The spirit-rapper; an autobiography
volumes from his library, elongated and stuffed out in a similar way,
and dressed in clothes belonging to different members of the family.
They were stripped, replaced on the book-shelves, and the dresses
returned to the several wardrobes where they belonged. There was no more
disturbance that night.
The next day, when the family were all at dinner, the table, with every
thing on it, suddenly rose to the ceiling, and then suddenly dropped
upon the floor with a noise that shook the whole house, but without any
other injury, or any thing on it being displaced. In the evening, while
they were all seated around the table, listening to a chapter which Mr.
Cotton was reading from the Bible, terrible knockings were again heard
all through the room, and Clara was seen to be raised as it were by some
invisible hand towards the ceiling, and to be borne with great force
through the room, and set down standing on her head. Then, after a
moment, she rose again and hung suspended to the ceiling by her feet and
her head downwards. After an hour the annoyances ceased, and the family
were left quiet. The annoyances continued, varying in their character
from day to day, for three weeks.
Priscilla sent me an account of them, and I thought my old friend had
been sufficiently punished. Moreover, I did not wish too much eclat to
be given at that time to the fantastic tricks I was playing. Mr. Cotton
was sure that it was the work of the devil, that it was witchcraft, and
he did not hesitate to accuse Priscilla. He had tried to get the
authorities to arrest her as a witch, but in this he had failed; for,
although the laws of Pennsylvania, at that time, if not now, recognized
witchcraft as a punishable offence, no magistrate in the city could be
found who did not look upon witchcraft as imaginary, and suspect the
good minister of being in need of physic and good regimen for
entertaining a belief in its reality. I however did not wish Priscilla’s
name to become associated in the gossip of the day with reported
phenomena of the sort, and I sent her an order to discontinue the
annoyances, and to restore every thing which had been injured to its
previous condition. The night she received my order, the noises ceased,
Clara rested quietly, and the family were undisturbed. On rising and
going through the house in the morning, no trace of the previous
disorder was discovered, every thing was in its place, and the clothing
and bedding which had been cut into ribbons, were all restored, and not
a mark of injury was to be found on them. Clara was well, and retained
no recollection of any thing that had happened to her or to the family
during the period she had been so grievously afflicted. Even the family,
Mr. Cotton among the rest, began to doubt, if they had not been the
sport of some strange hallucination, and almost to persuade themselves
that the annoyances had had no objective character.
All this may strike many as wholly incredible, but a thousand instances,
as well attested as any facts can be, of a similar character, can be
adduced. Let me be permitted to relate an instance still more
marvellous, which occurred in 1849, at the presbytery or parsonage of
Cideville, France, in the Department of the Lower Seine, and which
became indirectly the subject of a judicial investigation. The curé of
Cideville encountered at the house of one of his sick parishioners, an
individual, a Mr. G——, who had the reputation of curing diseases in a
mysterious manner. He reproved him severely, and sent him away. Shortly
after, Mr. G—— was arrested and condemned for his malpractices in other
cases, to two years’ imprisonment. The wretched man, recollecting the
reproof he had received from the curé, believed that it was owing to him
that he had been arrested and sent to prison, and, it is said, he threw
out threats of vengeance. One Thorel, a shepherd, a friend and disciple
of the Mr. G——, was also heard to say, that the curé would be made to
repent of what he had done, and that he (Thorel) would himself see that
his master was avenged, and his orders executed.
Two boys, one twelve, the other fourteen, were boarded and educated in
the parsonage by the curé. They were sons of honest, pious, and much
esteemed schoolmasters of the district, and appeared to have inherited
the good qualities of their parents. They were both intended for the
priesthood, and were a great comfort to the good curé, who loved,
cherished, and instructed them, and perhaps obtained something for their
board and tuition to eke out his scanty means of living.
One day there was a public auction, where a great crowd were collected,
and these boys were present among the rest. The shepherd, Thorel, was
there, and seen to approach the younger of the two, but nothing more was
observed. Immediately on the return to the parsonage, a violent
hurricane struck it, followed by blows as from a hammer in every part of
the house, under the floors, above the ceiling, and behind the
wainscoting. Sometimes these blows were weak, short, abrupt, sometimes
so violent as to shake the house, and to threaten to demolish it, as
Thorel, in a moment of rashness had foretold. The blows were heard at
the distance of two kilometres, and a large portion of the inhabitants
of Cideville, a hundred and fifty at a time, it is said, surrounded the
parsonage for hours, examining it in all directions, and seeking in vain
to discover whence the blows proceeded.
This was not all. Whilst these mysterious knockings continued, and made
themselves heard on every point indicated, they reproduced the exact
rhythm of whatever air was demanded of them; the glass in the windows
were broken, and rattled in every direction; the tables were overturned,
or were seen walking about; the chairs were grouped together and
suspended in the air; the dogs were thrown crosswise over one another or
were hung by their tails to the ceiling; knives, brushes, breviaries,
flew out by one window and back through another on the opposite side;
the shovel and tongs quit of themselves the fire-place and walked alone
into the room; the andirons, followed by the fire, recoiled from the
chimney even to the middle of the floor; hammers flew in the air, and
dropped as slowly and as softly as a feather on the floor; the utensils
of the toilet suddenly quitted the chambranle on which they were placed,
and as suddenly returned of their own accord; enormous desks rushed one
against another and were broken, and one loaded with books approached
rapidly and horizontally close to the forehead of Mr. R. de Saint V——,
and, without touching him, dropped perpendicularly upon its feet.
Madame de Saint V——, whose chateau was near to the parsonage, whose
testimony cannot be questioned, and who had witnessed a score of similar
experiments, felt herself drawn one day by the corner of her mantle,
without perceiving the invisible hand that drew it. The Mayor of
Cideville received a violent blow on his thigh, and at the cry forced
from him by this violence, he received a gentle caress, which instantly
relieved him from the pain.
A proprietor, residing fourteen leagues distant, and from whom I hold
this relation, came unexpectedly to Cideville, wholly ignorant of the
mysterious events which were taking place. After a night spent in the
chamber of the boys, he questioned the mysterious knocking, made it
strike in different corners of the room, and established with it the
conditions of a dialogue. One blow, for example, would say yes, two
blows, no; then the number of blows would indicate the number of the
letter in the alphabet, &c. This settled, the witness caused to be
rapped out his surname and Christian name, and those of his children,
his age and theirs, to the year, month, and day,—the name of his
commune, &c. All this was done with such rapidity that he was obliged to
conjure the rapper to proceed more slowly, that he might have more
leisure to verify the answers, all of which he found perfectly exact.
What is more striking is, that this gentleman knew nothing at the time
of spirit-rapping, then beginning to excite attention in the United
States, and it was not till several weeks after that he heard of it.
All this, the sceptics will allege, may be attributed to jugglery, to
the cunning and craft of the juggler, divining the thoughts of the
interrogator before he had detected them himself. But there was
something more still; something which the sceptics will hardly be able
to explain. A priest, a vicar of St. Roch, the Abbé L——, came
accidentally, and wholly unlooked for, to Cideville. To similar
questions he received apparently through his brother, like himself
wholly unknown in the place, answers equally prompt and exact, but with
this singular difference: In one instance the questioner himself was
ignorant, and unable to verify the details of the answer obtained. He
was, indeed, told the age and Christian name of his mother and his
brother, but he had either never known them or had forgotten them. He
however took a note of the answers, and, on his return to Paris,
consulted the registers, and found them literally exact. What now
becomes of the objection against the previous witness, or the
explanation insisted on, that the answer is given by the brain of the
interrogator?
Two landholders from the town of Eu came all express to Cideville. They
were told their names, Christian names, the number of their dogs, their
horses, &c. But still more astonishing were the phenomena that
accompanied the boy believed to have been touched by the shepherd
Thorel. He perceived continually near him the _shade_, or appearance of
a man, in a blouse, whom he did not know, but whom he identified with
Thorel, the first time he was confronted with that person. Even one of
the ecclesiastics present, when the boy said he saw the phantom,
perceived distinctly behind the lad a sort of grayish column or fluidic
vapor, a phenomenon often observed on similar occasions. One day the boy
fell into convulsions, then into a sort of ecstatic syncope, from which
for several hours nothing could rouse him, and which caused a fear that
he was dead. Another time he said that he saw a black hand descending
the chimney, and he cried out that it struck him. Nobody could see the
hand, but those present heard the blow, and saw its mark on the face of
the child, who in his simplicity ran out doors, thinking to see this
hand come out the top of the chimney.
At length several ecclesiastics united at the parsonage, and consulted
how they might be disembarrassed of the annoyance. One proposed one
thing, another proposed another, and a third remarked that he had heard
it said that those mysterious _shades_ feared the point of a sword. At
the risk of a little superstition, they armed themselves with swords,
and stabbed with them wherever the noises were heard. But it is
difficult to hit an agent in constant and rapid motion, and they were
about to desist, when one of them, having more skilfully pursued one of
the noises than the others, all at once a flame flashed forth, followed
by a smoke so dense that they were obliged to open all the windows to
escape immediate suffocation. The smoke dissipated, and calm succeeding
to so terrible an emotion, they resumed their stabbing, and soon they
heard a groan; they continued, the groaning redoubled, and at length
they distinctly heard pronounced the word “pardon.” “Pardon! yes,
certainly, we will forgive you; and more than that, we will pass all the
night in praying for you; but on condition that you come to-morrow, in
person, and beg pardon of this boy.” “Will you forgive us all?” “How
many are you?” “We are five, including the shepherd.” “We will forgive
you all.” All then became quiet in the parsonage; and the rest of that