these 

 unintelligent material objects can retain the impression made 

 upon them. Devotion to relics, for example, is an instance 

 where an unanimated object so retains the eftcct, to some degree, 



of the personality that was once in close union with it. Now, 

 if it is true that material objects can absorb, so to speak, 

 something of the personalities that are in contact with them, we 

 can hardly conceive an event more likely to put this law in 

 motion than a murder. Both personalities are at full stretch 

 — the murderer in his malignity ; the victim in his terror. It 

 is, for both of them, a kind of nerve-climax — the supreme 

 moment of their lives. Does it not seem probable— if the Jaw 

 I have spoken of is true at all — that the very walls, and ceiling, 

 and floor, and bedhangings, and furniture, should receive a 

 certain impression of the horror ? and that they should 

 retain it ? 



IMPRESSIONS IN ROOM ON IMPRESSIONABLE. 



Then comes a man who is highly receptive and 

 intuitive, falls to sleep; his sub-conscious self receives 

 the impressions from the material surroundings. Is 

 it not perfectly conceivable that a telepathic force 

 which has been stored, so to speak, in a kind of 

 material battery, even for years, stored there by the 

 terrific emotional impulse of the original crime — may 

 be powerful enough also to produce a visual image ? 

 He awakes with a sense of shock. 



The cases where the haunting ceases so soon as the 

 crime is discovered, where a body is found and given 

 Christian burial, Mr. Benson says it seems to him 

 conceivable, as Mr. Hudson suggests : — 



That the emotion generated by the victim may be condi- 

 tioned by the victim's own violent desire at the moment of the 

 murder. As he dies with the knife in his throat, his supreme 

 wish may very well be that the crime should be detected and 

 punished. He sets up, that is to say, in the emotional atmo- 

 sphere vibrations that are conditioned and coloured by his 

 desire ; and those vibrations may, quite conceivably, continue 

 to vibrate — with the result that the room is haunted— until their 

 conditioning quality is satisfied — until, that is, they meet with 

 the answering vibrations set up by the discovery. 



THE EVIL EYE, 



The Hiudu Spiritual Magazine publishes an article 

 upon "The Practice of Gaze." Mr. U. S. Surya 

 Prakas Rao says that the impossible becomes pos- 

 sible to the man who has practised steady gaze I A 

 French peasant, he says, was able to kill small birds 

 by steadily looking at them. But the most striking 

 story is that of an opera singer named Massol, who, 

 under the Second I'^mpire, was a great favourite with 

 the public. Although he was a man of small intellect 

 he had a wonderful voice and an eye which slew. 

 One of his greatest successes was his rendering of the 

 "Curse" aria in an opera called " King Charles VI." 

 During the singing of this aria, if his eye fell acci 

 dentally upon anyone in the audience or on the stage, 

 that person died. After he had killed a scene shifter, 

 the leader of the orchestra, and an unfortunate mer- 

 chant from Marseilles, the opera was excluded from 

 the repertoire. The writer of the article says the 

 science and practice of " the gaze " is known amonj; 

 the Hindus as " Trataka Yoga." The practice of the 

 gaze gives you whatever you can desire. The third 

 eye becomes open. The whole article is interesting 

 and unusual. 



