‘haunted,’ though, as we have seen, the effect is far less common than the cause.  All these sorts of causes are undoubtedly more apt to be prevalent among superstitious savages than among educated Europeans.  And it stands to reason that savages, where one man ’thinks he sees something,’ will be readier than we are to think they ‘see something’ too.  Yet collective hallucinations, which are shared by several persons at once, are especially puzzling.  Even if they occur when all are in a strained condition of expectancy, it is odd that all see them in the same way.[12] Examples will occur later.  When there is no excitement, the mystery is increased.  We may note that, among the expectant multitudes who looked on while Bernadette was viewing the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes, not one person, however superstitious or hysterical, pretended to share the vision.  Again, only one person, and he on doubtful evidence, is asserted to have shared, once, the visions of Jeanne d’Arc.  In both cases all the conditions said to produce collective hallucination were present in the highest degree.  Yet no collective hallucination occurred.

Narratives about hallucinations coincident with a death, narratives well attested, are abundant in modern times, so abundant that one need only refer the curious to Messrs. Gurney and Myers’s two large volumes, ‘Phantasms of the Living,’ and to the S.P.R ’Report of Census of Hallucinations’ (1894).  Mr. Tylor says:  ’The spiritualistic theory specially insists on cases of apparitions, where the person’s death corresponds more or less nearly with the time when some friend perceives his phantom.’  But visionaries, he remarks truly, often see phantoms of living persons when nothing occurs.  That is the case, and the question arises whether more such phantoms are viewed (not by ‘visionaries’) in connection with the death or other crisis of the person whose hallucinatory appearance is perceived, than ought to occur, if there be no connection of some unknown cause between deaths and appearances.  As Mr. Tylor observes, ’Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, came to associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be connected in fact.’[13] Did early man, then, find in experience that apparitions of his friends were ‘connected in fact’ with their deaths?  And, if so, was that discovered connection in fact the origin of his belief that an hallucinatory appearance of an absent person sometimes announced his death?

That the belief exists in New Zealand we saw, and find confirmed by this instance, one of ‘many such relations,’ says the author.  A Maori chief was long absent on the war-path.  One day he entered his wife’s hut, and sat mute by the hearth.  She ran to bring witnesses, but on her return the phantasm was no longer visible.  The woman soon afterwards married again.

Her husband then returned in perfect health, and pardoned the lady, as she had acted on what, to a Maori mind, seemed good legal evidence of his decease.  Of course, even if she fabled, the story is evidence to the existence of the belief.[14]