XVII.MANIFESTATIONS.
As may be well imagined, a subject so conspicuous and mysterious as the dark deeds done in Bussey’s wood, would not be allowed to pass over without some professional attempts on the part of the spiritualistic community to discover their hidden secret. “Seances” were called, and the force of mediumistic power enlisted and put in operation to extract the terrible revelation from some detective spirit among the dead; with what result the police are best able to judge, and the culprit, too; but it occurred to me that it might possibly amuse my readers to read some of the communications relating to the topics I have been treating of, from the spirit world, through what is called trance mediums. The two or three that I shall take occasion to abridge were sent to the police head-quarters, and I have no doubt they were sent in good faith. The result of the incantations is of little moment, but I have understood that it was said somewhere by a presumed spirit, that they would tell all about the murders, and expose the culprit, if a sum of money would be raised competent to the support of the bereaved mother of the children.The fact that there were large rewards offered—and I believe they have not been withdrawn—should have satisfied them that if, through their agency, the murderer was detected, they could make over the amount to Mrs. Joyce. I do not vouch for the truth of the rumor, but think it improbable, because it was an unnecessary demand under the circumstances. The occasions when, actuated by a mixed motive of curiosity and a desire to examine, I have witnessed the proceedings at these sittings of the faithful, have not had a very strong tendency to convince me that good spirits put their feet under the mahogany. To be sure my experience has been limited, but it has been definite up to this period. I have not attended the public or professional seances; but there are many persons who are sceptics, yet strongly mediumistic, and able to make the table move across the room by the mere imposition of their hands. I have heard the alphabet repeated at my own room, where only one gentleman was present beside myself; and this gentleman, an involuntary and unprofessional medium, was of considerable power, and used that power for the purposes of investigation. Answers I have there witnessed to questions, that astonished me,—direct, satisfactory, and going back into the far and dim years of childhood, astonishing to my friend, as well as to myself,—facts that my own mind had entirely lost in the lapse of years, but which came upto my recollection as vivid as if of yesterday’s happening. Sometimes my recollection has been corrected, and in such a way as to convince me that my idea of the circumstance had been erroneous. And then again, a something of intelligence would move the table, in answer to the alphabet, and tell such self-evident lies, with so enthusiastic a vivacity as to startle me into the belief that he had been the writer of bulletins for some newspaper during the late Southern conflict. And this assumed spirit would pass himself off as a deceased member of my family, staggering me with his knowledge, and from which bewilderment I confess I can find no present means of rational escape. I have, however, come pretty nearly to the conclusion that the spirit, or whatever it is, that I have alluded to above, has been our only visitor; but the imagination cannot conceive a scheme so subtle as his has been to deceive us into the belief that those persons, whose character he pretended to represent, were in fact the very individuals themselves; and under ordinary circumstances few men could have been blamed had they been credulous of his representations.
I have frequently tried by the most determined exercise of will, to force the responses into the channel I had mentally prepared for them; but in no case, I must candidly confess, could I command obedience. This fact shook my theory of sympathetic influence, andsettled in that small sphere of experiment the vexed question of the power of mind to operate upon matter. My friend, who has the mediumistic faculty, made similar attempts, and always with like result. Let wiser heads than mine unravel and explain, by cogent and irresistible logic, these eccentric incidents, for I must admit my utter inability to explain them by any rules outside of those adopted by the spiritualist. But though I may have been a witness of these phenomena, it does not follow that I am a spiritualist, any more than I am of the mythological faith of pagan Greece, because, forsooth, I take delight in the statue of Minerva, go into raptures over that of Venus, and read with unfeigned enjoyment the poems of that prince of old idolaters, blind but immortal Homer.
I have before me a package of manuscript purporting to have been written by inhabitants of another world,—by hands that have felt the pressure of the hand of death, and yet, it would seem, are able to express thought with the intelligence usually attributed to life. One of these communications purports to have been written by Isabella Joyce, the murdered girl, and another by her father, Stephen Joyce.
The manuscript of the girl strikes me as of a better order of chirography than is usually to be found in that of children of her age; while the father’s is large and roughly emphatic, and bears the impress of a passionatedesire to discover the murderer and avenge the deaths of his children. Friends of Stephen Joyce assert that the formation of the writing is unmistakably similar to his; but, as I have not been able to compare the dead man’s penmanship with anything done by him while on earth, I cannot pass judgment either of denial or verification.
It would appear that, speedily after the murders were discovered, meetings were called of the spiritualists, in the hope that some revelation would be made that might lead to the arrest of the party or parties engaged in the atrocious deed.
Not later than a month or two ago, I read in a spiritualistic paper, of the city of Boston,—conducted, by the way, with great editorial ability,—a communication from the boy murdered; but which contained no clue that could direct detection safely and judicially to any desired result.
In the written communication, signed “Isabella Joyce,” to which I have alluded, there are references to parties that had been previously arrested or suspected. She, however, distinctly exonerates the young man of the factory, whose flight is as yet unaccounted for; but whose innocence is beyond all question. She speaks, also, of that inebriated unfortunate to whom Dedham jail has become a matter of practical and suggestive recollection. The name of that eminent individualknown to the police and the public by the euphonic appellation of Scratch Gravel, makes no figure in her revelations; though he confessed to many circumstances that would have led in ordinary cases to his implication in the deed. His admissions were tortured by over-zealous detectives into positive confession; but after strict comparison of his statements, made under the pressure of prison and terror, or rum reaction, with the exact incidents of his maudlin staggerings and stutterings, he was given up as not worthy of belief, though he madly made the attempt to get himself hanged.
It is my intention to give merely the pith and essence of these strange writings,—having placed the original papers in the hands of my publisher,—where any person, curious in such matters, can examine them.
The girl commences by appealing to her mother, and declaring that she cannot be happy until they have found that “terrible man.” She cries frequently to her mother, as if under some great spasm of alarm,—hints at certain persons,—exonerates others, who were suspected, and in such manner as to remind us of the terrible ravings and charges of the “afflicted children” who figured as the juvenile fiends and denouncers of the Salem Witchcraft tragedies.
In her outcries she speaks of a returned soldier, and checks her mother’s suspicions, that appeared to havegone astray in the wrong direction, and then directly charges the crime upon our poor dilapidated young friend, whose greatest misfortune it was to have been drunk on that fatal day, and been whipped or blackeyed in the evening.
The girl proceeds with repeated exclamations of Mother! Mother! and emphasizes the sufferings through which she passed. Be it remembered that she speaks only of murder throughout her disclosures, if disclosures they can be called.
Her second declaration is more minute and connected, but still it is a jumbled and very unsatisfactory narrative, or rather child gossip, of the circumstances and incidents as they occurred previous and up to the instant of the catastrophe. She again speaks of a soldier,—the one whose hand was cut; says she saw him in a garden as they passed along,—the garden across the brook; that he followed them into the woods. She now goes back to her trip out of Boston toward the wood, and tells that they got out at Burroughs Street, walked up the plain or plank (hard to decipher), till they came to a juncture of the road where it crosses the track of the steam cars, then to the right, and round a store or stone house to the left, over the brook to the other side. She expressly and suddenly declares, at this point of her recital, thatshe does not remember him. After they climbed over the gate (supposed to be the gate verynear where she was found, and which opens from the Dedham road; there is another gate between the murder spot and Mr. Motley’s house), they saw the man. He followed, but up to that moment had not spoken to her. He now seems to have turned back, but, changing his mind, returned quickly and addressed her. At this she became alarmed and fled; he pursued. There is much confusion here,—a scuffling and tussling of sentences as if a mimic was giving to the life some quickly whirling scene of trouble and irritation and surprise, wherein there was the essence of a great danger.
It is a confused statement of Johnny’s having spoken of the sheep (Mr. Motley’s sheep down in the valley grazing at the time, watched by a vagrant boy, afterward examined by the authorities, and found to be no wiser than the flock he watched). She says she does not remember exactly—speaks of a knife which she tried to get hold of—of his cutting himself with it—of his throwing it into the wood. (If he did, he must have gone back for it and rescued it, for no such knife was found after a vigilant search over the whole locality.) She exclaims, “He murdered me!”—that he was scratched on the face and neck, and bears the marks “now,”—at the time of her manifestation at the spiritual sitting. At this point the paper is filled with wild and alarming cries to her mother. The idea presents itself again of a mimic reacting a scene in which the soul is driven tothe very verge of madness by that dread fiend called Terror. The voice seems to pierce the air in its shrill proclamation of intense and terrible agony, and anon it subsides into stifled sobs and ejaculations of how much she suffered while the black deed was done,—how “sick” she was. After that outburst of mad appeal and piteous mourning she resumes her narrative, and describes her murderer. He wore blue clothes, and looked like a soldier; but not a soldier just from the wars. (A soldier loafing after his laurels had withered in bar-room atmosphere, I suppose.) She fixes his nationality distinctly,—an Irishman. It was one o’clock, she says; but the writing here is blurred and crossed, and very difficult, if not quite impossible, to make out and determine whether it is one or two o’clock. Her brother, she says, ran for help, and the man ran after him and killed him and came back to her. This statement is signed “Isabella Joyce.”
The other portions of the page of foolscap, on which her hand appears, is covered with a lively display of all sorts of penmanship,—the idle signatures of a small party of the other world’s inhabitants, who, it would seem, were in Isabella’s company.
Again she resumes control over the writing medium’s hand, and says,—
“Johnny was dead, and the man went off after Idied. He went down the other way to Boston. He will be found.”
We have nothing more from the spirit of the girl (I speak now without entering into any question of the authenticity of these communications, leaving my reader to dispose of that enigma, as may best suit his temper and convenience), but the father makes his appearance on the scene and endorses his daughter’s testimony; but singularly neither witness offers to give the name of the designated soldier. The spiritualistic theory is that they could not do so, because he was a stranger to both of them, and consequently while they could see his face and clothes, they could not tell his name. The case is similar to our own daily experience in our transient meeting with people on the street,—a passing and silent interview, in which nothing is discovered save the recognition of a person and no more.
The revelation of the father is to the effect that he knows where the man is, and will follow him to the end.
One part of his statement I suppress, because it comes directly within the province of the law officers, and might direct suspicion upon a possibly innocent man.
Three years ago, it is asserted by those who believe in this extraordinary doctrine of the power of the dead to express themselves through the living, this man,Stephen Joyce, declared that by the fifth of the month of July, eighteen hundred and sixty-five, the murderer would be in the hands of justice; and how many months have come and gone since that spirit entered the mystic witness-box, and foretold such sequence to the tragedy, and yet without fulfilment? I am sorry that he was no true prophet,—no wiser in a ghostly form than in the fleshly substance. He is not half so good a ghost as Hamlet’s father was. The Dane went straight to the point, and told the truth and nothing but the truth, while here we have the spirit of the girl upon the stand, and she rambles in her talk without the aid of the great legal screw of cross-questioning, designating nothing that is tangible, indeed giving false clues to the murderer, and screaming, “Mother! Mother!” as if she would pour into the listener’s ear some faint echo of those dread cries that rang amid the gloomy woods when the soul of her was stabbed out of her.
The ghost of the murdered King of Denmark spoke the truth, as other ghosts by judicial testimony have done; but they were the old-fashioned ghosts, standing by themselves without the aid of human machinery, without the table or the easily assimilated trance, responsible for their coming and for what they told or what they desired to be done by their informing. They came and made short work of it, impressing belief by solemn utterances or majestic gestures. In this caseagain, the man, who should have been interested more than any other man, comes through the arm and fingers of a stranger, a living being, and is assumed to have written out, at that solemn investigation, a deposition,—not made upon the Holy Book, holier than all books, but with lips sanctified by the kiss of death,—and vaguely points to some unfortunate, and declares with all the potency of his supernal condition that ere the fifth of the approaching month the discovery would be made, and the hands of the law laid upon the person of the murderer of his children; and the fifth of that long-passed month lies strewn with the leaves of several autumns, buried far back in the dead annals, and no revelation has confirmed his prophecy. How is this? Or was it, as I have said before, left to these pages to revive that miserable event, and glare it to those eyes that have so often seen the vision of the dead; to awaken in that drowsing conscience the phantoms that he had half lulled to sleep, and force him to some act by which the law may be able to read, without the farther aid of business mediums, the mark of Cain that God has put upon his brow?
Who knows, and who can tell as yet, the meaning of my ghost that came to me upon the hill?
It was not with any sinister design that the doctrine of spiritualism, or its practices, has been introduced into my narrative. It formed no portion of my originalintention; but I found it impossible to refrain from giving publicity to documents that had been found of sufficient importance to attract the attention of the authorities. The spiritualist is able to take care of himself and his belief. Such communications might be used to a fearful and fatal purpose. The criminals engaged in the perpetration of a crime could, if such testimony was of any judicial weight, arrange a circle, produce the manifestations, or the similitude of manifestations, and direct attention to certain innocent parties, when suspicion would give time for the real culprits to escape. Every one knows how easy it is to work through the agency of a religious sentiment, and a very large class of people, habituated to the belief in spiritual revelations as inculcated by the spiritualists, receiving impressions in that way, would be hard to believe otherwise than as the spurious spirits asserted. Crime would thus become more dramatic, and the consequences of such interference on the part of a religious organization might lead to the overthrow of all the purposes and powers of civil authority. Happily, I am confident no such construction can be placed upon the operations and revelations of the authorized spiritualistic media. I do not know exactly what view they take of the knowledge presumed to be possessed by the murdered regarding the murderer. To reveal simply the name of the person, taking for granted that thepower exists according to the doctrine of spiritualism, would be of no use, unless a train of circumstantial evidence could be intimated, by which the law could develop a legal connection between the accused and the crime. There have been several instances, in this country, in which testimonious ghosts have enacted important parts. Some of these are upon the public record; others in private circulation. There was a case some fifty years ago in Virginia, when, if I recollect correctly, the ghost of a Mr. Clapham met a man upon the path in the mountain, nearly opposite to the famous Point of Rocks, on the Potomac, and told him where his will could be found,—the absence of which had involved his widow in vexatious and tedious litigation. The will was found and the question of right established in her favor; and I myself have partaken of the hospitality of that generous lady in the years gone by, when peace and plenty abounded in those beautiful valleys. As a matter of curiosity, I will give in brief, a singular case that happened in Scotland, and which goes to establish my theory of the injustice that may be perpetrated by the assertions of persons using the simulated spiritualistic agency for the detection of crime. The Scotch rebellion of 1745 compelled a larger amount of vigilance in preventing its recurrence than it possibly had taken to subdue it in the first instance. Troops were scattered among the highlands, for the purpose ofarresting all persons using arms, and enforcing the orders of the British authorities against the wearing of the clan tartans. Among these troops was Sergeant Arthur Davies, who is described as a bold and reckless man, careless in exposing himself openly in those wild and hostile glens, and among a people conquered but not won. Davies was in command of a squad of four men, and was stationed at Dubrach, near Braeman, then a desolate and dangerous district.
On the 28th of September, 1749, Davies left his barracks, with his command, to meet the troops posted at Glenshee. The sergeant never returned from that expedition; for, wandering off alone to hunt in his usual careless and defiant mood, he was murdered.
Two men Duncan Terig, alias Clerk, and Alexander Bain MacDonald were suspected, but, for five years, owing to the disaffected temper of the people toward the foreign troops, no steps were taken to arrest these suspected men; but at length on the 3d of June, 1754, nearly five years afterwards, Clerk and MacDonald were tried at Edinboro’ for the murder of the sergeant. This singular evidence was adduced upon the trial.
Some time after the murder, Donald Farquharson, living in Glenshee, had been informed by his neighbor Alexander MacPherson, that he (MacPherson) had been visited frequently by an apparition. It was the ghost of Sergeant Davies, who insisted upon having a burial ofhis remains. This MacPherson had declined to have anything to do with. On this the spectre had bidden him apply to Donald Farquharson. Together they visited the spot where MacPherson said the remains were lying; Donald giving as a reason for going his fear of being troubled by the grave-seeking ghost of the slaughtered Saxon.
The witness described the finding of what was left of the skeleton of the unhappy warrior. They were satisfactorily recognized by certain incontestable signs.
MacPherson’s description of the ghost as it appeared to him was this: A figure clad in blue. He appeared at night; he was in bed; he rose and followed it to the door. “I am Sergeant Davies,” said the spectre; and then he related the facts of the murder, and pointed out the place where his body or his relics could be found. The witness had asked the names of the murderers. The ghost declined, upon the ground that he could not reply to a question, but would have told if he had not been asked. The ghost had visited him again, but this time totally denuded of clothing,—but always desiring to have his body buried. The body was subsequently properly interred. Again the ghost had come to him and had announced his murderers,—“Duncan Clerk and Alexander MacDonald,”—the prisoners then at the bar. The witness was asked by Mr. Macintosh, counsel for the prisoners, what language the ghost spoke. “Asgood Gaelic as ever he heard in Lochaber,” said MacPherson. “Pretty well,” commented McIntosh, “for the ghost of an English sergeant.” The facts turned out to be that MacPherson had been in the employment of Clerk, and a disagreement had arisen between the two men. MacPherson had often charged Clerk with the murder, and on this Clerk had promised to do everything for him if he would only keep his suspicions secret. But stronger evidence was produced against the prisoners. A man named Cameron had seen the murder perpetrated. He saw Clerk and another man fire simultaneously at the soldier, and he saw him fall; but he was deterred from making these facts known to the authorities for fear of incurring the animosity of the Highlanders, who thought it no great harm, but perhaps a merit, to shoot down one of the hated invaders.
Curious to relate, the prisoners were acquitted. The evidence against MacDonald was not clear; but no doubt existed as to the guilt of Clerk. MacPherson was prompted to the accusation against Clerk by motives of personal malice, and, having become possessed of Clerk’s secret, he was anxious to gratify his hatred. Fear of the popular hatred, if he lodged a simple accusation against his victim, on account of the abhorrence in which an informer was particularly held at that time, and the more so if the information was directed against a native in favor of the dominant race, he was obliged to invent his ghost-story,and, thus appealing to popular belief in the supernatural, effect his purpose. But the jury would not believe his story, for it was known that he had discovered the sergeant’s remains before he told of the ghostly visitations, which proved that the marvel was an afterthought.
Sir Walter Scott edited an account of the murder for the Bannatyne Club, and Mr. Hill Burton has included the story in his narratives of Criminal Trials in Scotland. Sir Walter, relating another trial where a ghost attempted by a second party to affix his murder upon a certain person, gives the following remark of the presiding judge upon the responsibility of the ghost testimony: “Stop!” the Judge interrupted, gravely; “this will not do. The evidence of the ghost is very much to the purpose, no doubt, but we can’t receive it second-hand. None can speak with a clearer knowledge of what befell him during life. But he must of course be sworn in the usual way. Call the ghost in open court, therefore, and, if he appears, the jury and I will give all weight to his evidence; but in case he does not come forward, I cannot allow of his being heard, as now proposed through the medium of a third party.” Up to this date it is not known whether the bailiff has made a return of the summons or not. We presume not.
But was it a ghost that confronted me?
That question, now that time is progressively dimmingthe vividness of the impression that I received when first I saw that something on the brow of the hill, rises to the tribunal of my own investigation. I am as anxious to have the mystery solved as my reader possibly could be; indeed I am more anxious than any other person could be. Dim as it sometimes appears to my mind’s eye at times, there are occasions when it assumes all the exactness of an incident that transpired but a second since. I see it cross the wall, advance out of the shadow into the light, stand still, then whirl or wheel, make one human-looking step, and vanish. Will I ever see it again? That is another question that disturbs me some. I cannot do but wait; but with what feelings, wait? You, in your fair room with gas a-lit, or reading in the broad-falling down of sunlight on this page, cannot conceive. Put out your light and let the room grow dark, and pause and think, and then perhaps, despite the adamantive philosophy of your unbelief, you may recognize the sentiments I have; or on some still and luminous night, moonless, drive out to that old wood and by yourself, even now, with such great washings of rains and cleansing of snows and storms of wind, go to the rock where the girl was found and see how your nerves will quiver, or how your heart will throb; or, passing down the road, draw rein at the cottage where I stopped, and, saying naught to any one, place yourself where I stood and wait.
I myself would not willingly try that visit over again, not that I dread anything of harm from such an act, but because I have been there once before and have had enough. But if I never see that strange visitor again, I will see the murderer. Of that I am convinced. I have firm reliance in law when it is honestly employed to detect crime or protect the wronged. I have faith in that subtle sympathy, which connects us with the dead. I feel that without it, love would be but a thread broken by the last breathing of our lungs, and memory nothing but an intellectual frigidity, to be melted into mist as we approach the haven of the hereafter. The dead appeal to us by the mesmeric agency of their immortality; they throw out, through every movement of the world’s circumstances and events, a suggestion of their needs, their condition, and their destiny. They are like the history of the past sublimated by the eloquence of immutable truth, and are sanctified by a sleep that has eternal life within its closed lids. They have, too, a sympathy in retort with us. As naught of the material can suffer annihilation, so the soul, being indestructible, permeates the air we breathe as do those revived plants of perfume that last fall we might have fancied dead and beyond all chance of life again. If that vision was a ghost, its purpose will be revealed; for it is impossible to suppose that the Ruler of the Universe, who says asparrow shall not fall without his knowledge, would permit so strange an occurrence to happen without having an intention. What that intention was, I for one, if only one, shall wait patiently to see.
THE END.