A Ghost Among The Mormons.
A Salt Lake correspondent of the New York World relates the following curious story under date of the 24th ult.:-
A novelty in the line of spiritual manifestations occurred in the Thirteenth Ward a few nights ago. It appears that a certain man had one wife, and was still in some manner bound to another woman. He had been a strict saint, and was at this time among the class called Apostles, and hence the extra woman could no longer be a polygamous wife nor rely upon the Church “sealing,” but was still bound to the man in ties of consanguinity in the shape of a few children.
About six weeks ago wife No. 1 was taken very sick, and was told by her doctor that her “time to adjourn” had about arrived. She at once prepared to go, and left her instructions with the husband to be carried out. The principal article in her verbal will and codicil was that he should not live with woman No. 2 after her death. This he considered unreasonable, and declined to become the administrator of such “nonsense.” She told him, if he refused her request that she would haunt them after her death if she could, and with this understanding they parted – wife No. 1 to her long home, and the husband to remain in this Zion, where he soon after legally married No. 2, and lived in the same house where No. 1 died.
After a few weeks of undisturbed felicity, “with no one to scold, no one to distress,” noises began to be heard about the house of nights, the doors opened and slammed, tables and chairs jupmed about, and dishes rattled around in the cupboard, &c.; footsteps were heard on the floor, as if a person was walking about with a heavy tread; yet no one could be seen. The man said he knew it was his defunct wife, because “it walked just like her, and slammed the things around just as she used to do.” His remembrance of his departed spouse and her eccentricities were sufficiently positive to convince the neighbours that it was actually her.
No sleep was experienced in that house for a few nights, when No.2 became so wrought upon by fear of ghosts that her nervous system required the attendance of a physician.
The facts are that about all of the apostates and a large number of the faithful saints are believers in spiritualism, and if these manifestations continue or become contagious under like circumstances it will be the death of polygamy. .If dissatisfied wives or sealed spouses are to return in invisible form and hold nocturnal carnivals around the couches of the surviving lords and their sleeping companions, it will do more damage to the institution of polygamy in one month than a lifetime of sermons by the Rev. Dr. Newman.
American Register, 21st June 1873.