About the year 1645, Richard Baxter, author of “Baxter’s Saint’s Rest,” a book valued by many Christians second only to the Bible, delivered an “Historical Discourse on Apparitions,” in which he said:
“There is now in London an understanding, sober, pious man, oft one of my hearers, who has an elder brother, a gentleman of considerable rank, who, having formerly seemed pious, of late years does often fall into the sin of drunkenness; he often lodges long together here at his brother’s house, and whensover he is drunk and has slept himself sober, something knocks at his bed’s head, as if one knocked on a wainscot. When they remove his bed it follows him. Besides other loud noises on other parts where he is, that all the house hears, they have often watched him, and kept his hands, lest he should do it himself.
“His brother has often told it me, and brought his wife, a discreet woman, to attest it, who avers, moreover, that as she watched him she has seen his shoes, under the bed, taken up, and nothing visible to touch them. They brought the man himself to me, and when we asked him how he dared sin again after such a warning, he had no excuse.”
Cornubian and Redruth Times, 28th December 1888.