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ballechin
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On the Trail of a Ghost.
Mr Andrew Lang writes to yesterday’s “Times”:
– Apart from personal questions, it would be very interesting if the mysterious noises so long attributed by tradition to haunted houses could be accounted for by what Byron calls “young earthquakes.” In 1765-1770 Mrs Ricketts, sister of Lord St Vincent, was first disturbed and finally driven out of the old house at Hinton Ampner, near Alresford, by noises unexplained. These, as described by her, closely resembled the sounds spoken of at Ballechin by several witnesses. They even more closely resembled the noises which, as Professor Milne says, occur in seismic districts in South America. The learned Professor doubtless knows whether the district near Alresford is seismic or not. The letters of Mrs Ricketts and of Lord St Vincent are published in the “Gentlemen’s Magazine” between 1870 and 1880; I have mislaid the exact reference. The parallelism to descriptions of “el grand ruido” are very close. Mrs Ricketts and her famous brother were persons of noted sense, veracity, and courage.
But a curious point arises. The noises both at Hinton Ampner (1769) and Ballechin, were not equally audible to all persons equally well placed for hearing. Your correspondent Mr Harold Sanders did not hear them for three weeks. Lord St Vincent never heard the Hinton disturbances till Mrs Ricketts informed him of their existence. Mr Samuel Wesley heard no sounds of an unusual kind at Epworth (1717) till weeks after his family was alarmed; he attests this himself. Other cases of similar “non-hearing” are equally well vouched for. Several explanations may be invented involving either trickery or contagious hallucination, but none of these explanations appear to apply to seismic noises. It is plain, of course, that, when people are once alarmed by mysterious noises of any kind, apparitions may either be fabled or produced by “suggestion.” This apparently occurred at Hepworth and Hinton; about Ballechin I have no exact information. As I understand the Psychical Researchers, they interpret such local sounds (if, that is, no more vulgar origin can be found) as perhaps purely hallucinatory, not as real noises at all, still less as necessarily caused by “spirits.” Thus a proper examination should either demonstrate an ordinary cause or causes, or the existence of seismic echoes, or should raise, in the last resort, a kind of presumption that the ear as well as the eye may be the victim of “collective hallucinations,” which was Coleridge’s theory.
The Scotsman, 25th June 1897.