CHAPTER VIII

HAUNTINGS IN THE EAST END

Having come to the conclusion that it was quite impossible to earn a living in America, I returned to England as a steerage passenger on the German liner “Elbe.”

It was the last homeward journey she was destined to go, for she was run into on her next outward voyage by the “Crathie,” several hundred miles off the East Coast of England, and sunk with an appalling loss of life. The weather being particularly rough, we were about nine days at sea; and the fact that our quarters were extremely close, consisting of little more than a square foot to each person, coupled with food that I could not eat, made me sincerely thankful when the time came to go ashore. Apart from these details I had nothing to complain of in the way I was treated, for the crew—though barely concealing their hearty contempt for all but the first-class passengers—were to me civil enough. At the same time the experience—an experience I had not bargained for—was one I certainly do not desire to go through again.

I shall never forget how glad I was to find myself once more in an English restaurant, sitting down to a good, square English meal. I spent two nights in Southampton, travelling thence to London.

On arriving at Waterloo, I found myself almost as embarrassed as I had been in New York, for my knowledge of London was extremely limited. I had only been there—excepting when I was up for my Sandhurst Exam.—for an odd day occasionally, and then I had always stayed at a private hotel in Cambridge Street, Hyde Park. Now, however, my funds being no longer equal to the West End, I was forced to look elsewhere for a lodging. After a wearisome search, I at last found a room in Tennyson Street, S.E. That room will take a lot of forgetting. It was very small, very dark, and very beetly. I could hear whole armies of blackbeetles parading the floor and scaling the walls. Occasionally, one dropped with a thud seemingly close to me, and I sprang out of bed in terror, lest it had landed on the counterpane. I honestly believe I am as much afraid of cockroaches as I am of ghosts.

I only stayed in that house three days, and then moved into the attic of a coffee tavern in York Road. That was midway in the ‘nineties, and York Road then was very different from what it is now. In the day-time it was full of frowsily dressed men and women and the fœtid steam from the cheaper kinds of restaurants.

I well remember one shop that boasted of hot rabbit dinners for fourpence; and big pork pies, that had a peculiar fascination for blue-bottles, were sold there, all the year round, for threepence. I often wondered how many people those pies killed, and how any man could be such a villain as to sell them.

But if York Road was mean and squalid in the day-time, it was infinitely worse at night. I have never in any other street in London seen such an endless procession of women of the unfortunate class. They were nearly all German, and their hard, cruel faces should have been a sufficient warning to anyone to give them a wide berth. I haven’t the slightest doubt that many of the young men who were foolish enough to be enticed by them were ruthlessly robbed, and not infrequently murdered.

One very nasty incident took place just under my window. It was in the depths of December, and the snow lay thick on the ground. Will anyone who experienced it ever forget that Christmas of 1894. I was laid up with influenza, and was lying awake coughing, when I heard a loud shriek, followed by an oath, and a series of groans and gurgles. Then someone whistled, and a cab came up, after which all was quiet for a few minutes, when a crowd collected and a babel of voices arose.

In the morning my landlady, with a very white face, told me she had seen it all through her window; she slept in the basement, and had been too horrified to move. It appears that, shortly before midnight, a man had hidden in the doorway of the house, as if waiting for someone, and about ten minutes later a woman had come along, whom he hurled to the ground, and stabbed. When the woman had ceased groaning, the man whistled, and a cab came up. The driver, getting down from his seat, helped lift the woman into the vehicle; he and the murderer then climbed into the box, there was the crack of a whip, and the cab was gone. A few minutes afterwards a couple of policemen appeared on the scene, talked for some time, and then walked away, after which the street remained silent till dawn.

I went out and looked at the scene of the incident. There was abundant evidence on the doorstep and window-sill as to what had taken place, and seeing the people next door looking at it, I asked them if they had heard anything in the night. They shrugged their shoulders. “It’s quite a common occurrence in this neighbourhood,” they said, “and it would never do for us to take any notice of it. If we did, we should certainly, sooner or later, share the same fate as that woman.” Thus, no attempt was made to bring the miscreant to justice, and the matter ended.

During the time I was with her, my landlady was robbed twice. On the first occasion two boys came into the front part of the shop and asked for some sandwiches. Whilst the landlady’s daughter, who was alone behind the counter, was serving them, one of the boys snatched up a ham, the other threw down a chair, and both flew out of the shop. The girl rushed after them, but of course fell over the chair. Her cries brought her brother Bert and me to the rescue, and we set off in pursuit of the thieves. Although they had got some distance, Bert, being an astonishingly fast sprinter, had nearly caught them up, when the foremost of the boys abruptly halted, and, whirling round, flung the ham right at him. He ducked, and the ham landed with a splash in a puddle of rain water. Picking it up, we bore it triumphantly home, and it was soon resting on the counter, I hope—since it was to be sold as usual—none the worse for its adventure.

Episode number two did not end quite so happily. A young man with a clean-shaven face, and innocent, big blue eyes came to look for rooms. He spoke with a strong American accent, and said he was travelling for a well-known firm of jewellers in Boston. Whether it was the eyes, or thoughts of gold bracelets and pearl pendants, I cannot say—perhaps it was both; anyhow, the landlady’s daughter beamed on him, and from that day forth I became a person of second importance, if, indeed, of any importance at all. Whatever he said was law, and whatever he chose to wear was “most elegant.” Then something happened, for which I was not altogether unprepared. He came down one morning carrying a somewhat bulky parcel, which he told the landlady’s daughter was his dress suit. “It’s too small for me,” he said. “This bracing climate of yours has given me such an appetite, I’ve grown fat. I’m going to take it to the tailor down the street to see if he can enlarge it for me. By the way, can you change me this sovereign?” He handed her a coin, and I saw him smile tenderly. Then he went out of the shop with a pile of silver in his hand—and never came back. The sovereign was of course a bad one, and, worse still, the dress clothes were a new suit of Bert’s, one for which he must have given at least three pounds.

I was not idle all the time I stayed in York Road. I was thrown on my own resources and had to find some means of making a livelihood. Expensive though my education had been, it was of little practical use to me now. The only subjects I knew anything about were those required for the Sandhurst and R.I.C. Examinations, and they in no way fitted me for business. A board-school youth with a knowledge of book-keeping and shorthand stood a much better chance of obtaining a clerkship than I did. It was a bitter revelation to me. I had always been brought up with the idea that breed and manners were a valuable asset.

I now discovered that without money and influence they were a handicap rather than otherwise. The majority of employers I interviewed were certainly not gentlemen, nor apparently did they care to have anything to do with such; all they wanted was smartness in figures and the capacity of standing prodigiously long hours and any amount of bullying. I worked for a week in an office in Lewisham. My employer was a kind of jobbing stockbroker with a florid face and yards of gold watch-chain. My hours, as far as I can remember, were from nine to six, with twenty minutes interval for luncheon. The second day I was there I was kept at work till after seven, and the following day, by way of retaliation, I took a good hour over my lunch. When I got back to the office, I thought my employer would have died of apoplexy. I have never seen a man in such a fury.

“What do you think I pay you for?” he shrieked; “to eat?”

“You haven’t paid me yet,” I responded; “it will be time enough to give way to your emotions when you have. You kept me here last night an hour longer than the time agreed. Very good! You get an hour less work out of me to-day. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”

He raised his thick, podgy hand, and I thought he was going to strike me, which I hoped he would do, for I have always been very fond of boxing, and a scrap with him just then would have been as nectar to me. To my astonishment, however, he suddenly subsided, and, walking out of the room, left me to go on with my work undisturbed. I left the office punctually at six that evening, and for the few remaining days I was with him, the prearranged hours were rigidly adhered to. That was my one and only experience in business. I tried to get on the staff of a newspaper, but although I wrote to almost every editor in London, I did not succeed. I am convinced that no post, outside that of a reporter, for which I had neither the training nor the inclination, can be obtained without the investment of money or colossal influence.

I managed, however, to do some free lance work, and I derived no little interest and amusement, though not much remuneration, interviewing for a weekly journal called “Theatricals.” The first man of any note I met was the late Sir Augustus Harris, to whom I introduced myself on the stage of Drury Lane. It was during a rehearsal of the pantomime, at which, if I remember rightly, Harry Nicholls, Herbert Campbell, Dan Leno, and many other favourites of those times were present. Sir Augustus listened to what I had to say with great courtesy, and told me to go to Mr. Neil Forsyth. I did so, with the result that I was offered a small post on the staff of the theatre. I was grateful to Mr. Forsyth, who was one of the very kindest men that ever breathed, but apart from the smallness of the salary, there were obstacles in the way, and so I had to refuse.

About this time I met a girl with whom I became madly infatuated, and when she refused to marry me, I seriously contemplated suicide. It was this episode that gave me the central idea for my first novel, “For Satan’s Sake,” in which I introduced the girl, and which is written very much round my own life.

I am only too thankful now that she did not accept me, for I do not know how I should have kept her, and that, apparently, as far as she was concerned, was the only thing that mattered.

I fought a desperate battle with myself for some time, and in the end came to the grim resolution to go on living. It was when I was recovering from this state of excessive mental dejection that I came in contact with an old acquaintance, a public schoolman, at whose suggestion I decided to try schoolmastering, and consequently obtained a post at Daventry Grammar School.

But I must now return to the principal subject of this narrative, namely, ghosts.

During the year I was in York Road I thoroughly explored the East End, and in the coffee houses and restaurants of Poplar, Deptford, Tilbury and Whitechapel I heard many first-hand accounts of hauntings. Though it is not generally known, the East End of London is far more haunted than the West. On one of my nocturnal rambles, I made the acquaintance of a Russian Jew, who had an extraordinary mania for spiders, which he kept in specially designed boxes with glass lids. On their half-holidays he used to set his children to work collecting flies and other insects, and the whole family used to revel in watching the spiders gorge themselves on their victims. You could see he was innately cruel by the hard twinkling of his little black eyes, and the spasmodic twitching of his flat, greasy, white fingers, but he was something of a scholar and he had a devout dread of ghosts. “There is a haunted house close to here,” he said to me one evening; “if you like to come with me I will introduce you to the owner. He is a Chinaman, called King Ho, or some such outlandish name, and he keeps an opium den.”

King Ho did not require much of an introduction, for, as soon as we entered, he fixed his little slit-like eyes on me and said:

“Well, what do you want? A smoke?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve come to hear about your ghosts. I’m interested in them.”

“There are plenty of them here,” he murmured; “the house is full of them. Sit down!”

I obeyed, and the Russian Jew went back to his spiders and left me alone with the Chinaman.

It was a dirty, sordid, ill-ventilated place, reeking with a dozen different odours, and suggestive of vermin _ad libitum_, and diseases of an Oriental origin and unspeakable nature. A curtain was drawn across one end of the room, and noticing that my eyes wandered off in that direction, King Ho got up and pulled aside the drapery. Two wooden berths, one above the other, were discovered; the top one was empty, and the lower occupied by a corpse-like Chinaman, who was lying on his side, facing us, with absolutely no expression in his eyes or mouth. He might have been dead the best part of a week.

“He’s away in the rice fields of his native home,” King Ho said, “talking to his wife and playing with his children. He goes there every night at this time”—and he glanced at the big, round, wooden clock hanging on the wall.

“You mean he is dreaming,” I said.

“No, I don’t,” King Ho retorted. “I mean he’s there—his spirit, his intelligence is there. That thing you are looking at is only his material body. He, and I, and others we know, don’t set much value on that, we can get out of it so easily. It’s the immaterial self we esteem.”

Then, seeing I was interested, he resumed his chair, and stretching out his long, thin, yellow hand, he touched me on the arm.

“Listen,” he said, “we, Chinamen, who come from the fields and mountains, and grow up in close touch with Nature, can concentrate. From our infancy upwards we think deeply. We think of the sky, the stars, the sun, the moon, the mighty Hoang Ho River and the vast range of the Pelings. We think of them in a sense quite different from the sense in which you Londoners would think of them. You would regard them as so many objects only—sky and land-marks. We think of them as spirits that can act as magnets to our spirits—as intelligences akin to ourselves, that can, when once we become thoroughly acquainted with them, draw us to them. The Pelings live just as much as you and I live—you might pull down their body, that great, elevated frame you style the mountains, just as you might overturn that bench; but the real, the spiritual Pelings would still remain. When once you grasp the idea that all Nature lives—that everything, even to the chairs and tables, have immaterial representatives, then you will begin to understand the principle of the concentration we practise. You must see the Pelings, the Hoang-Ho, the rice fields, not as they would appear to the man in the street here, here in London, Piccadilly, but as we, who live near them and know them, see them—as figures that can see and hear, figures with intelligence, expression—intense expression in their eyes. When you see them like that, you will get to love them, and, when you love them, you will unconsciously concentrate on them, as you do on all things that you love. Your love will not be in vain, it will be reciprocated, and the love that reciprocates yours will, as a magnet, draw you—you—your immaterial ego—your true self—towards it. Now you begin to understand, I can tell by your face. The Chinaman—the Chinaman of the plains and hills—like myself, _thinks_—he knows Nature, and when he leaves China and comes over here, he concentrates until he hears the voice of that Nature calling to him; and when he hears it, his spirit is gently freed from his material body, and borne silently and instantaneously to his home.

“Now, he can think best when he can get some at least of the conditions of his native surroundings—and the most important of them is silence. Not silence such as you may understand it, but the silence of the conscious, inanimate hills, and rivers, and plains—and the only way to procure it is through opium—the opium I supply. Hence he comes here, takes it, and lies over yonder, and thinks, till he hears the call and his spirit is released.”

“But the ghosts,” I interrupted, “the ghosts you spoke about.”

“Wait,” he said. “Listen! Sometimes men have come here who have lost the love of the spirit of the mountain and river. They have lost it because they have liked too much this London of yours, and have imbibed too deeply of that detestable immorality, which so weakens the spirit that it cannot, even if it heard the call, get away from the flesh. I tell those men that my opium will do them no good, but they take it; they take it, and dream as Englishmen would dream—with their spirits chained to their material bodies. When these depraved Chinamen awake and realise that they can never, never again, be drawn by the mighty, majestic love of the Spirit of the Mountain and River, and that they can never again revisit the home of their childhood, so bitter is their disappointment that they kill themselves—not always here, but anywhere—in their lodgings, in the river, or in the docks. Their spirits then invariably come here, where, undoubtedly, they renew their vain efforts to get back to China—to the mighty, majestic Spirit of the Mountain and River, whose love they have lost. Look in that top berth and tell me what you see there?”

“It’s empty,” I said.

“Look again,” he replied.

I did so, but still there was nothing there, only just the bare, dingy panelling.

“Well,” he asked, “what now?”

“Nothing,” I said; “absolutely nothing.”

“Go up to it and put one hand inside,” he remarked.

I did so, and sprang back with a loud cry. I had touched a face!

“Yes,” he said, as I stepped out into the semi-darkness of the causeway, “it frightens some people, but it never frightens me, because I know that the only consolation possible for these unhappy spirits is to lie next to, or to come in contact with, the bodies of those whose spirits are walking and talking with their fond ones in distant China.”

Whilst I was at York Road I became acquainted with an Irish doctor, whom I will call Flynn. He ran a surgery not far from King Ho’s house. Flynn belonged to a famous secret society, whose fundamental object was to carry on a doctrine of surreptitious hatred to England and all things English. Though I had no sympathy with such a society—for I have always held the opinion that, however badly England behaved to Ireland in the past, the majority of the English people of to-day are only too anxious to act fairly to her, and therefore it is better to let bygones be bygones—I found Flynn a very original and entertaining character. All his patients were either Irish or of foreign extraction, and whenever any English person came to the surgery, he flatly refused to attend them.

One evening, when I was sitting chatting with him in front of a blazing peat fire—Flynn would never burn English coal—two Swedish engineers came into the surgery, and Flynn, who, for some peculiar reason, was particularly partial to the Swedes, asked them to join us at supper. The meal certainly was not in the approved style of the West End, nor, perhaps, would it have appealed to the nouveau riche; for there was no snowy tablecloth, no serviettes, no champagne, no liqueurs; it consisted of boiled beef, suet dumplings, potatoes—boiled in their skins, of course—and plenty, yes, plenty, of stout and whiskey; and it was very welcome to the four hungry, healthy men, who did ample justice to it. After we had finished, and pipes were produced, I brought up the subject of ghosts—never very far from my mind—and one of the Swedes laughed.

“Ghosts,” he said, “there are no such things. Neither ghosts nor fairies. I believe in nothing. There is no God, no devil, no heaven, no hell. When we die, we die—there is no future life whatever.”

“Let’s have a séance,” Flynn said, “and see if we can’t convince him. I have the skeleton of a murderer in the room overhead. I will fetch it down, and it shall sit round the table with us.”

“All right!” the sceptical Swede, whose name was Nielssen, said. “Fetch it down; fetch twenty skeletons you like, the more the merrier. Nothing will convince me.”

Flynn ran upstairs, and presently reappeared with a tall skeleton in his arms. The table was cleared, and we all sat round it with our hands spread out after the usual manner of table turners, the skeleton being placed between the two Swedes, each of whom had hold of one of its hands. Flynn then turned down the lights, and we started asking the table questions, many of which, I fear, were of a very ribald and frivolous nature. Every now and then it gave a big tilt, and Nielssen shouted, “That’s for me! It’s my mother-in-law—she’s found out I’ve been making love to my landlady’s daughter.” Once there was a rap, and for the moment I was taken in. Then the other Swede, Heilborn, cried out, “It’s only Nielssen. He did it with his foot; he’s incorrigible!” This sort of thing went on for some time, Flynn and Nielssen constantly playing some prank, and Heilborn and myself not always too serious.

Suddenly the atmosphere of the room seemed to undergo a change, and, as if by common consent, we were all silent. Then Nielssen uttered a sharp cry of pain.

“Strike a light quickly,” he cried; “my hand is being hurt frightfully!”

We did so, and Nielssen gave vent to an expression of relief.

“How did it happen?” Heilborn asked.

“I don’t know,” Nielssen said faintly. He was evidently much shaken, and spoke with the emotion of a man who has undergone some violent shock. “I was only holding the skeleton the same as you, when I suddenly felt its fingers close like a vice on mine. It was a grip of iron. See, my hand is crushed almost out of shape!” He held it out, and we all bent over it curiously. Compared with the other hand, it looked singularly white and limp, and when Flynn touched it, Nielssen very perceptibly winced.

Flynn gave him some brandy, and after a little while he seemed himself again; but he would not continue the séance. “There’s something very odd about the skeleton,” he said. “I don’t believe in spirits, as you know, but there must be something closely akin to one attached to this thing,” and he gave it a vicious kick with his foot.

A week later, when I called at Flynn’s house, he told me that Nielssen was in bed. He had fallen downstairs and badly bruised his spine, besides breaking a leg. “He’ll get over it all right,” Flynn said, “but it will be some time before he can do anything. His account of the accident is most remarkable; in fact, he declares that it wasn’t an accident, that he was deliberately thrown. He swears that he distinctly saw a skeleton hand suddenly catch hold of him round the ankle, and that the next moment he felt himself whirling through the air. He is most emphatic in his declaration that he will never again scoff at ghosts or play with the invisible. And now,” Flynn added, “the wretched thing has begun to plague me. I can’t get a decent night’s sleep. As soon as I begin to doze I am visited by the most disturbing dreams. I invariably hear knocking at the door, and when I open it, something rushes in and strangles me. But the worst of it is, I hear the knocking when I’m awake, too. Sometimes it begins directly I get into bed, before my head has touched the pillow. Knock, knock, knock!—the hard, sharp knock of bony knuckles on door, walls and furniture. I am not actually frightened, but I don’t like it. What do you make of it?”

“If it’s not the skeleton, the spirit of some depraved human,” I replied, “it’s some other equally low and vicious earth-bound, one of the class that visit séances and attach themselves to the unlucky sitter. You might try getting rid of the skeleton—have it cremated and see what effect that has.”

Flynn took my advice; the skeleton was reduced to ashes, and the ashes buried many miles away from Limehouse Causeway, after which, the disturbances, as far as Flynn was concerned, at any rate, entirely ceased. Whether Nielssen was victimised again I cannot say. He rejoined his ship as soon as he had recovered, and since then he has completely passed out of my existence.

There was a house I used occasionally to go to in Whitechapel, a rendezvous of itinerant free lance writers like myself, where, although I never actually saw any ghostly phenomena, I always had very extraordinary impressions. The moment I crossed the threshold, I fancied I was in a big funeral procession following a hearse. It was a dull, winter’s day, I thought; there were inches of slush on the ground, and the cold was intense. I could not see the faces of the people walking beside me, but I instinctively knew that they wore an expression of extreme relief, and that some even of them should-be mourners laughed. We tramped on till we came to a steep hill, then there was a loud report, and at once everything became chaotic. After this my mind gradually cleared and the impressions abruptly ceased. There was no variation in these impressions, they always began and ended in precisely the same way; moreover, I invariably received them whenever I entered the house. I mentioned my experience one day to an habitué of the place, and he quite casually informed me that several men who went there had had similar experiences, and he thought the landlord, if approached tactfully, might offer some sort of explanation. Acting upon this suggestion, I spoke to the landlord, and learned from him that half a century or more ago the house was owned by a wealthy tradesman, who, it was generally supposed, had made his money by sweating his employés. When he died, all the hands had to attend his funeral, but far from looking sad, as they followed the coffin, they had exhibited every manifestation of joy. Just as the procession had reached the summit of a steep hill, a half-witted man fired a gun from a cottage window, and the horses drawing the hearse, taking fright, dashed down the incline and into a wall at the foot of it. Strange to say, no one was injured, but the coffin was thrown out and broken to pieces. The event made a great impression upon the minds of all who witnessed it, and the landlord informed me that I was by no means the only person who, upon entering the house, had received a vivid mental picture of the scene.

I am often asked if I am a consistent medium. No, I am not. It is only at times I see ghosts, only at times I receive vivid impressions, and I do not believe that any person, however mediumistic, can depend upon his or her psychic faculty for consistency. I have been to several public séances, where professional mediums have had the audacity to say they see spirits standing beside practically everyone in the assembly. They rattle off the description of an alleged spirit, as if it were a part in a well-rehearsed play—and play it undoubtedly is to anyone who pauses to reflect. Genuine phantasms do not come to order quite so readily.

In olden times, when people were really psychic, those versed in the art from their childhood upwards could only raise a ghost with great difficulty, and often, only by resorting to spells, many of which were of a very subtle and complex nature. And when, in the end, they did succeed, such manifestations invariably had a very alarming effect on the medium as well as the spectator. How is it, then, that so many of the professional mediums of to-day can not only see visitants from the other world, whenever they like, all around them, but can view these ghostly visitants without being in the least disconcerted, without—as the saying is—turning a hair? Have they really stronger nerves than had Saul, and a closer, far closer intimacy with the Unknown than had the Witch of Endor, or can it be that the Spirit World has so participated in our age of quickness—our rapid forms of locomotion—that a medium has only to raise his or her eyebrows and a host of spirits at once whiz into the room? I do not think so. I believe that such mediums—the mediums whose psychic vision is apparently inexhaustible, and can be turned on and off to order—are either unmitigated humbugs or hysterical dupes, who mistake the baldest impressions for actual spiritual phenomena.

The unmitigated humbug has only to describe the alleged presence with a little elasticity, and the description will surely fit—albeit somewhat loosely—one or another of our departed friends. Who amongst us does not know someone on the other side passably good-looking, rather tall, of medium colouring, and somewhat stout? And if we plead that we do not, it is of no consequence—the medium glibly asserts that the spirit he or she describes has got behind our chair by mistake, and is really searching for someone else. But apart from this obvious fraud, can we believe that any one of those whom we have loved and lost would so degrade themselves and us as to appear at a public séance before a company of strangers. Surely we would rather not see them at all, than see them in such circumstances. At any rate, we would rather—much rather—possess our souls in patience, until our departed loved ones can appear to us in private—as they sometimes can—without the intervention of any medium whatsoever.

With regard to automatic or spirit writing, there is, I believe, just as much fraud practised. The mere fact that Sir somebody or other has a touching belief in one or two of these automatic scribes is quite enough for most people, and, consequently, they never dream of questioning the integrity of any medium who professes to convey to them messages from the dead. It is sufficient that the man with the title, the great man of science, believes. But they forget, often wilfully forget, that the cleverest man is often the most simple; that a great judge has not unfrequently had his pockets picked; and that eminence in one direction by no means denotes ability in another.

Snobbishness is responsible for much. The big man is credulous, and because he is credulous the little man is credulous too. Hence, consistency in the spirit world, in clairvoyance, in automatic writing, is, for the moment, almost universally accepted, and direct communication with the spirit world erroneously looked upon as an every-day occurrence. It will be otherwise when the man in the street wakes up and discovers the occult for himself. Experience will, I think, teach him, as it has taught me, that although ghosts may on very rare occasions come to order—and when they do, their coming is, I believe, quite as surprising to the medium as it is to the audience—by far the greater number of superphysical phenomena appear spontaneously; and it is through such spontaneous appearances only that we can hope to make any progress in our communication with the other world.