Real Ghost Stories

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How vast and powerful are those hidden organs of the Unconscious
Personality we can only dimly see. It is through them that Divine
revelation is vouchsafed to man. The visions of the mystic, the
prophecies of the seer, the inspiration of the sibyl, all come through
this Unconscious Soul. It is through this dumb and suppressed Ego that
we communicate by telepathy,--that thought is transferred without using
the five senses. This under-soul is in touch with the over-soul, which,
in Emerson's noble phrase, "abolishes time and space." "This influence
of the senses has," he says, "in most men, overpowered their mind to
that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and
insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is in the world
the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the
force of the soul." It is this Unconscious Personality which sees the
_Strathmore_ foundering in mid-ocean, which hears a whisper spoken
hundreds of miles off upon the battlefield, and which witnesses, as if
it happened before the eyes, a tragedy occurring at the Antipodes.

In proportion as the active, domineering Conscious Personality
extinguishes his submissive unconscious partner, materialism flourishes,
and man becomes blind to the Divinity that underlies all things. Hence
in all religions the first step is to silence the noisy, bustling master
of our earthly tabernacle, who, having monopolised the five senses, will
listen to no voice which it cannot hear, and to allow the silent
mistress to be open-souled to God. Hence the stress which all spiritual
religions have laid upon contemplation, upon prayer and fasting. Whether
it is an Indian Yogi, or a Trappist Monk, or one of our own Quakers, it
is all the same. In the words of the Revivalist hymn, "We must lay our
deadly doing down," and in receptive silence wait for the inspiration
from on high. The Conscious Personality has usurped the visible world;
but the Invisible, with its immeasurable expanse, is the domain of the
Sub-conscious. Hence we read in the Scriptures of losing life that we
may find it; for things of time and sense are temporal, but the things
which are not seen are eternal.

It is extraordinary how close is the analogy when we come to work it
out. The impressions stored up by the Conscious Personality and
entrusted to the care of the Unconscious are often, much to our disgust,
not forthcoming when wanted. It is as if we had given a memorandum to
our wife and we could not discover where she had put it. But night
comes; our Conscious Self sleeps, our Unconscious Housewife wakes, and
turning over her stores produces the missing impression; and when our
other self wakes it finds the mislaid memorandum, so to speak, ready to
its hand. Sometimes, as in the case of somnambulism, the Sub-conscious
Personality stealthily endeavours to use the body and limbs, from all
direct control over which it is shut out as absolutely as the inmate of
a Hindu zenana is forbidden to mount the charger of her warrior spouse.
But it is only when the Conscious Personality is thrown into a state of
hypnotic trance that the Unconscious Personality is emancipated from the
marital despotism of her partner. Then for the first time she is allowed
to help herself to the faculties and senses usually monopolised by the
Conscious Self. But like the timid and submissive inmate of the zenana
suddenly delivered from the thraldom of her life-long partner, she
immediately falls under the control of another. The Conscious
Personality of another person exercises over her the same supreme
authority that her own Conscious Personality did formerly.

There is nothing of sex in the ordinary material sense about the two
personalities. But their union is so close as to suggest that the
intrusion of the hypnotist is equivalent to an intrigue with a married
woman. The Sub-conscious Personality is no longer faithful exclusively
to its natural partner; it is under the control of the Conscious
Personality of another; and in the latter case the dictator seems to be
irresistibly over-riding for a time all the efforts of the Conscious
Personality to recover its authority in its own domain.

What proof, it will be asked impatiently, is there for the splitting of
our personality? The question is a just one, and I proceed to answer it.

There are often to be found in the records of lunatic asylums strange
instances of a dual personality, in which there appear to be two minds
in one body, as there are sometimes two yolks in one egg.

In the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, M. Jules Janet records the
following experiment which, although simplicity itself, gives us a very
vivid glimpse of a most appalling complex problem:--

"An hysterical subject with an insensitive limb is put to sleep, and is
told, 'After you wake you will raise your finger when you mean Yes, and
you will put it down when you mean No, in answer to the questions which
I shall ask you.' The subject is then wakened, and M. Janet pricks the
insensitive limb in several places. He asks, 'Do you feel anything?' The
conscious-awakened person replies with the lips, 'No,' but at the same
time, in accordance with the signal that has been agreed upon during the
state of hypnotisation, the finger is raised to signify 'Yes.' It has
been found that the finger will even indicate exactly the number of
times that the apparently insensitive limb has been wounded."

_The Double-Souled Irishman._

Dr. Robinson, of Lewisham, who has bestowed much attention on this
subject, sends me the following delightful story about an Irishman who
seems to have incarnated the Irish nationality in his own unhappy
person:--

"An old colleague of mine at the Darlington Hospital told me that he
once had an Irish lunatic under his care who imagined that his body was
the dwelling-place of two individuals, one of whom was a Catholic, with
Nationalist--not to say Fenian--proclivities, and the other was a
Protestant and an Orangeman. The host of these incompatibles said he
made it a fixed rule that the Protestant should occupy the right side of
his body and the Catholic the left, 'so that he would not be annoyed wid
them quarrelling in his inside.' The sympathies of the host were with
the green and against the orange, and he tried to weaken the latter by
starving him, and for months would only chew his food on the left side
of his mouth. The lunatic was not very troublesome, as a rule, but the
attendants generally had to straight-waistcoat him on certain critical
days--such as St. Patrick's Day and the anniversary of the battle of the
Boyne; because the Orange fist would punch the Fenian head unmercifully,
and occasionally he and the Fenian leagued together against the
Orangeman and banged him against the wall. This lunatic, when
questioned, said he did his best to keep the peace between his
troublesome guests, but that sometimes they got out of hand."

_Ansel Bourne and A. J. Brown._

A similar case, although not so violent or chronic in its manifestation,
is recorded in Vol. VII. (Part xix.) of the Psychical Research Society's
Proceedings, as having occurred on Rhode Island some years ago. An
excellent citizen, and a very religious lay preacher, of the name of
Ansel Bourne, was the subject:--

On January 17th, 1887, he went from his home in Coventry, R.I., to
Providence, in order to get money to pay for a farm which he had
arranged to buy, leaving his horse at Greene Station, in a stable,
expecting to return the same afternoon from the city. He drew out of the
bank 551 dollars, and paid several small bills, after which he went to
his nephew's store, 121, Broad Street, and then started to go to his
sister's house on Westminster Street. This was the last that was known
of his doings at that time. He did not appear at his sister's house, and
did not return to Greene.

Nothing was heard of him until March the 14th, when a telegram came from
a doctor in Norristown, Philadelphia, stating that he had just been
discovered there. He was entirely unconscious of having been absent from
home, or of the lapse of time between January 17th and March 14th. He
was brought home by his relatives, who, by diligent inquiry were able to
make out that Mr. Ansel Bourne, five weeks after leaving Rhode Island,
opened a shop in Norristown, and stocked it with toys and confectionery
which he purchased in Philadelphia. He called himself A. J. Brown, and
lived and did business, and went to meeting, like any ordinary mortal,
giving no one any suspicion that he was any other than A. J. Brown.

On the morning of Monday, March 14th, about five o'clock, he heard, he
says, an explosion like the report of a gun or a pistol, and, waking, he
noticed that there was a ridge in his bed not like the bed he had been
accustomed to sleep in. He noticed the electric light opposite his
windows. He rose and pulled away the curtains and looked out on the
street. He felt very weak, and thought that he had been drugged. His
next sensation was that of fear, knowing that he was in a place where he
had no business to be. He feared arrest as a burglar, or possibly
injury. He says this is the only time in his life he ever feared a
policeman.

The last thing he could remember before waking was seeing the Adams
express wagons at the corner of Dorrance and Broad Streets, in
Providence, on his way from the store of his nephew in Broad Street to
his sister's residence in Westminster Street, on January 17th.

The memory of Ansel Bourne retained absolutely nothing of the doings of
A. J. Brown, whose life he had lived for nearly two months. Professor
William James hypnotised him, and no sooner was he put into the trance
and was told to remember what happened January 17th, 1887, than he
became A. J. Brown again, and gave a clear and connected narrative of
all his doings in the Brown state. He did not remember ever having met
Ansel Bourne. Everything, however, in his past life, he said, was "mixed
up." He only remembered that he was confused, wanted to get somewhere
and have rest. He did not remember how he left Norristown. His mind was
confused, and since then it was a blank. He had no memory whatever of
his name or of his second marriage and the place of his birth. He
remembered, however, the date of his birth, and of his first wife's
death, and his trade. But between January 17th, 1887, and March 14th he
was not himself but another, and that other one Albert J. Brown, who
ceased to exist consciously on March 14th, but who promptly returned
four years afterwards, when Ansel Bourne was hypnotised, and showed that
he remembered perfectly all that happened to him between these two
dates. The confusion of his two memories in his earlier life is
puzzling, but it in no way impairs the value of this illustration of the
existence of two independent memories--two selfs, so to speak, within a
single skin.

The phenomenon is not uncommon, especially with epileptic patients.
Every mad-doctor knows cases in which there are what may be described as
alternating consciousnesses with alternating memories. But the
experiments of the French hypnotists carry us much further. In their
hands this Sub-conscious Personality is capable of development, of
tuition, and of emancipation. In this little suspected region lies a
great resource. For when the Conscious Personality is hopeless,
diseased, or demoralised the Unconscious Personality can be employed to
renovate and restore the patient, and then when its work is done it can
become unconscious once more and practically cease to exist.

Chapter II.

Louis V. and His Two Souls.

There is at present[2] a patient in France whose case is so
extraordinary that I cannot do better than transcribe the report of it
here, especially because it tends to show not only that we have two
personalities, but that each may use by preference a separate lobe of
the brain. The Conscious Personality occupies the left and controls the
right hand, the Unconscious the right side of the head and controls the
left hand. It also brings to light a very curious, not to say appalling,
fact, viz., the immense moral difference there may be between the
Conscious and the Unconscious Personalities. In the American case Bourne
was a character practically identical with Brown. In this French case
the character of each self is entirely different. What makes the case
still more interesting is that, besides the two personalities which we
all seem to possess, this patient had an arrested personality, which was
only fourteen years old when the age of his body was over forty. Here is
the report, however, make of it what you will.

[2] 1891.

"Louis V. began life (in 1863) as the neglected child of a turbulent
mother. He was sent to a reformatory at ten years of age, and there
showed himself, as he has always done when his organization had given
him a chance, quiet, well-behaved, and obedient. Then at fourteen years
old he had a great fright from a viper--a fright which threw him off his
balance, and started the series of psychical oscillations on which he
has been tossed ever since. At first the symptoms were only physical,
epilepsy and hysterical paralysis of the legs; and at the asylum of
Bonneval, whither he was next sent, he worked at tailoring steadily for
a couple of months. Then suddenly he had a hystero-epileptic
attack--fifty hours of convulsions and ecstasy--and when he awoke from
it he was no longer paralysed, no longer acquainted with tailoring, and
no longer virtuous. His memory was set back, so to say, to the moment of
the viper's appearance, and he could remember nothing since. His
character had become violent, greedy, quarrelsome, and his tastes were
radically changed. For instance, though he had before the attack been a
total abstainer, he now not only drank his own wine, but stole the wine
of the other patients. He escaped from Bonneval, and after a few
turbulent years, tracked by his occasional relapses into hospital or
madhouse, he turned up once more at the Rochefort asylum in the
character of a private of marines, convicted of theft, but considered to
be of unsound mind. And at Rochefort and La Rochelle, by great good
fortune, he fell into the hands of three physicians--Professors Bourru
and Burot, and Dr. Mabille--able and willing to continue and extend the
observations which Dr. Camuset at Bonneval, and Dr. Jules Voisin at
Bicetre, had already made on this most precious of _mauvais sujets_
at earlier points in his chequered career.

"He is now no longer at Rochefort, and Dr. Burot informs me that his
health has much improved, and that his peculiarities have in great part
disappeared. I must, however, for clearness sake, use the present tense
in briefly describing his condition at the time when the long series of
experiments were made.

"The state into which he has gravitated is a very unpleasing one. There
is paralysis and insensibility of the right side, and, as is often the
case in right hemiplegia, the speech is indistinct and difficult.
Nevertheless he is constantly haranguing any one who will listen to him,
abusing his physicians, or preaching--with a monkey-like impudence
rather than with reasoned clearness--radicalism in politics and atheism
in religion. He makes bad jokes, and if any one pleases him he
endeavours to caress him. He remembers recent events during his
residence at Rochefort asylum, but only two scraps of his life before
that date, namely, his vicious period at Bonneval and a part of his stay
at Bicetre.

"Except this strange fragmentary memory, there is nothing very unusual
in this condition, and in many asylums no experiments on it would have
been attempted. Fortunately the physicians at Rochefort were familiar
with the efficacy of the contact of metals in provoking transfer of
hysterical hemiplegia from one side to the other. They tried various
metals in turn on Louis V. Lead, silver, and zinc had no effect. Copper
produced a slight return of sensibility in the paralysed arm, but steel
applied to the right arm transferred the whole insensibility to the left
side of the body.

"Inexplicable as such a phenomenon is, it is sufficiently common, as
French physicians hold, in hysterical cases to excite little surprise.
What puzzled the doctors was the change of character which accompanied
the change of sensibility. When Louis V. issued from the crisis of
transfer with its minute of anxious expression and panting breath, he
might fairly be called a new man. The restless insolence, the savage
impulsiveness, have wholly disappeared. The patient is now gentle,
respectful, and modest, can speak clearly, but he only speaks when he is
spoken to. If he is asked his views on religion and politics, he prefers
to leave such matters to wiser heads than his own. It might seem that
morally and mentally the patient's cure had been complete.

"But now ask what he thinks of Rochefort; how he liked his regiment of
marines. He will blankly answer that he knows nothing of Rochefort, and
was never a soldier in his life. 'Where are you then, and what is the
date of to-day?' 'I am at Bicetre; it is January 2nd, 1884, and I hope
to see M. Voisin, as I did yesterday.'

"It is found, in fact, that he has now the memory of two short periods
of life (different from those which he remembers when his right side is
paralysed), periods during which, so far as now can be ascertained, his
character was of this same decorous type, and his paralysis was on his
left side.

"These two conditions are what are called his first and his second, out
of a series of six or more through which he can be made to pass. For
brevity's sake I will further describe his fifth state only.

"If he is placed in an electric bath, or if a magnet is placed on his
head, it looks at first sight as though a complete physical cure had
been effected. All paralysis, all defect of sensibility, has
disappeared. His movements are light and active, his expression gentle
and timid, but ask him where he is, and you will find that he has gone
back to a boy of fourteen, that he is at St. Urbain, his first
reformatory, and that his memory embraces his years of childhood, and
stops short on the very day on which he had the fright from the viper.
If he is pressed to recollect the incident of the viper, a violent
epileptiform crisis puts a sudden end to this phase of his personality."
(Vol. IV. pp. 497, 498, 499, "Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research").

This carries us a good deal further. Here we have not only two distinct
personalities, but two distinct characters, if not three, in one body.
According to the side which is paralysed, the man is a savage reprobate
or a decent modest citizen. The man seems born again when the steel
touches his right side. Yet all that has happened has been that the
Sub-conscious Personality has superseded his Conscious Personality in
the control of Louis V.

_Lucie and Adrienne._

The next case, although not marked by the same violent contrast, is
quite as remarkable, because it illustrates the extent to which the
Sub-conscious Self can be utilized in curing the Conscious Personality.

The subject was a girl of nineteen, called Lucie, who was highly
hysterical, having daily attacks of several hours' duration. She was
also devoid of the sense of pain or the sense of contact, so that she
"lost her legs in bed," as she put it.

On her fifth hypnotisation, however, Lucie underwent a kind of
catalepsy, after which she returned to the somnambulic state; but that
state was deeper than before. She no longer made any sign whether of
assent or refusal when she received the hypnotic commands, but she
executed them infallibly, whether they were to take effect immediately,
or after waking.

In Lucie's case this went further, and the suggested actions became
absolutely a portion of the trance-life. She executed them without
apparently knowing what she was doing. If, for instance, in her waking
state she was told (in the tone which in her hypnotic state signified
command) to get up and walk about, she walked about, but to judge from
her conversation she supposed herself to be still sitting quiet. She
would weep violently when commanded, but while she wept she continued to
talk as gaily and unconcernedly as if the tears had been turned on by a
stop-cock.

Any suggestion uttered by M. Janet in a brusque tone of command reached
the Unconscious Self alone; and other remarks reached the subject--awake
or somnambulic--in the ordinary way. The next step was to test the
intelligence of this hidden "slave of the lamp," if I may so term
it--this sub-conscious and indifferent executor of all that was bidden.
How far was its attention alert? How far was it capable of reasoning and
judgment? M. Janet began with a simple experiment. "When I shall have
clapped my hands together twelve times," he said to the entranced
subject before awakening her, "you will go to sleep again." There was no
sign that the sleeper understood or heard; and when she was awakened the
events of the trance were a blank to her as usual. She began talking to
other persons. M. Janet, at some little distance, clapped his hands
feebly together five times. Seeing that she did not seem to be attending
to him, he went up to her and said, "Did you hear what I did just now?"
"No; what?" "Do you hear this?" and he clapped his hands once more.
"Yes, you clapped your hands." "How often?" "Once." M. Janet again
withdrew and clapped his hands six times gently, with pauses between the
claps. Lucie paid no apparent attention, but when the sixth clap of this
second series--making the twelfth altogether--was reached, she fell
instantly into the trance again. It seemed, then, that the "slave of the
lamp" had counted the claps through all, and had obeyed the order much
as a clock strikes after a certain number of swings of the pendulum,
however often you stop it between hour and hour.

Thus far, the knowledge gained as to the unconscious element in Lucie
was not direct, but inferential. The nature of the command which it
could execute showed it to be capable of attention and memory; but there
was no way of learning its own conception of itself, if such existed, or
of determining its relation to other phenomena of Lucie's trance. And
here it was that automatic writing was successfully invoked; here we
have, as I may say, the first fruits in France of the new attention
directed to this seldom-trodden field. M. Janet began by the following
simple command: "When I clap my hands you will write Bonjour." This was
done in the usual scrawling script of automatism, and Lucie, though
fully awake, was not aware that she had written anything at all.

M. Janet simply ordered the entranced girl to write answers to all
questions of his after her waking. The command thus given had a
persistent effect, and while the awakened Lucie continued to chatter as
usual with other persons, her Unconscious Self wrote brief and scrawling
responses to M. Janet's questions. This was the moment at which, in many
cases, a new and invading separate personality is assumed.

A singular conversation gave to this limited creation, this statutory
intelligence, an identity sufficient for practical convenience. "Do you
hear me?" asked Professor Janet. Answer (by writing), "No." "But in
order to answer one must hear." "Certainly." "Then how do you manage?"
"I don't know." "There must be somebody that hears me." "Yes." "Who is
it?" "Not Lucie." "Oh, some one else? Shall we call her Blanche?" "Yes,
Blanche." Blanche, however, had to be changed. Another name had to be
chosen. "What name will you have?" "No name." "You must, it will be more
convenient." "Well, then, Adrienne." Never, perhaps, has a personality
had less spontaneity about it.

Yet Adrienne was in some respects deeper down than Lucie. She could get
at the genesis of certain psychical manifestations of which Lucie
experienced only the results. A striking instance of this was afforded
by the phenomena of the hystero-epileptic attacks to which this patient
was subject.

Lucie's special terror, which recurred in wild exclamation in her
hysterical fits, was in some way connected with hidden men. She could
not, however, recollect the incident to which her cries referred; she
only knew that she had had a severe fright at seven years old, and an
illness in consequence. Now, during these "crises" Lucie (except,
presumably, in the periods of unconsciousness which form a pretty
constant element in such attacks) could hear what Prof. Janet said to
her. Adrienne, on the contrary, was hard to get at; could no longer obey
orders, and if she wrote, wrote only "J'ai peur, j'ai peur."

M. Janet, however, waited until the attack was over, and then questioned
Adrienne as to the true meaning of the agitated scene. Adrienne was able
to describe to him the terrifying incident in her childish life which
had originated the confused hallucinations which recurred during the
attack. She could not explain the recrudescence of the hallucinations;
but she knew what Lucie saw, and why she saw it; nay, indeed, it was
Adrienne, rather than Lucie, to whom the hallucination was directly
visible.

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