The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-01-22

l it simply fades away in shadowy mist Sometimes the phantasmal figure i | seen as though illuminated on a darl l backgrounds sometimes the contour i indistinct and resembles Luminous
 cloud; sometimes there is no figure
 all, but merely a diffused glow"
 The doctors pipe had gone out, H. | took match from the skull of an In | dian chief, which served himr as z match box, and lighted it again. Sait he;
 | Each of us, I believe, has in him g ghost, which ordinarily is confined tt 1 the precincts of the body. When l die my ghost leaves my body permanently and, having done so. perhaps it may | continue to be the vehicle and means o1 expression of conscious will, memory and understanding. St. Paul says There is a natural body and a spiritua
 body It is of the spiritual body that l speak.
 "Qur bodily senses take cognizance of
 no forms of matter except those which are in a certain degree of condensation but, as have already said, the spiritual
 body may be of more rarified and tenu-
 ous substance The non-appearance of
 ghosts to us may be q question, not of
 the existence of spectres. but of the
 acutenees of our perceptive faculties.
 My own experience is that the coming
 of an apparition is always preceded by
 curious sensation which I call the
 ghost chill When this symptom ar
 rives, the threshold of consciousness
 seems to be shifted to the extent of
 rendering possible perception of some
 thing ordinarily invisible. The change
 is usually very brief, lasting only few
 seconds, during which the manifestation
 occurs.
 since childhood I have found myself
 possessed of an organism in which the
 threshold of consciousness Is markedly
 capable of such shifting On several
 occasions I have been aware of the
 presence of the spiritual bodies of de-
 ceased persons who gave me informa-
 tion that was not otherwise obtainable, and who conveyed to my mind con- viction of their identity. The evidential value of these experiences is wholly per- sonal, of course inasmuch as they are not subject to the ordinary process of verification.
 "In each of us there is an inner in- dividuality which differs from out other self It is not subject to the law of gravitation and it cannot be mechanic ally affected to it's injury or benefit It does not depend for its being upon the welfare or survival of the body it in- habits. It is capable of changing it's location by its own voltion under cer- tain circumstances, such as I will pres ently mention though probably not ex- actly in accordance with our ideas of transfer through space. To such a be- ing the notion of time is doubtless quite different to our own, and this may give it a duration of existence comparable with our notion of endless life. Very likely it is not confined to this planet when once released from the body. h. deed, nothing forbids the assumption that it antedated the body which it in- habits It is the soul of ordinary lan- guage, and may consist of substance as dense for its conditions of environ ment as is the physical body or the conditions of surrounding it.
 T have spoken of the permanent of the ghost from the physic- al body as implying the death of the latter, but there is plenty of evidence to show that it sometimes leaves the tenement for brief time, returning. I myself have seen ohantoms of living persons on more han one occasion, which looked and | acted precisely as the individuals them selves might have done. They looked l ike figures thrown upon a screen by l nagic-lantern usually, being recognized | Or few moments and then disappear ng; but in some cases they had every , appearance of solidarity, to the extent [ if hiding objects behind them. I never | leard of any of them speak, but on two ,r three occasions they ineligible mes ages by their attitudes and gestures There is no essential difference between he spectre of a living human being and l he apparition of a dead person, so far IS appearances go. Each of us, as I lave said, carries his own ghost after Jim, which ordinarily is under the con- rol of the possessor, but sometimes ap pears to act independently. As a rule he projection of a phantom by living person is an involuntary act, resulting from great mental perturba- ion, with the cause of which the indi- ,idual to whom the spectre appears Is II some way connected. The most tartling instances of this kind occur title before or shortly after the death f the sender, and such ghosts are .nown as death wraiths.'
 "One reason that I have for believing he evidence of my own senses in this natter is that on several occasions the ppartion of my own personality has resented itself to other persons in laces where my body was not at the ime. Some years ago I was in Chicago t an ordinary evening party with about orty friends, when an individual in Washington who did not even know yhere I was, was visited by my phan- asm and received from it brief mes- age, stating where I was at the time nd giving the names of two or three uests present--persons, with whom the bserver was unacquainted This was ne of the rare cases where a ghost 1ade itself audible. The Society for sychieal Research has collected enough arefully attested and fully authenti- ated instances of such appearances to Il two bulky octave volumes.
 "Of course, in study of this interest lg subject the chief and obvious diff llty is to distinguish veritable appari- (