The R——s are home this week from California, and full of a surprising tale of their experience in renting and trying to live in a haunted house. They had no idea of its unpleasant character when they took it. Indeed they decided upon it principally because of the sunniness of the rooms and its generally cheerful character. The only suspicious feature was the very moderate price; but that appears to have aroused only gratitude instead of suspicion in their minds.

The sounds they heard, which finally drove them out of the house, were such commonplace ones—the clinking of medicine bottles, the mixing of stuff in saucers—that one hardly believes they could have invented them. Invention would certainly have conceived a more dramatic excuse for abandoning a house. Also, they solemnly aver that it was only upon their giving up the lease that they heard the story of the almost incredible tragedy of the former owner's death.

There certainly must be some manifestations such as are commonly known as "ghostly." I never have come across any personally, but the testimony is too frequent and persistent for doubt. Some phenomena have undoubtedly been observed of which the laws are not yet understood. The psychologists profess to be working in this direction, but the psychology of our day is still in about the condition of astronomy and chemistry in the days of the thirteenth-century astrologers and alchemists—mere blind flounderings. We need a psychological Copernicus badly. I am convinced that what are commonly called "superstitions" are really observed results of unknown causes. When I was a child the negroes always warned one that it brought bad luck to go near a stable when one had a cut finger. Nothing could seem more blindly uncorrelated, and yet it is now known that the germ of tetanus breeds only in manure, which shows that their observation was correct, though they had no conception of germs, or microbes. It was an old superstition, derided by the medical profession, that there was some merit in hanging red curtains at the windows of a smallpox patient; yet recently some interesting discoveries have been made as to the effect of red light upon sufferers from this disease.

Again there is the old-wife's belief that the howling of a dog presages death. I saw no sense in that until I was brought in contact with death for the first time, and then discovered that a person near the end, and immediately afterwards, emitted a powerful odour, very like the smell of tuberoses. In two cases within my experience this odour remained in the death-chamber, despite persistent airing and cleaning, for fully a year. My sense of smell is extremely acute, and no one seemed to remark this odour but myself, nor have I ever heard or seen any mention of the phenomenon being noticed by others; but naturally a dog, whose sense of smell must be a thousand times more acute than mine, is aware of this strange, half repulsive perfume, which has the effect upon his nerves produced also, apparently, by moonlight and by music.

If fresh rose leaves are shut closely into a drawer until they have thoroughly dried and crumbled, they will be found, when removed, entirely scentless, but the drawer will retain for years some intangible emanation which they have given off, and this will permeate any object left in the drawer. Recent delicate experiments have shown how the violence of emotion will affect the weight of human beings, and no doubt, in supreme crises of feeling, living bodies may lose this weight by the throwing off of some emanation which may linger for a long time in the immediate surroundings. It has been discovered that many objects retain luminosity, after being long exposed to powerful rays; a luminosity invisible to our sight, but sufficient to make dim photographs upon highly sensitized plates. The "ghosts" are very probably explicable on some such theory as this. Some individuals are like these extremely sensitive plates. The emanations thrown out in the condition of intense emotion affect them, and give them an impression of sounds or sights which appear, in our present state of ignorance, to be supernatural. Of course, any psychologist or scientist would pooh-pooh this hypothesis of mine, if it were made public, but equally they would have sniffed fifty years ago at a guess at wireless telegraphy, or the RoËntgen ray, or the radioactivity of radium. After all, however, they are right in thinking that guesses are not very valuable unless one has the industry to demonstrate their accuracy.