The Occult Review 8, no. 1 (July 1908), 44-46[1]
MY personal experience concerning gruesome ghost stories and apparitions of the dead is somewhat limited; but the following well-authenticated cases have come to my notice—
1. In the town of Kempten in the south of Bavaria there is an old house which in the seventeenth century was still used as a nunnery; the walls are of great thickness and some of the passages very narrow. In this house strange voices were heard, like sighs and groans and sometimes the ghost of a black-robed nun was seen, gliding silently through some rooms. Moreover, it happened occasionally that, when some one went upstairs, it was as if he encountered an invisible barrier and he had to use his will-power to force his way through it. In the year 1850, some changes and repairs were made in the house and a skeleton of a female was found immured in one of the walls. It appears that a nun was there immured alive and probably died of starvation: this kind of punishment being frequently employed at those times for infringement of the rules of the order.
Now we need not suppose that this ghost was the spirit of a very wicked woman. It may be that she was murdered in that way out of jealousy or for some similar reason. The suffering which she had to endure was sufficient to account for the creation of a thought form of great persistency.
2. The wife of a labouring man whose husband was absent and his whereabouts unknown to her, lived with her children at L——. One night, she saw the door of her sleeping room open and her husband walk in. He first went to the bed where the two children slept and made over each child the sign of the cross; he then came to her couch and did the same. After this he went out and banged the door with such force that the noise of it awoke the neighbours. It was found out that the man had died in a hospital at exactly the same hour.
This occurrence may be explained as having been caused by the intense thought of the dying person. Moreover, the physical body is a storehouse of a great deal of energy, which becomes liberated at death and by which such noises may be produced. Theophrastus Paracelsus says these things are produced by what he calls the Evestrum. (For particulars, see my book on Paracelsus, published by Kegan Paul, Trübner and Co.)
3. Mrs. S—— of Boston, a lady with great “mediumistic” faculties, was standing one morning early at her desk, when the door opened and a labouring man in his working clothes came in and saluted her. Being greatly surprised at the unexpected visit of a stranger, her first thought was that the door had been left unlocked; but this was not the case. She asked the man where he came from, and he answered that he had escaped that night from a big fire by jumping out of the fourth story of a burning factory; that he came away unharmed, but that many people had perished on that occasion. The man could not say by what means he came to Boston, neither could he have reached there by rail in such a short time, as the place of the accident was somewhere near Indianopolis [Indianapolis]. In fact that man had perished by jumping out of the window and did not know he was dead. Mrs. S—— explained the matter to him, and invited him to call on her again. This he did the next day; but on this occasion the ghost wore his Sunday clothes.
Mrs. S—— assures me that this occurrence actually took place on the physical plane; but it may be supposed that she was in a kind of trance and that it was an astral experience which she mistook for an external reality. The burning of that factory, however, took place on the night in question and Mrs. S—— knew nothing about it.
4. The following case has nothing to do with trances or dreams, and is well known in Germany. One night at about eleven o’clock the sentinels who stood guard at the door of the palace where Field-Marshal General von Moltke lived, saw him come out and presented their arms. The general wore his usual military dress, but without a sword and was bareheaded. At the same time General v. G—— and another gentleman of the Court saw the marshal walking out of the door. He walked up the street to the place where the bridge was then building to which afterwards his name was given. There he stood still and seemed to look at the work. The two gentlemen were very much surprised to see Moltke walk about bareheaded and at such an unusual hour and they followed him for fear that some accident might happen to him. After a while Moltke turned round a corner and went on, and they followed him again, but he mysteriously disappeared. That night Moltke died, and when the two gentlemen heard of it, they naturally supposed that he had met with an accident when they saw him near midnight; but it turned out that he had died already at 9 p.m., or some two hours before they followed him. The case has been made the subject of official investigation. The sentinels and the other witnesses were examined and no circumstance could have been better authenticated. It created a great sensation at the time, but the “experts” did not know what to make of it.
As “Moltke bridge” was then nearly finished, it seems natural that the old general wished to see it, and this may have been his last thought, which caused his spirit to create such a phantasm of himself. The fact that such “phantasms” may assume a visible and tangible shape appears as nothing supernatural, if we consider that “materiality” is also a relative term and that everything that exists is “material” in a certain sense, even if it consists, as Shakespeare says, “of such stuff as dreams are made of.” Things visible and things invisible are only different “gradations” of matter and an ethereal form may, under certain conditions, assume a very material aspect by changing its density.
5. Such ghosts or mental images may be of very long duration. In 1860 there was a young lady at Rome, dying of consumption. Her home was at L—— in Switzerland, and she desired to be buried there. So they started with her on the voyage, but she died on the way at N—— and her body was buried there.
Her wish remained unfulfilled and seems to keep her shadow in unrest still, because even very recently “spirit communications” have been received, asking that the remains should be disinterred and buried in L——.
The lesson which such cases teach seems to me very important. They prove that ideas are real things existing independently of the human brains from which they have emanated, and being capable of impressing other minds. This is a case where a person appears to be entranced by the spirit of one deceased; the deceased person may have nothing whatever to do with the communication supposed to come from him or her; it is merely that the medium has been caught in a certain current of thought. This is shown by the following fact: At some spiritistic séances there came repeatedly what seemed to be the spirit of a certain priest who delivered always the same sermon; but that sermon stopped at a certain point and the “spirit” could not continue it. It was discovered afterwards that the said priest had been struck dead by apoplexy while delivering that sermon in the pulpit and this occurred exactly at the point of the sermon where the spirit communication always stopped. As the sermon was not continued, there could be no further thought current and consequently no actual impression.
Note:
[1] Ghosts. Franz Hartmann, M.D. The Occult Review 8, no. 1 (July 1908), 44-46. {This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos, by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025}