Some Mysterious Ants[1]
It sometimes seems as if we were at the eve of a new period of witchcraft, like that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where it was even by learned people believed that insects and worms, lice and fleas could be produced by magic spells. Modern science, of course, does not believe in spontaneous generation. Nevertheless, the following facts, communicated to me by Mr. A— W—, a personal friend of mine, may go to indicate that the mysteries of generation of ants may not yet be fully scientifically investigated or known. He writes:—
In the year I885 there died at G— an elder brother of mine, who for twenty-five years had been a Catholic priest at that place. He left a small farm, which by his last will and testament he made over to the convent of T— ; but as there were certain obligations connected with this inheritance, the convent refused to accept it, and it came into my possession. Being fond of farming I moved into the little cottage and took charge of the place.
I had only one neighbor, and he had a very bad reputation. I received many warnings, advising me to beware of him, he being a very dangerous person, and it was said that he was a sorcerer and his wife nothing less than a witch. Of course I laughed at these reports, because I believed neither in witchcraft nor sorcery, nor in anything of a spiritual or religious kind. I was a thorough materialist and rationalist, and prided myself in ignoring everything that could not be demonstrated to my physical senses. I would have considered it beneath my dignity to give to such popular superstitions so much as a thought.
However, I had a very material reason to keep away from my neighbor; because among other things with which my farm was encumbered was a lease upon a barn belonging to that neighbor, which my brother had used for drying his hops. Now I found that the leaseholder had the habit of not merely pocketing the rent, but also stealing as much as he could of the hops, and to make an end of this robbery I paid him my lease in advance, but made no more use of his barn. My neighbor, finding his income thus inconveniently cut down, became furious and tried to revenge himself upon me on every occasion, sneering at me and using offensive language whenever I happened to come within sight of him. He tried his best to damage my property, and I was finally forced to get a bulldog to protect my house.
One day about noon, I was walking in my garden, which was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, when I beheld William—for so I will call him—standing at the other side of the fence, making faces at me and using abusive language. For a while I tried to ignore his presence; but finally his vituperations were so strong that I became exasperated beyond endurance, and rushed towards him, intending to strike him. In my fury, however, I forgot the barbed wire and running against it wounded my hand. This caused an outburst of hilarity on the part of William and an outburst of wrath on my own, so much so that I cursed him to his face.
This was the last I ever saw of him, and when a few weeks afterwards I inquired about him at the village, I was told that he was ill with intestinal obstruction and not expected to live. Two days afterwards he died, and everybody in the village rejoiced over his death. While he lived they were all afraid of him and dared not say anything against him; but now, as he was beyond doing harm their tongues became loosened and characterized him without mercy.
A couple of days passed in peace; but one morning at about 8 o’clock, just as the funeral bell was ringing for William, I went toward the village to attend to some business, when it suddenly began to snow. In a few minutes the ground was covered. All at once I saw at a short distance ahead of me what seemed to be a black ribbon about five inches wide stretching across the road, and as I came nearer, I found that this black streak consisted of innumerable traveling ants. This was the more surprising to me, as I knew that ants usually sleep in winter and do not travel through the snow or over the hard frozen soil. Moreover, these ants were of enormous size, each nearly half an inch, with round heads and of a black color. They came out of a big hole in the ground at the wayside in never-ending quantities, crossing the road and rushing in the direction of my farm. This circumstance made me suspect that they intended mischief. I turned back and arrived at my house just in time to oppose the invaders. They had already attempted to enter my cottage, and were scaling the walls.
During the whole day I and a servant attempted to defend the premises against these terrible ants—by using hot water and brooms, ashes and quicklime. Thousands were killed, but there was no end of newcomers, and while we were defending the cottage, another party invaded the barn and the stable.
It was late in the night when I went to bed, but I did not sleep, for suddenly tremendous noises or raps were heard upon the wall next to the head end of my bed. It seemed as if the wall had split in two; blows followed one after another. I got up and lit a light. I examined the walls and discovered nothing; but while I stood before one spot of the wall, the raps commenced on another. I repeat, that the idea of there being any ghosts never entered my mind, and I would have treated any such suggestion with the utmost contempt. Nevertheless, these noises continued night after night, making the nights almost intolerable, until at last I became used to it. For seven years these troubles continued, but my skepticism remained the same.
At last I took a severe illness, and the doctors did not know what to make of it. Some called it “neuralgia.” I suffered terribly, my body was as it were paralyzed; I could not move, and had to lie still like a piece of wood. The least noise caused me agonies, and still I had to bear these loud knocks and blows on the wall. I also noticed that they came and went with a certain regularity, and it began to dawn upon my mind that they might have some intelligent, although invisible cause. The thought struck me that perhaps the ghost of William might be connected with these phenomena, and although I at first rejected this idea, the thought finally grew into an interior conviction, which I could not ignore.
One morning, while half awake, I had the feeling as if some monster were attempting to penetrate into my body. I thought I saw an enormous animal, half spider, half scorpion, letting itself down on a self-spun thread from the ceiling; but when it came near my face, it gave a jump and seemed to disappear in a hole in the wall. But there was no hole.
I now remembered that in my youth I had been taught that we should pray for the dead, and the thought came to me, that if these things were caused by the restless ghost of William, perhaps if I were to pray for him, he would leave me in peace. However, I found praying to be a difficult job. I could not forget: all the mischief which William had done to me, and each rap on the wall sent a pain through my body, as if I were struck by a spear. Finding that my prayers were useless, I began to curse; this only seemed to increase the noises; but at length they suddenly ceased. I felt that night terribly lonesome and desolate, as if some part of myself had become separated from me, or as if my best friend had been carried to the grave, and I almost wished that the ghost of William would return from the place to where I had sent him, and make his raps again. On the next morning I noticed that I could move my arms and legs, and after some exertion I was able to sit up in my bed and eventually to leave it with assistance. Great was my joy when I found I could descend the stairs and reenter my writing-room, which was situated directly below the room where I used to sleep.
All day I remained in my writing-room, attending to a pile of letters which had accumulated upon my desk during my illness. It was already dark, and I was sitting in my comfortable chair, when I distinctly heard somebody moving in my bedroom above. This somebody seemed to drag himself slowly with heavy trailing steps towards the descending staircase, and then I heard a heavy fall, as if a body had fallen downstairs. There was no one in the house at that time except myself and no one could have produced the noise; but the same thing occurred on the next and the following day at the same hour. Raps on the wall were heard occasionally, but they grew weaker, and at the same time I grew stronger in health.
In the meantime, the ants had done a great deal of damage to the barn and also found their way into the cottage. Outwardly the walls showed no signs, but after removing the plaster it was found that the woodwork in many places was eaten up; rafters and sleepers were only a spongy mass, and had to be replaced by new ones one after another. These ants did their work as thoroughly as the white ants in India; but they had no resemblance to them. All my efforts to get rid of them were of no avail. The more I killed, the more they seemed to be increasing in numbers, and in the year 1905, getting tired of the struggle, I left the place. I have never seen or heard of such a queer kind of ants again. Could they have been products of the astral plane?
The Amulet
Owing, perhaps, to the publicity, which the Occult Review has given to some of my experiences in occultism, it appears that I have acquired a certain notoriety as a supposed expert in matters belonging to the invisible world or the “night side of nature,” because I am frequently favored with letters from various parts of the world, in which the writers send me accounts of dreams, visions or other experiences of astral or spiritual things, which they believe to be of some importance, and of which they desire explanations. This notoriety I have neither desired nor do I think I deserve it; because I am still too deeply immersed in matter to have my clairvoyant faculties fully developed, and although I occasionally get glimpses of usually invisible things, I have to rely for my judgment more upon reason and common sense than upon interior revelation. Moreover, the tales told to me and for which my advice is asked are frequently of little significance and do not go beyond events such as occur every day. Sometimes, however, some extraordinary happenings come to my knowledge, which deserve to be noticed, and to this class belongs the following case, told to me by one of my personal acquaintances, a highly respectable man of more than sixty years of age, who is occupying the prominent position of chief justice in a town in this country.
He says:—
While I was still young and a student at the university of O———, I had occasion to do some great service to an old Jew who used to be a friend of our family and a frequent visitor at our house. It does not signify what that service was; it will be sufficient to say that as a result of my intervention I saved the Jew from losing the whole of his property, and prevented him from committing the suicide which he intended.
Not long after this event I got ready to enjoy my holidays by making a trip to Switzerland, and on the morning before I started, the Jew came to me and said: “You have done me an immense service, and I wish to show you my gratitude. Now I know you are a great admirer of the ladies and a lover of adventures, and I am in possession of an amulet which gives the wearer power over any woman, no matter of what social position she may be. I will make you a gift of that amulet, and if you wear it about your person, you may be sure that no female in this world can resist you if you direct your desire towards her. You need not even say anything, she will come to you voluntarily, and without being asked.”
So saying the Jew produced a strip of parchment, written over with a lot of Hebrew characters, which I could not read.
“Nonsense!” I cried. “You must be drunk or crazy! Do you actually think that you could make me believe such stuff?”
“It may seem incredible to you,” answered Solomon, “nevertheless it is perfectly true. I have myself tried the amulet, and it has never failed.”
I looked at the Jew. It would surely require a powerful amulet to make any woman fall in love with such a creature; for not only was his nose of accentuated type and of enormous length, but one of his cheeks was adorned by a wart, and his neck with a goiter. This, in addition to his bow legs, gave him an appearance such as is usually considered far from attractive.
“Yes!” continued the Jew, “when I was younger I loved adventures and I know what I am talking about. Now I am getting old, and I may just as well let you have the amulet; although I would never before have thought of selling it at any price, much less of giving it away.”
I protested, but the Jew insisted, and the end of it was that I stuck the parchment away into my satchel, intending to find out at some leisure time what these Hebrew characters meant.
A few days afterwards I was standing one evening on the porch of a certain hotel on the Rigi. It was evening, and there were a number of people present, enjoying the beautiful sight of the sunset, and among these I noticed an exquisitely charming young lady standing apart from the crowd, and looking dreamily over the landscape. She appeared to be a widow, for she was dressed in black; she was small and slender, of fair complexion, with an abundance of dark brown hair. But I will make no attempt to describe her beauty; I had never before seen anything so attractive, and the desire to possess her took possession of me.
Then the devil tempted me, and I went almost instinctively to my room and took the amulet out of my bag. It seemed to me that there could be no harm in gratifying my curiosity in regard to an experiment of which I knew beforehand that it would never succeed. I put the parchment into my breast pocket and returned to the porch, directing my thought upon the lady, who suddenly turned around and looked at me in an astonished and, as it seemed to me, reproachful way. I felt myself blush and slunk ashamed back into my room.
My curiosity was aroused to know who the lady was, and I hoped to see her at supper. She did not appear; but by making prudent inquiries I found that she was the widowed daughter of a Russian general, and considered quite unapproachable.
It was not far from midnight when I retired to my room; but I could not sleep. The vision of those sorrowful eyes kept me awake. I thought of the amulet and was ready to curse it; while still some faint hope lurked within my heart, wondering whether the experiment would succeed.
I may have been lying awake for about half an hour, when I was startled by a gentle rap at my door. I did not open, but waited until it was rapped a second time. I then arose and rapidly slipped into my clothes. There was no need of striking a light, for the full moon was shining directly into my room, making everything as clearly visible as if it were full daylight. I opened the door, and in walked the lady, dressed in a white silken gown, with her long hair falling over her shoulders, and reaching down below the knees.
“What do you wish?” I stuttered.
“Sir!” she said, in a voice calm and full of resignation. “You see in me a most unfortunate woman. By some power whose nature I do not know, but which I am unable to resist, I have been forced to take this disgraceful step. Take me; I surrender. There is no help?”
“Do you love me?” I asked, trying to take hold of her hand; for I felt myself almost irresistibly drawn towards her, and hardly knew what I was doing.
“No!” she exclaimed. “I do not know who you are; but man or devil, relieve the fire that burns in my veins or kill me, if you know no pity.”
These words brought me back to my senses. I was terrified. It seemed to me as if I myself were in possession of some horrible demon, whose power I must escape or perish.
“Madame!” I said. “I am no devil, and I wish you no harm; but I believe I know the cause of the spell that attracted you to me, and I will destroy it.” So saying, I lit a match, and holding the amulet at one end, I set it on fire, and watched it as it was consumed by the flame.
Now I am no visionary, and I had never cared to read about ghosts. apparitions, or what I have since been taught to call elementals; but I suppose that if I had studied all the books of the wizards, words would fail me to describe the horrible and disgusting thing which seemed to shape itself out of the smoke of the burning parchment, and which I saw for an instant before it disappeared from view.
The lady saw it also and fainted. I went in search of the chambermaid, and by her assistance managed to revive her and send her back to her apartment. A good bribe secured the silence of the girl, and I departed next morning.
Thus far goes the account of the judge. My own opinion is that some elemental was bound by a magic spell to that amulet, and that he took possession of the lady, who evidently was of a very mediumistic organization, such as is nowadays often found in hysterical women, and, for matter of that, also in hysterical men.
Note:
[1] Some Occult Happenings. Dr. Franz Hartmann. The Occult Review 9, no. 3 (March 1909), 132-137. {This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos. Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025}