1882.] 
Subjective or Objective ? 
65 
wall, their trap-doors, sliding panels, and other similar 
devices. Anyone who examines such a building, or even a 
farm-house of any pretension built in the time of Queen 
Elizabeth, or in the days of the Stuarts, will be at no loss 
to understand why it should be haunted rather than one of 
our well-lighted modern houses, free from all lurking-places 
and complexities. 
Who ever heard of the cottage of a farm-labourer being 
haunted, save perhaps by typhoid fever ? There is not the 
space that ghosts love ; there are none of the closets from 
which they emerge, or the pillars and projections behind 
which they may disappear. We can see no reason why the 
manifestations of truly spiritual beings should be prevented 
or made more rare by these changes in the style of building. 
An immaterial being could, so far as we are able to judge, 
enter a room quite as easily through the solid wall as 
through a secret door or a disused chimney, and could dis- 
appear as readily through the middle of the floor as behind 
a statue or a column. But we can well understand the 
facilities which mansions of the mediaeval type must give 
for the transmission of sounds and for the performances of 
tricksters and criminals. 
Even the question why ghosts should chiefly reveal them- 
selves to the sight or hearing of the living at the “ witching 
hour of night,” or — to translate the case into the language 
of men of the world — why strange sights and sounds are 
most common about midnight, will probably admit of a very 
natural solution. I have often, when pursuing some train 
of research to a late hour, been struck with the creaking of 
wooden articles, chairs, book-shelves, tables, &c. Heaps of 
papers which have been left in a state of imperfect equili- 
brium, but have remained untouched for hours, have some- 
times suddenly slipped to the ground. I may be told that 
in the silence of midnight slight noises attradt notice which 
might escape attention amidst the bustle of the day. I reply 
that in London midnight is a much less silent time than 
(say) from 3 to 4 a.m. Further, persons on night-duty in 
mines, where there is no more noise at one part of the 
twenty-four hours than at another, maintain that the ap- 
proach of midnight is marked by a general ticking and 
crackling in all diredtions, and that loose portions of rock 
apparently seledt that time for falling in preference to 
others. 
But a number of considerations lead us to the conclusion 
that in a great proportion — probably a majority — of instances 
the phenomena of haunted houses are subjedtive in their 
