Ernest Bennett - Apparitions and Haunted Houses

The purpose of this book is to present a survey of the evidence furnished from time to time by reliable witnesses in regard to what are commonly known as apparitions or ghosts, and the various hypotheses which may be put forward to meet the admitted facts. Apart from the evidence accumulated in Great Britain, careful investigators have engaged in similar labours in every country of the civilized world. Flammarion in France, Professor Bozzano in Italy, Dr. Walter Prince in the United States, and other foreign students of recognized intellectual standing have collected narratives bearing on this subject. It is in our own country, however, that by far the most systematic and careful investigations have taken place, mainly through the sustained efforts of the Society for Psychical Research.

This society (which I shall describe hereafter by the letters S.P.R.) was founded in 1882 chiefly through the efforts of Professor Barrett and a group of distinguished Cambridge men, Frederic Myers, Henry Sidgwick, and Edmund Gurney, to make an organized and scientific attempt to investigate that large group of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as psychical and spiritualistic. Among these phenomena those connected with apparitions have always held an important place, more especially in the earlier work of the society.

In 1886 Gurney, Myers, and Podmore published their famous book Phantasms of the Living, a monument of industrious research and critical judgement, which contains some hundreds of well-attested narratives. This volume, however, dealt almost exclusively, as its name implies, with the phantasmal appearances of living persons to living persons. No direct attempt was made to deal with other phantasms than those of the living, though, in view of the fact that the overwhelming majority of such appearances occur at or about the moment of the agents death, considerable doubt must obviously prevail in some instances as to whether or not death had actually taken place before the appearance of the phantasmal figure.

Apart from the large volume of evidence accumulated in the pages of Phantasms of the Living, we find in the forty-three volumes of the Proceedings of the S.P.R. and the monthly Journal a very large number of narratives dealing with apparitions of the dead, some recognized, others carrying with them no indication of identity. The cases which are printed by the society have all been carefully investigated; no narratives have been accepted unless they reached a high standard of evidential value.

In view of the fact that the subject of phantasms of the living has been exhaustively covered, no such narratives, with the exception of a very few collective cases, appear in this book, which is concerned especially with the evidence for, and explanation of, apparitions of the dead. It is upon the tried and tested cases of the S.P.R. that I have largely relied in this present volume. To that extremely small section of the community who are members of the S.P.R. or read its literature some at least of these narratives will doubtless be familiar; but to the reading public in general this important body of evidence is more or less unknown. On that ground, therefore, I make no apology for reprinting with occasional abridgements some of the best cases in the records of the S.P.R.

Because, however, of the obvious fact that nearly all the S.P.R. cases are now remote though their comparative antiquity does not necessarily invalidate the evidence I gladly accepted an invitation in the spring of 1934 to take part with Professor Broad, Dame Edith Lyttelton, Sir Oliver Lodge, and others in a series of broadcasts described as an Inquiry into the Unknown. The topic allotted to me at my request was Apparitions and Haunted Houses. It was difficult to believe that those sources of experience which had furnished the evidence of the best S.P.R. cases in earlier years should have dried up, and I wished to supplement the older narratives by the first-hand testimony of present-day witnesses.