Laying a ghost.
The uneasy spirit that exercised itself within a veritable haunted house in Germany has just been very effectively “laid,” and that not by any canonical or uncanonical form of exorcism, but by the operation of the criminal law.
A farmer and his wife who dwelt at Resau, near Potsdam, took into their service last November a lad of 15 named Charles Wolter. Scarcely had this boy entered the farmhouse when some extraordinary manifestations took place. Farmer Boettcher found the pigs were set at liberty by invisible hands, and objects usually regarded as stationary showed a surprising mobility. In the dead of night resounding blows appeared to be struck upon the outer walls; but when the farmer, “a slippered pantaloon,” in scant raiment, came, candle in hand, to investigate, there was no one to be seen.
Noises were not all; windows were broken, shoes and clothing flew about; and attempts at exorcism were met by showers of potatoes and other missiles. The village pastor’s aid was invoked; but scarcely had the worthy man entered the house before there was a noise as of thunder, and he had to dodge to escape a well-aimed volley of potatoes. He began to chant a psalm, but the “spirit” undismayed, bombarded him with ham bones.
Wolter was a spectator of the singular scene; but the pastor did not suspect the boy, for he had passed a very satisfactory examination in religious knowledge. Under these puzzling circumstances the minister formed a theory that the erratic flight of potatoes and other articles in the Boettcherian home was due to a “magnetic current”, and he wrote to Prof. Helmholtz, who very judiciously replied that the magnetic current would not bombard a venerable pastor with hambones and potatoes, and that he was probably being hoaxed by some practical joker.
So it was. The boy Wolter was the hauntee of the house, and having some athletic dexterity was able for a time to play these pranks undetected. Apparently his motive was to drive Boettcher from the farm, in order that his father might buy it at a cheaper rate. “Haunted houses” are rarely at a premium in the agricultural world. The boy’s guilt was proved, and he has been sent to prison for six weeks.
South Wales Echo, 19th January 1889.
Foreign Spiritual Fragments
“Gather them up”
Stone throwing in Berlin.
The wiseacres in Berlin are greatly perplexed by some physical manifestations which have taken place in the village of Resau, near Potsdam, and have formed the subject of a magisterial inquiry. In that place livesa man named Boettcher, who owns a house and a little bit of land. He and his wife had engaged a boy, fifteen years of age, as a domestic. This lad, Charles Wolter, seemsto have been highly mediumistic, which will help to explain what follows.
After Boettcher and his wife retired to rest of a night, they heard strange noises on the wall, and although they lit a candle, nobody was visible. Wolter was tranquilly sleeping in a palliasse at the foot of their bed, and they woke him and told him to light a lantern. Bottcher and he then searched the premises outside, and while they were engaged on a fruitless search for their invisible disturbers, their windows were broken by stones.
Another night the man’s sabots were flung across the room in one direction and his clothes in another. When he attempted to rise he was pelted with potatoes; husband and wife hid their heads underneath the clothes, said their prayers, and repeated some hymns to drive away their tormentors, but all in vain. The nocturnal disturbances became more frequent, violent, and inexplicable, and the pastor of the neighbouring village of Blixendorf, Herr Muller, was called in, but was saluted with a shower of potatoes, ham bones, and cooking utensils. The boy was all the time in full view of the worthy pastor, who saw that he had no hand in the production of the phenomena.
Then the mayor of Resau was appealed to, and he caused Wolter to be arrested and tried for having occasioned them; but although therewas not a tittle of evidence to connect him with them, and the pastor declared his innocence, the poor lad was committed to prison for six weeks by the Solons; after which the bombardment ceased, as it naturally would when the mischievous spirits who produced it were deprived of a medium. The Sphinx, to which we are indebted for these particulars, publishes a plan of the premises in which the disturbances took place. – C. Rohner, in “Harbinger of Light.”
The Two Worlds, 16th August 1889.