Posthumous Humanity: A Study of Phantoms/Chapter 4

Let us return to the posthumous man. Being the continuation beyond the tomb of the inner personality that we have seen manifest itself in the phenomenon of duplication, it becomes easier to observe it. The living phantom and the post-sepulchral phantom have, in fact, as their common origin would indicate, numerous points of resemblance, so that the study of the one completes that of the other. I shall pass in review the principal traits which characterize them, so that we may inform ourselves as to the nature of the posthumous being. At the same time, we must not forget that we are entering the shadow-world, and that more than one point of interrogation will go unanswered.

Let us first study its physical constitution. What I have already said of the living spectre in the examples of duplication, cited in the second chapter, throws light upon the structure of the post-sepulchral spectre. It is the phantasmal replica of all the organs of the human body. It has been seen, in ​fact, to move, speak, take nourishment, accomplish, in a word, the different functions of animal life. This applies to the posthumous phantom as well as to its elder brother, as I shall have occasion to show, especially in the chapter on the post-mortem vampire. The molecules which constitute it are evidently borrowed from the organism which gave it birth. It may then be defined as a gaseous tissue offering a certain resistance, as we are taught in the doubling of the assistant-mistress of Riga, cited in Chapter II.

The fluidic constitution of the phantom offers the explanation of several peculiarities which it presents. In the first place, it clearly accounts for the ease with which it penetrates houses. Some spectres open and close the doors of rooms, but others disdain these precautions, and know how to pass through when the entrances are all shut. They pass through partitions, or at least wooden ones. This phenomenon involves nothing contrary to the laws of nature. It is a direct consequence of the structure of the phantom. We know that all bodies, however great their density, are pierced with innumerable pores which give passage to fluid. Platinum, the densest of metals, is penetrated by hydrogen, and we have the record of the famous experiment of the Florentine academicians, who, submitting to a heavy pressure a hollow sphere of gold filled with water, saw tiny liquid drops ooze through the surface. One deduces from this, that the fissures of ​work of doors imperfectly joined may give access to the gaseous and elastic tissue of the spectre.^[1]

By analogous considerations may be explained the rapidity with which the phantom, whether living or posthumous, may move. We have seen the Double of the Alsatian woman quit her ship, lost in the middle of the ocean, to repair to Rio Janeiro, and return on board within the interval of a syncope; that is to say, in two or three hours, perhaps less. The same fact occurs with the father of the captain who was returning from India, and for the adept of Philadelphia. The phantom of the latter crossed the Atlantic, entered a coffee-house in London, and returned to his starting-point with the answer for the lady who waited in his reception-room. We have noticed facts not less extraordinary with the post-humous phantom. It is seen to show itself at almost the moment of death, at hundreds, sometimes thousands, of leagues distance. This is what happens with apparitions between the old and the new world. Certain persons who had relations far away, ​having shown themselves to them at the moment when they were about to expire, it has been supposed that the phantom had the gift of ubiquity. Nothing of the sort. Its presence at the same hour at different points vast distances apart is easily explained by the marvellous rapidity of its fight, which makes it seem as though the apparitions were appearing simultaneously when they were but doing so successively. As to this extraordinary rapidity, the cause must be sought in the fluidity of the spectre, which allows of its passage almost without obstacle through the atmospheric air under the final impulse of the vital force.^[2]

One of the characteristics of the posthumous being is its aversion to light and promptitude in shunning it; all the manifestations by which it reveals its presence are nocturnal and rarely diurnal. In the latter case it sometimes produces noises like those which are heard at night; but the phantom only appears when favoured by obscurity, in twilight, for instance. It even seems as if light annihilates its forces, for all noises stop as soon as a candle is brought into the room where they are occurring. This fact is amply established by the examples which I have cited. I will, however, add another thoroughly characteristic fact, and which confirms what I have said as to the physical constitution of the spectre. It is related by an eminent jurisconsult of the sixteenth century, ​Alexander of Alexandria. The following is a condensation of his narrative:

"In a haunted house in Rome we saw nightly a hideous and entirely black spectre, of the most threatening appearance, who seemed to implore our assistance. No one before my arrival had been willing to hire this habitation, because of the strange things which happened in it. Several of my friends came one evening to pass the night with me, to be witnesses of what they had heard told in this respect. They watched with us, and, although the lights were burning, they soon saw the spectre appear, with his thousand and one pranks, his clamours, his terrific manifestations, which made our companions sometimes think, despite all their courage, that they were destined to be its victims. The entire house resounded with the groans of this phantom; but when we approached it, it seemed to fall back, especially to shun the light which we carried in our hand. Finally, after an indescribable uproar of several hours, and when the night was almost ended, everything vanished. Of all these prodigies a single one especially deserves mention, for, in my eyes, it was the greatest and most terrifying. Night having come, after I had fastened my door with a strong silken cord, I had retired to bed. I was still awake, and had not yet extinguished the light, when I heard the spectre make his usual clatter at the door, and presently, the door remaining closed and tied, I saw him, incredible though it ​seem, introduce himself into the room by the chinks and the keyholes. Hardly had he entered when he slipped under my bed, and Marc, my pupil, as also the other who was lying with us, having perceived all this manœuvre, and being numbed with fright, began to utter cries of terror and to call for help. But, observing all this time the door to be closed, I persisted in not believing what I had seen, when I perceived the terrible phantom thrust from beneath my bed an arm and a hand, with which he extinguished my light. This being put out, he then began to upset, not only the books, but also everything in the room, at the same time making sounds which froze our senses. All this noise having awakened the house, we presently saw lights in the antechamber, and at the same time noticed the phantom open the door and escape."

As the author relates it, the most curious circumstance of this tale is the care taken by the spectre to extinguish the light before commencing his uproar. We have seen the same thing occurring elsewhere. The uneasiness with which the phantom feels the light is attributable to the disorganizing action which all light has upon its tissue.

We know that light is a vibratory motion impressed upon the ether by incandescent bodies. These vibrations of an almost infinite rapidity would soon alter the fluidic tissues of the phantom by dispersing its molecules, if it did not retire by day into its tomb or other most obscure retreat. It is the ​same with the posthumous animal. It is photophobic in the same degree as the post-sepulchral man, and, like the latter, exhibits itself only at night. These precautions may prolong for a certain time the shade's existence, but not avert its end. Whatever pains, in fact, it may take to shun the daylight, it cannot entirely escape the multiple and incessant action of the luminous calorific and electric vibrations which pervade space and assail it from every side. The molecules of its tissue disintegrating from each other, there comes at last a day when it has no further consciousness of itself. Its personality has then disappeared; it has become but a vague form, which dissipates itself slowly and becomes lost in the universal medium. This slow agony of the posthumous being is verified, if I may venture to say so, experimentally by the very course of its manifestations: tumultuous at the beginning, they decrease gradually in frequency and power, and end in complete cessation; thus indicating the daily shocks which the shade suffers from cosmic agents until its definitive annihilation occurs.^[3]

​Let us now pass on to another order of facts. What strikes us at once in a posthumous apparition is that the person exhibits himself in the costume that he had while living. It would seem that it ought to show itself as it was on its death-bed, at the moment when it was laid away in the tomb. But it is not always thus. We have seen that the Abbé Peytou and the Archbishop of Saint Gaudens wore their ecclesiastical costume; when one hears Mdme. X., of Bastide-de-Sérou, walk in her room, one distinguishes the rustle of a silken dress. This is nothing extraordinary, for these garments would, perhaps, represent those in which they were clothed after their death. But this would not apply to the case of M. X., of the Canton d'Oust, who in three well-attested apparitions exhibited himself in a hat and a comforter, such as he usually wore round his neck. It is not at all likely that they would have put him on a hat and muffler when they laid him in his coffin. What is still more extraordinary, the shade frequently carries in his hand articles which were familiar to him. The Abbé de Peytou was seen to be reading his breviary in the garden of the Presbytery; and when they heard him moving in his chamber, they easily distinguished the noise that he made in opening and closing his snuff-box and taking from it a pinch of imaginary tobacco. When ​we meet M. X., of Oust, in his vineyard, he carries the scissors with which he used to clip the shoots. The ass of Saint Croix and the mule of the Customs officer carried, the one his halter, the other his panniers. We have gathered analogous facts in the examples of duplication mentioned in the second chapter. The living phantom is clothed, like the post-sepulchral phantom, with the costume that he habitually wore; he carries also with him the objects which are familiar to him. The father of the chamberlain of the king of Sweden carried in his hand a cane. The Alsatian woman of Rio Janeiro had her little daughter in her arms. The shepherd of Noisy-le-Grand showed himself with his crook and his two dogs. All were clothed as usual, although the first two were in their beds at the moment of the apparition.

The draft that the posthumous being makes on his own wardrobe or former portable objects has long seemed to me a phenomenon as inexplicable as the apparition itself. It seems indispensable to admit that garments and material objects in general have their fluidic duplicates as much as men and animals—duplicates that the phantom can detach and make use of. But where to find the experimental verification of this hypothesis so as to make a rational explanation? After various researches, I discovered it in reading the biography of the Seeress of Prevorst. As I have said in the preceding chapter, we learn from Dr. Kerner that this ​extraordinary woman detected in all subjects their phantasmal image.

We have seen that posthumous manifestations are of two kinds. Sometimes the shade returns peacefully to the places where it resided, or to its favourite occupations. Such is the case with the Abbé Peytou, who walked in his room or in the garden of the Presbytery, carrying, sometimes his breviary, sometimes his snuff-box; of M. X., of the Canton d'Oust, who went to prune his vines with his scissors, smiling pleasantly, according to his custom of the ass of Saint Croix and the mule of the Customs officer, who came to browse on imaginary grass. But this is, we think, an exception, at least with man. More frequently, these manifestations are boisterous, and disclose uneasiness and suffering. It has been shown by sundry observations that the object of all these disturbances is to attract the notice of relations to the memory of the deceased, as though the latter wished them to busy themselves for him and relieve him from annoyance. Post-mortem existence seems, in fact, to be a burden for many of those who have the privilege of entering it.^[4] The popular saying, "It is a soul in suffering," stripped of all theological interpretation ​seems perfectly accurate for characterizing posthumous manifestations. The phantom, who confines himself to pulling off bed-clothes and uncovering the sleeper, acts, evidently, under the impulsion of the same force.

Let us make a closer study of the noises which accompany the ghost; for we shall find in them, perhaps, the strangest peculiarities that phenomena of the posthumous order present. I shall not dwell upon the noise that the spectre makes in dwellings, when it limits itself to striking blows upon the walls or partitions, moving furniture, and changing the places of chairs. It only requires, to produce the disturbance, a certain dynamic power, and I shall presently tell whence it derives it. The real prodigy begins when it resorts to its ballistics, for the projectile seems to be its favourite arm. It often happens that the objects flung about in a room by an invisible hand are far from producing in their fall the effect that one would anticipate from the noise when they drop. They sometimes strike a glass without breaking it, although their volume and the force of projection with which they seem imbued ought to make it fly in pieces. At other times they fall upon a person, but do him no harm. He who receives the blow compares it to the shock that a ball of wool or cotton would produce. The phenomenon becomes still more extraordinary when it is a question of invisible projectiles. One hears stones dashed with force against the partitions or ​furniture, and then rebound upon the floor, but one perceives nothing. Occasionally there are bits broken out of glasses, or one can see fragments of plaster detaching themselves from the ceiling and falling to the ground, while the hail of projectiles comes from without and passes through the windows. In certain cases it is the crockery heaped upon a table that is heard to fall and smash itself with violence upon the floor. The occupants of the house run there, but see with astonishment that the glasses and china are in their places, as though they had been dupes of an imaginary noise. Must we then concede the existence of a posthumous dynamic, which would be in its most essential features the antithesis of ours? Certainly not; the shade obeys, like us, the laws of time and space. The anomalies which its projectile power presents will explain themselves on the day when we have completed the inventory and studied the nature of all the forces which govern the universe.^[5] Meanwhile, let us ​try to lift a part of this mysterious veil, if indeed it is permitted to apply rational deductions to a world so different from our own.

The most striking prodigy in these tumultuous manifestations is the extraordinary disproportion which exists between the fluidic structure of the shade, and the enormous quantity of muscular power which it exhibits in flinging its projectiles and making them rebound with a noise which sometimes stupifies persons and even animals. When the death is recent, and the posthumous being confines himself to striking blows on the partitions, or moving chairs, one may hazard an explanation sufficiently natural. All is not over at the moment when the heart ceases to beat. Certain organic forces continue their action as long as the tissues which were their seat are not decomposed.^[6] We know that upon exhuming a corpse it is remarked that the beard and nails have grown. Therefore the shade might act, in a certain measure, under the impulsion of the forces of the body which it has just forsaken. But when the death dates back some weeks or months, and decomposition has begun its work, and the blows struck or the projectiles flung imply a great ​muscular vigour on the part of the author of this startling tumult, one is compelled to admit that the latter has found a new source of vital force in which it recruits its energies. Certain indications seem to establish the hypothesis that this reservoir is the body of a living person, and by preference that of a relative of the deceased.^[7] I will mention, as an indication of this fluidic vampirism and as an indirect proof, an analogous fact observed with the Seeress of Prevorst. Dr. Kerner states that his patient ate little, but she confessed that she was nourished by the substance of her visitors, especially of those related to her by the ties of blood, their constitution being more sympathetic with her own. In point of fact, visitors who had passed some minutes near her noticed that upon retiring they were weakened.

Now let us skirt another not less mysterious side of this strange ballistic phenomenon, where all is obscurity and surprise. The invisible projectiles produce mechanical effects as great as if they were stones of great bulk. One would say this is a negation of the laws of motion. All rational explanation becomes impossible. But let us go on to the end, and try to penetrate into the geometry of phantoms. We have seen that all bodies have their phantasmal Doubles, which the shade can detach and grasp. The garments it carries, the objects it holds in its hand, are phantasmal images borrowed from ​its former wardrobe or its former utensils. It is presumable that the same holds as to invisible projectiles; in lieu of flinging stones, they fling their duplicates.^[8] What mechanical result can come from such a projection?

The science of dynamics teaches us that the sum of motion that a moving body possesses is found by multiplying the mass of the moving body by its velocity, and that its live force at the moment of fall is equal to half the bulk by the square of the velocity. According to this formula, can be obtained whatever mechanical effect may be desired by giving to the projectile a sufficient velocity, provided the bulk of the projectile is greater than zero. Now we have seen, in analyzing several examples of duplication of living persons, that their phantom offered a certain resistance. It is the same with the image of inorganic bodies, and, however feeble may be the density of such a projectile, it might in falling produce any acoustic effect desired, if the impulsion were strong enough. The post-sepulchral man acts with stones as with garments. He limits himself to detaching from them their phantasmal Double, which becomes in his hands an invisible projectile. In the same way ​might be explained the noise of crockery falling with a crash, but which is afterwards found on the sideboard intact. These are acoustic effects produced by the Doubles of the glasses and plates which the phantom dashes on the floor.^[9] In all cases, however, do not let us be deceived by appearances, and let us be on our guard that, in exploring the domain of the shades, we may not take a shade of reasoning for reason itself.

The phantasmal image of a body, making in its fall a noise comparable to that which the body itself would produce, implies, as I have said, an almost infinite projectile force. Now the posthumous thing being unable to feed its energies except in the body of a living person, with which it is in fluidic communication,^[10] one asks himself if this reservoir of living force is sufficient to render ​possible such effects. We touch here upon a problem still so obscure as to rarified matter, that we must wait until this new branch of physics, sighted by Crookes, has been studied under its different aspects before we can have the reading of the riddle. It would be easier to take account of the not less strange phenomenon which presents itself when the projectiles, in place of being invisible, are real stones which strike without doing any hurt. We can admit that these projectiles are saturated with mesmeric fluid, and we shall soon see that one of the properties of this fluid is to render lighter the bodies which it impregnates with its currents.

Is it the common right of all men to claim an existence beyond the tomb? It would he rash, we think, to answer affirmatively this famous interrogative, although one may lay down the general proposition that every individual carries in himself the phantasmal image which after death constitutes the posthumous spectre. This principle, which presents itself as the immediate consequence of a general law, the phantasmal Double of all bodies in nature, as established in the preceding chapter, has been verified, to some degree experimentally, by the Seeress of Prevorst. Let us first say a few words about this extraordinary woman, so often quoted in the books of the spiritists and magnetizers.

Her name was Mdme. Hauffe, but she is more ​commonly known under the name of the Seeress of Prevorst, the name of a village of Wurtemburg where she was born in the beginning of this century. It is to Dr. Kerner, one of the celebrities of contemporary Germany, who had medical charge of her during the last years of her life, that we owe all the details related about her. From her childhood there was noticed in her a nervous organization of exceptional delicacy, and this excessive impressionability went on increasing to the close of her life. Other members of her family possessed certain of these faculties, but in a far less degree. Finally, there had been remarked in numerous persons in the village of Prevorst a certain predisposition to nervous diseases, notably St. Vitus's dance. Electricity and magnetism acted upon her in a most extraordinary manner. During a shower, electric sparks could be drawn from her body; when she held certain metals in her hands, she felt magnetic currents running through her limbs. Iron, especially, affected her in a very high degree, and they had been obliged to remove all the nails from the woodwork in her room. Animal magnetism acted on her in a way not less surprising than terrestrial. She was often seen to fall of herself into somnambulism. She thus presented a striking example of the connection so often observed between electro-magnetic phenomena and the phenomena of spiritism, among which the duplication of the human personality occupies so ​large a field. The exquisite sensitiveness of her nervous system made her perceive sensations which passed unnoticed by all others. She sometimes had presentiments of dangers which threatened some one of her friends; she then warned the latter, and events always justified her prognostications, From that fact, the name of Seeress, by which she was designated, as antiquity gave the surname of Thaumaturgist, or wonder-worker, to the celebrated Apollonius of Tyana. Useless to add that the common people ascribe to supernatural faculties, or to communications with a world different to our own, that which was but extraordinary aggrandisement of the sensitiveness of the nervous centres.^[11]

Such an organization naturally predisposed to the visions of spiritism. She was often tormented by apparitions of spectres, which could not be charged to hallucination; for the persons who were present heard as distinctly as herself the blow struck on the partitions, or saw certain objects which were in the room changing their places. We are aware that this is the natural thing in manifestations of the human phantom, conspicuously of the posthumous phantom. She often saw her own Double, and perceived those of others by looking in their right eye.^[12] This fact is the experimental demonstration ​of this axiom that, besides its exterior and organic form, the human body possesses an interior and fluidic form moulded after the former. When a person's Double is projected, the person and his image are seen simultaneously.

Another revelation of the Seeress of Prevorst additionally confirms our axiom. Whilst I was absorbed in physiological studies, I was often arrested by a singular fact. It sometimes happens that a person who has lost an arm or leg experiences certain sensations at the extremities of the fingers or toes. Physiologists explain this anomaly by postulating in the patient an inversion of sensitiveness or of recollection, which makes him locate in the hand or the foot the sensation with which the nerve of the stump is alone affected. They try to justify their statement by pretended analogies which they find sometimes in the production of virtual images formed by the action of luminous rays on mirrors, sometimes in the arrival of despatches upon the same electric wire, which have several centres of correspondence as in its circuit. I confess that these explanations seemed to me laboured, and have never satisfied me. When I studied the problem of the duplication of man, the question of amputations recurred to my ​mind, and I asked myself if it was not more simple and logical to attribute the anomaly of which I have spoken to the doubling of the human body, which by its fluidic nature can escape amputation. I set myself, with this view, to making some experiments, which the loss of my sight has prevented my carrying out. I was then not the least surprised when I read in the book of Dr. Kerner that the Seeress of Prevorst perceived on every amputated man the lost limb.

Let us restate our interrogatory. Every man possessing his Double should, it seems, enter after death the region of shadows; it is not at all certain, however, judging from the small number of posthumous apparitions and the exceeding rarity of projection of the Double with living persons. It is probable that the phantasmal image, inert of itself, has need to be stimulated, and in some sort completed, by another agent of the organism, which imparts to it the necessary energy to give it self-consciousness. The study of this new factor of human dynamics will be the object in the following chapters.