I woke up to a brilliant summer morning pouring in at my open window, but I was in no mood to enjoy its loveliness. I was bathed in cold perspiration, I was shivering with pure unadulterated fear. I was prostrate with the violent revulsion of feeling, from acute dread of discovery to partial immunity on gaining the street and escaping from the house. The vividness of every detail was crystal clear, and attended by all the violent emotions such an adventure and escape would naturally arouse in me, had they happened in the world of realities.
It was hours before I could shake off the horror of the vision, and I left the hotel that day. Nothing would induce me ever to pa.s.s another night under that roof.
I had no recurrence of the vision till three months after, then it came again, with all its attendant horrors, when I was asleep in my own bed at home. This was succeeded at long intervals by a vision of my condition of mind as an undiscovered criminal, always evading detection, but without the vision of my return to the scene of the crime. During the last thirty years I have had recurrences of the complete and partial vision, but at long intervals.
A few years ago I happened to be standing with my host in an enormous stone hall, in one of the greatest houses in England. We were discussing the house, and its uncomfortable vastness. There were suites of apartments in outlying parts where whole families might hide for days if housemaids were careless. To reach the dining and drawing-rooms from the bedrooms, if one was tired, was a real weariness.
We were looking up at the great gallery, running round the hall. It was reached by four wide flights of stairs at different corners, and it was full of all sorts of recesses, and ma.s.sive pieces of old furniture and screens. On the spur of the moment I said to my host, "Wouldn"t it be uncanny if we were to see a strange face looking down on us?"
To my surprise, he answered: "Oh! that has often happened. I"ve often seen strangers looking down. At one time I took them to be inquisitive members of my own household, whom I didn"t know by sight, and one day I complained about it, to the housekeeper. She looked very much disturbed and told me she had seen the same thing herself. The house is opened on certain days to the public, and she was half inclined to think one of the visitors had escaped from the crowd, and hidden herself for several days, as it was not on a public day that the figure was seen."
"Is it always the same figure?" I asked.
"Oh, no," replied my host. "Always a different one, and always some one quite ordinary and modern looking. The strictest orders are given that none of the servants" friends are to be allowed in this part of the house, and the housekeeper has always been with us and is thoroughly trustworthy. The fact remains an unsolved mystery."
The housekeeper was a very agreeable old woman of the real, old-fashioned type. Very rustling in the evening, in a rich silk gown, and wearing some fine piece of jewelry presented to her by one or other of the crowned heads who had visited the famous house. I had asked her before I left about these mysterious appearances, and she had no explanation to offer. She had ascertained beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they had nothing to do with the household.
"They were always just ordinary looking men and women, such as one meets in the streets every day. Sometimes they seem to have hats on, sometimes their heads appear uncovered," she explained.
This fits in with a belief I have always held that we constantly rub shoulders with the disembodied, without being in the least aware of it.
As the Bishop of London once said: "We will find ourselves exactly the same persons ten minutes after death as we were ten minutes before death."
There are many occasions when we cannot express feeling in intellectual terms owing to the poverty of language. One"s life not being a matter of intellectual perception, but a conscious experience, little of it can be made known. The mystic life is really incommunicable.
We regard the Universe through the lens of five very imperfect senses, conscious all the time that there are certainly many more mediums for the expression of consciousness.
Perception is a manifestation of consciousness, and varies enormously in individuals, ranging often above and beneath the normal. Undoubtedly perception can be enormously extended by practice, not only in seeing material objects, but in approaching the borderland of other worlds.
The sight of the Psychic or Medium is not so much vision as a consciousness of the thoughts and feelings of others. It is a sensation rather than a process of thinking, sensation not as we commonly accept the term, but sensation through which mental objects are realized with as great a clarity of vision as physical objects are seen with the naked eye.
This intuitive vision is near akin to ordinary physical vision, inasmuch as the object seen has a real concrete existence. The Psychic feels vibrations and absorbs them.
My explanation of my vision in the Highland inn is that the actual criminal had slept the night before in the room I occupied, and happening to be mediumistic I at once began to absorb the vibrations, and became steeped in all the circ.u.mstances, environment, and conditions thrown off by the criminal in connection with the crime.
The vibrations were intensely strong, and still fresh and concentrated.
I absorbed them so fully that still at times they steal back across the threshold of my subconsciousness, the vehicle which registers and retains all impressions.
During sleep, when one is off guard, the gate is often ajar, and old memories and incidents steal through, and range at will through the ordinary consciousness.
In daily, normal existence the mind is merely a whirlpool, but undoubtedly the criminal would concentrate mentally on every detail of her crime. There would be a focalization of her mind; a concentration of her whole mental faculties upon this one single subject, and when the mental force is reduced from its normal, dissipated condition into coherency, its power is unlimited. It is possible to catch a physical disease by sleeping in an infected bed. It is quite as easy to catch a mental disease by the same means. Many emotions are highly contagious, notably fear. All are invisible to human sight, and there is rarely any warning. A Psychic may sense something unpleasant before infection is established. In fact, this often happens to quite normal individuals.
Something in the atmosphere of a place conveys a warning, is unpleasant or uncongenial and it is avoided. If a warning was conveyed to me in the Highland inn I was too tired to heed it.
At one time in my life I saw a great deal of two intimate and charming friends, Lord and Lady Wynford. Alas! both have now pa.s.sed over.
Lady Wynford was born Caroline Baillie of Dochfour, and owing to her Scotch blood, and her relationship with many of our great Scotch families, she was profoundly interested in ghosts. Lord Wynford, on the contrary, had an absolute horror of the subject, and always left the room whilst it was under discussion. Though very dissimilar, husband and wife were the best of friends. She was very handsome and a brilliant woman of the world. He was shy, retiring, and deeply religious. A perfect example of a true gentleman of the old school, and an aristocrat to his finger-tips. I was devoted to them both, and they were very kind to me in giving me their warm friendship, though at the time of which I write I was only a girl of about twenty years old.
At that period the great topic of conversation amongst ghost-hunters was Glamis Castle, the most celebrated of all haunted houses. No ghost book is ever considered complete without reference to this celebrated Castle, and the story usually narrated is, that in the secret room some abnormal horror lived, and that the heir, Lord Glamis, and the factor, had to be told of its existence by the Earl of Strathmore in person. This information was of so terrible a nature that it changed not only the lives of those two men, but even their personal appearance. They grew aged and haggard in a single night.
This story was readily discussed in old days by members of the Strathmore family, who were just as keen as outsiders were to probe the mystery. To-day it is universally believed that the monstrosity is at last laid to rest, and that though other ghosts still walk the Castle, the worst has departed forever.
I went one afternoon to see the Wynfords in the hotel in which they stayed whilst in Scotland, and found Lady Reay with them. She was a wonderful woman in her way, and preserved her youth up till very late in life. Lord Wynford was not present, and Lady Wynford at once greeted me by exclaiming, "We are going to stay at Glamis next week, and Lady Reay has been there and seen a ghost."
"But not _the_ ghost," admitted Lady Reay.
"Then what did you see?" I inquired.
She then told the following story, which has a sequel:--
"I had been in the Castle for three nights and much to my satisfaction seen absolutely nothing. We were a very cheery party, and every one was frightfully thrilled and nervously expectant, but we were very careful not to breathe the word "ghost" before our host and hostess.
"On the fourth night I was awakened by a moaning sound in my room, and I opened my eyes. The room was in total darkness, but I saw something very bright near the door. I shut my eyes instantly, and pulled the bedclothes over my head in a paroxysm of fear. I longed to light my candles, but didn"t dare, and the moaning continued, and I thought I should go quite mad.
"At last I ventured to peep out again. I saw a woman dressed exactly like Mary Tudor, in her pictures, and she was wandering round the walls, flinging herself against them, like a bird against the bars of a cage, and beating her hands upon the walls, and all the time she moaned horribly. I"m sure she was the ghost of a mad woman. Her face and form were lit up exactly like a picture thrown upon a magic lantern screen, and every detail of her dress was clearly defined.
"Luckily she never looked at me, or I should have screamed, and I thought of Lord and Lady I. sleeping in the next room to mine, and wondered how I could reach them. I was really too terrified to move, and the ghost kept more or less to that part of the room where the door was situated.
"I must have lain there awake for two or three hours, sometimes with my head buried under the clothes, sometimes peeping out, when at last the moaning suddenly stopped. I opened my eyes. Thank G.o.d, I was alone. The ghost had departed.
"I lay with wide open eyes till daybreak. Then the first thing I did was to run to the mirror to see if my hair had turned white. Mercifully it hadn"t, but I looked an awful wreck.
"I told just a few people what I had seen, and contrived to get a wire sent me before lunch. Early in the afternoon I was on the way to Edinburgh."
Such was the story Lady Reay related.
Thirteen years later Captain Eric Streatfield, who was a nephew of Lord Strathmore, and an intimate friend of my husband, told me exactly the same story. He was a boy of six at the time, when the lady of Tudor days appeared moaning in his room, and he said he would never forget the misery of the night he pa.s.sed. He was very much interested in hearing that Lady Reay had gone through the same experience. He told me another extraordinary story.
Whilst, as a school boy, he was visiting at Glamis Castle with his parents, he noticed that they began to behave in rather a peculiar manner. They were often consulting alone with one another, and constantly scanning the sky from their bedroom window, which adjoined his. For two or three days this sort of thing went on, and he caught queer fragments of conversation whispered between them, such as, "It doesn"t always happen. We might be spared this year, the power must die out some day."
At last one evening his father called him into his room, where his mother stood by the open window. In his hand his father held an open watch.
His mother bade him look out, and tell them what sort of night it was.
He replied that it was fine, and still and cold, and the stars were beginning to appear.
His father then said, "We want you to take particular note of the weather, for in another moment you may witness a remarkable change.
Probably you will see a furious tempest."
Eric could not make head or tail of this. He wondered if his parents had gone mad, but glancing at his mother he noticed that she looked strangely pale and anxious.
Then the storm burst, with such terrific suddenness and fury that it terrified him. A howling tempest, accompanied by blinding lightning and deafening thunder, rushed down upon them from an absolutely clear sky.
His mother knelt down by the bed, and he thought that she was praying.
When Eric asked for an explanation he was told that when he was grown up one would be given him. Unfortunately the moment never came. An aunt had told him that the storm was peculiarly to do with Glamis, and was something that could not be explained.
Lord and Lady Wynford paid their visit to Glamis, and I looked forward eagerly to their return in a week"s time. I went to see them the day after their arrival back again, and was met by Lady Wynford alone.
Before I could question her she began to speak of the visit.
"I don"t want you even to mention the word Glamis to Wynford," she said very gravely. "He"s had a great shock, and he"s in a very queer state of mind."