Apparitions. The belief that the spirits of the departed are occasionally presented to the sight of the living, has existed in all ages and countries, and usually declines only when a people has advanced considerably in the knowledge of physical conditions and laws. We can understand the inability of the primitive man and the savage to realise death. The memory of the deceased lends power to call up his appearance. The primitive man does not observe accurately the distinction between fact and fancy—between what is seen in dream and what is seen in reality. Tylor, in his Researches into the Early History of Mankind, says: 'The belief that man has a soul capable of existing apart from the body it belongs to, and continuing to live, for a time at least, after that body is dead and buried, fits perfectly in such a mind with the fact that the shadowy forms of men and women do appear to others, when the men and women themselves are at a distance, and after they are dead. We call these apparitions dreams or phantasms, according as the person to whom they appear is asleep or awake; and when we hear of their occurrence in ordinary life, set them down as subjective processes of the mind. Among the less civilised races, the separation of subjective and objective impressions, which in this, as in several other matters, makes the most important difference between the educated man and the savage, is much less fully carried out.' The Dyaks regard dreams as actual occurrences; and many savage races believe that dreams are incidents which happen to the spirit when it is wandering from the body. In sleep, the soul is supposed to leave the body and travel about. If so, why may it not be encountered by some one? The man who fancies he sees at night the figure of a friend, or of an enemy, supposes he sees this dreamer's wandering soul. Among primitive races there is a superstitious objection to rousing a sleeper, lest he should awake before his soul has had time to return to the body. Death is regarded as another form of sleep; and during that sleep the spirit is wandering, and when wandering, may be met. The relative thinks of his deceased kinsman, dreams of him, and supposes he has seen his spirit. Madge Wildfire, in her rambling talk of her dead baby, expresses this confusion of mind between objective and subjective vision: 'Whiles I think my puir bairn's dead—ye ken very weel it's buried—but that signifies naething. I have had it on my knees a hundred times, and a hundred till that, since it was buried —and how could that be were it dead, ye ken—it's merely impossible.'
One of the modern theories of the natural origin of religion is, that it comes altogether from belief in the reappearance of the dead, and is, in fact, the cult of the ghosts of ancestors. Witchcraft, necromancy, has always been intimately connected with the spirits of the dead, and this is regarded as the parent of all religious worship. The savage man fears the dead and seeks to propitiate them, and gradually forgets that the ghosts are those of ancestors, and considers them as demons, a separate order of spirits; and later, as he advances in intelligence, these demons cease to be altogether demoniacal, and become gods. Be that as it may, it is certain that the propitiation and even worship of the dead has formed an integral part of all primitive religions, and has maintained its hold among the more ignorant after it has ceased to affect the more educated.
A diseased condition of the body, pressure on the brain, produces optical delusion. The writer of this article remembers distinctly how, as a child, he was seated on the box of a coach on a burning summer day, on his way over the great stony plain about Marseilles, when he saw hideous objects, as imps and demons, running by the horses, and vaulting on their backs. He spoke to his father about them, and was at once removed within the carriage, where, away from the sun on his head, the sight of the imps gradually failed. On another occasion, when suffering from inflammation of the lungs, lying with his eyes open, he believed he could see through the back of his head and bed, and watch a group of persons engaged brewing the elixir of life at a fire. The apparitions seen in delirium tremens belong to the same category.
The brain consists of two hemispheres, and this enables a double current of ideas to flow through the mind simultaneously; for instance, it is quite possible to read a book aloud, and all the while to be thinking about something else. Attention consists in the uniting and concentrating the thought of both hemispheres, and as one eye controls the observations of the other, and completes it, so is it in the two hemispheres of the brain; the one checks and complements the other. Now, in certain conditions easily induced, when the mind is not on the alert and braced to attention, it is possible for one hemisphere of the brain to receive an impression and form a subjective picture of a person or object independently of the other, and unless the attention be at once aroused, and this picture be critically investigated, this waking dream of one part of the brain may be taken to have been an actual sight of what was really presented to it.
It is, moreover, curious to observe how easy it is for a perfectly sincere and upright person to deceive himself as to what he has seen, simply from the fact that he has not been attentive, and has not observed critically what has presented itself before him, and he readily falls into the error of accepting a subjective perception for an objective vision. He may have a little doubt at first, but after he has once spoken of what he has seen, all doubt fades away. His spoken account of what he saw gives consistency to the shadowy sight, and without an intention to deceive, he deceives himself as well as others.
The fear of seeing something often so dazzles and bewilders the visual organ, that it sees the things that were feared. This accounts for many stories of the sight of apparitions in haunted houses. A crime is supposed to have been committed in some old house, and superstition believes that the spirit of the murderer or of the murdered person cannot rest. Whoever is nervous and timid, and visits this house at night, is predisposed to see the wandering spirit, and the fear that is present deprives the judgment of its power of taking accurate observations of what really is seen, and so superinduces a lax condition which is ready to be deceived. There may be conditions of body which allow of a sight beyond what is given to most, as it is certain that beasts see and scent and hear what our own faculties fail to perceive. But what we insist on is, that the greatest caution should be exercised in receiving stories of apparitions, and the utmost care taken to investigate every case of apparent spiritual manifestation. Before we can admit that there are genuine cases of ghosts having been seen, we must be satisfied that the observer was in full possession of his faculties, that his attention was on the alert, that he was capable of judging between subjective and objective presentations, and that he was healthily in mind and body.
In 1882 a Society for Psychical Research was founded for the scientific and systematic investigation of reported apparitions, clairvoyance, haunted houses, hypnotism, thought-reading, and spiritualistic phenomena; it publishes Proceedings. See also the articles ANIMAL MAGNETISM, ANIMISM, DEMONOLOGY, HALLUCINATIONS, HAUNTED HOUSES, HYPNOTISM, SECOND SIGHT, SOMNAMBULISM, SPIRITUALISM.
Among the most famous stories of apparitions, we may mention that told by Cicero of the murdered man appearing to his friend and warning him where to find him in a hay-cart; the apparition of Julius Cæsar before the battle of Philippi; that which appeared to Lord Erskine; the famous story of the Earl of Tyrone and the black ribbon, which, however, has been shown by a writer in Notes and Queries to be full of discrepancies; the appearance of Sir George Villiers before the murder of his son, the Duke of Buckingham; the case of Sir Charles Lee's daughter (1662); the trains of phantasmata that appeared to the publisher Nicolai in Berlin (1791); and the Wynyard ghost story. According to widespread superstition, the apparitions of those about to die in the ensuing year are seen to enter the parish church on St Mark's eve. The most famous account of such a weird procession is that given by Gervase Hollis, reprinted in Chambers's Book of Days, i. 549.
Apparitions may be variously classed. There are the revenants proper, the ghosts of the dead which reappear, return to walk the earth; the fetches, doubles, or the second-self, in which case it is the 'counterfeit presentment' of one still living; the Poltergeist, a noisy impish spirit, who amuses himself with upsetting everything in a house, throwing stones, and making unearthly noises. There are also spectral animals said to haunt buildings, churchyards, &c. It has been recently shown by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould (Murray's Magazine, vol. i. p. 363) that these are reminiscences of animals formerly immured alive under foundations. Appearances of strange lights, and the hearing of mysterious sounds, all belong to the same group of spiritual manifestations. The Banshee (q.v.) has its analogues elsewhere than in Ireland, and is held to be an attendant spirit on a family, that appears before the death of a member of it.
The literature on apparitions is voluminous; we can only notice a few of the most important writers on them. Sir David Brewster, in his Natural Magic (1832), contended for the rational and natural explanation of the spectral illusions. Before that, an admirable book by Hennings, Von Geistern u. Geisteschern (1780), laid the basis of true criticism on spectral appearances. Dr J. Kerner, in his Magikon (5 vols. 1840-53), collected the best authenticated stories of ghosts, which he explained by animal magnetism. Mrs Crowe, The Night-side of Nature (1853), followed in the same line. Collections of what purport to be well-authenticated stories of apparitions are Dr Lee's books: The Other World, or Glimpses of the Supernatural (1875), More Glimpses of the World Unseen (1878), and Glimpses in the Twilight (1885). See also Aubrey's Miscellanies (1696); Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691); R. Dale Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (New York, 1875), and The Debatable Land (1874); Stolz, Die Schreibende Hand (1880); Ingram, Haunted Houses (1884); 'Carus Sterne,' Naturgeschichte der Gespenster (1863); Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871); Gurney and Myers, Phantoms of the Living (1886); W. T. Stead, Real Ghost Stories (1891), and his Borderland; Thiselton-Dyer, The Ghost World (1893); A. Lang, The Cock Lane Ghost (1894); Frank Podmore, Apparitions and Thought Transference (Int. Sci. series, 1894), and Studies in Psychical Research (1897); the publications of the Psychical Research Society (since 1882); the book on the phenomena at Ballechin by Lord Bute and Miss Freer (1899); and works referred to at PSYCHOLOGY, SPIRITUALISM, THEOSOPHY, &c.