A Mystery!
Some time back (says the Weekly News) we quoted from an American paper a statement regarding mysterious noises, sometimes like those of the Cock-lane ghost, heard by many persons, and produced without any visible or traceable agency. The mystery thickens. We give the following from an Auburn correspondent of the Boston Chronotype of August 4; and should not have given it had it appeared in a paper of less high character.
It is asserted that a sound of knocking or rapping is every now and then heard in the rooms of many houses – heard alike by the regular inmates and by visitors or perfect strangers – and sometimes even in the open air and in the open country, and in answer to questions! – “At the risk,” writes the correspondent, “of exciting the wonder of those who are continually looking for supernatural things if they do not understand them, I will state that not only do we get the rapping in answer to questions, but other very singular manifestations, showing that there is absolutely a power in something which is invisible to us, and that power has a will to direct. Even the rapping is a sufficient proof of both power and will, for no sound could be produced without a vibration of the atmosphere. And it could not sound in different places at the request of persons unless there was a directing will.
But there are plainer proofs than this: I have been witness, many times, to the moving of tables, chairs, &c., at the request and without the request of persons present. I have been investigating with others, making every effort to detect any deception, or any visible cause for what was occurring, and have seen a table move some distance on the floor and then back again to the place from whence it started. At other times the table would adhere to the floor as if a great weight was upon it, and a person would have to lift very strong to raise it from the floor on one side, so that it would tip up to an angle of forty five degrees, and there remain while persons would bear heavily upon it without bringing it to the floor. While in this situation you might feel, by laying your hands upon it, a peculiar tremulous motion, at times resembling the action of a very gentle galvanic battery. In fact, there is much to remind one of something of the galvanic or the electric kind in the whole affair, for often where the rapping is heard, however light, there is a tremulous electric jar felt in the room.
I know I may be told of the “extreme liability of the senses to illusion;” “that all present were deceived, or that some adroit person was deceiving the others;” but I would simply state that, with all due deference to those who have been often duped themselves, or are in the habit of deceiving others, there are too many witnesses, and the test has been too well applied, to make any of the observers obnoxious to such a charge. There is a class who are inclined to run into a wild frenzy of superstition. I have seen some of this class undertake the investigation, but they either receive it with great-eyed wonder, and believe everything infallibly correct that they hear, or they denounce those who have undertaken to teach them something as being ‘in league with the devil,’ and, being driven to a point, declare that they believe that it really is spirits, but evil and only evil ones that communicate. Another strong argument in favour of the devilish theory with them is, that it is heard by so many ‘infidels’ and men out of the pale of orthodoxy. Their logic is as forcible as their power of investigation.”
Preston Chronicle, 29th September 1849.