6\ Haunted Houses and their Phenomena : [February, 
other districfts of England, or — if we except Thessaly, the 
Harz mountains, and Bretagne — of all Europe. 
All these circumstances are, I submit, hard to reconcile 
with the theory which regards haunting as an objective phe- 
nomenon due to the agency of spirits. We may, indeed, 
be told by a certain school of modern thinkers that we are 
ignorant of the laws of the spirit-world, and that the points 
which have just been raised might be capable of a satisfac- 
tory explanation. A spirit may indeed be desirous of com- 
municating with the living, but the especial conditions under 
which alone such intercourse is possible may be wanting. 
Admitting this plea, the most that can be claimed of us is 
suspension of judgment, and the readiness to decide any 
case brought forward upon its own evidence. 
Far more perplexing than spirits are the semi-material 
beings of Earl Lytton, and, if I do not misapprehend them, 
of the authors of the “ Unseen Universe.” It is all very 
well to tell us that as the dry land, the seas, and the air 
have each their occupants, the depths of space and the inter- 
atomic intervals may in like manner be inhabited. I reply 
that all the organisms of which experience tells us are par- 
tially at least composed of solid matter, and I confess my 
utter inability to conceive of portions of liquids or gases 
being individualised and organised. And if matter exists — 
as I am not prepared to deny — in any more sublimated state 
the difficulty becomes greater. I will admit the existence 
of such beings when I either see them or meet with pheno- 
mena from which they may be legitimately inferred. 
That strange sights and sounds, as in the case of the 
“ drummer of Tedworth,” may be due to the revenge of a 
necromancer, or, if the term be preferred, of an “ occult 
philosopher,” I neither admit nor deny. 
We come now to the “ natural ” agencies by which the 
inmates of a house may be scared till the cause is discovered. 
No one can deny that, in numbers of instances, very alarm- 
ing and apparently inexplicable manifestations have been 
traced to sources of the .most matter-of-fact and every-day 
kind. To the question, why are haunted houses less fre- 
quent in the nineteenth than in the eighteenth or the seven- 
teenth century ? the most obvious answer is, because of the 
greater simplicity and uniformity of modern architecture. 
The favourite arena for supposed supernatural manifesta- 
tions was in old castles, monasteries, colleges, baronial halls, 
not so much because of the deeds of darkness there trans- 
acted as on account of their narrow, dark, and winding 
passages, their staircases concealed in the thickness of the 
