Before criticising this explanation, let us give the English affair, alluded to by Mr. Podmore.

The most curious modern case known to me is not of recent date, but it occurred in full daylight, in the presence of many witnesses, and the phenomena continued for weeks.  The events were of 1849, and the record is expanded, by Mr. Bristow, a spectator, from an account written by him in 1854.  The scene was Swanland, near Hull, in a carpenter’s shop, where Mr. Bristow was employed with two fellow workmen.  To be brief, they were pelted by odds and ends of wood, about the size of a common matchbox.  Each blamed the others, till this explanation became untenable.  The workrooms and space above were searched to no purpose.  The bits of wood sometimes danced along the floor, more commonly sailed gently along, or “moved as if borne on gently heaving waves.”  This sort of thing was repeated during six weeks.  One piece of wood “came from a distant corner of the room towards me, describing what may be likened to a geometrical square, or corkscrew of about eighteen inches diameter....  Never was a piece seen to come in at the doorway.”  Mr. Bristow deems this period ’the most remarkable episode in my life.’ (June 27, 1891.) The phenomena ’did not depend on the presence of any one person or number of persons.’

Going to Swanland, in 1891, Mr. Sidgwick found one surviving witness of these occurrences, who averred that the objects could not have been thrown because of the eccentricities of their course, which he described in the same way as Mr. Bristow.  The thrower must certainly have had a native genius for ‘pitching’ at base-ball.  This witness, named Andrews, was mentioned by Mr. Bristow in his report, but not referred to by him for confirmation.  Those to whom he referred were found to be dead, or had emigrated.  The villagers had a superstitious theory about the phenomena being provoked by a dead man, whose affairs had not been settled to his liking.  So Mr. Darwin’s spoon danced—­on a grave.[5]

This case has a certain interest a propos of Mr. Podmore’s surmise that all such phenomena arise in trickery, which produces excitement in the spectators, while excitement begets hallucination, and hallucination takes the form of seeing the thrown objects move in a non-natural way.  Thus, I keep throwing things about.  You, not detecting this stratagem, get excited, consequently hallucinated, and you believe you see the things move in spirals, or undulate as if on waves, or hop, or float, or glide in an impossible way.  So close is the uniformity of hallucination that these phenomena are described, in similar terms, by witnesses (hallucinated, of course) in times old and new, as in cases cited by Glanvil, Increase Mather, Telfer (of Rerrick), and, generally, in works of the seventeenth century.  Nor is this uniform hallucination confined to England.  Mr. Podmore quotes a German example, and I received a similar testimony (to the flight of an object round a corner) from a gentleman who employed Esther Teed, ‘the Amherst Mystery,’ in his service. He was not excited, for he was normally engaged in his normal stable, when the incident occurred unexpectedly as he was looking after his live stock.  One may add the case of Cideville (1851) and Sir W. Crookes’s evidence, and that of Mr. Schhapoff.