A large book might easily be filled with old stories of mysterious flights of stones, and volatile chairs and tables.  The ancient mystics of the Levant were acquainted with the phenomena, as Iamblichus shows.  The Eskimo knew them well.  Glanvill is rich in examples, the objects flying about in presence of a solitary spectator, who has called at a ‘haunted house,’ and sometimes the events accompany the presence of a single individual, who may, or may not be a convulsionary or epileptic.  Sometimes they befall where no individual is suspected of constitutional electricity or of imposture.

We may select a laughable example from a rare tract.  ’An authentic, candid, and circumstantial narrative of the astonishing transactions at Stockwell, in the county of Surrey, on Monday and Tuesday, the 6th and 7th of January, 1772.  Published with the consent and approbation of the family and other parties concerned, to authenticate which, the original copy is signed by them.  London, 1772, printed for J. Marks, bookseller, in St. Martin’s Lane.’

The dramatis personae are old Mrs. Golding, of Stockwell parish, ’a gentlewoman of unblemished honour and character’; Mrs. Pain, her niece, a farmer’s wife, ‘respected in the parish’; Mary Martin, her servant, previously with Mrs. Golding; Richard Fowler, a labourer, living opposite Mrs. Pain; Sarah Fowler his wife—­all these sign the document,—­and Ann Robinson, Mrs. Golding’s maid, just entered on her service.  Ann does not sign.

The trouble began at ten a.m. on January 6, when Mrs. Golding heard a great smash of crockery, an event ‘most incident to maids’.  The lady went into the kitchen, when plates began to fall from the dresser ‘while she was there and nobody near them’.  Then a clock tumbled down, so did a lantern, a pan of salt beef cracked, and a carpenter, Rowlidge, suggested that a recent addition of a room above had shaken the foundation of the house.  Mrs. Golding rushed into the house of Mr. Gresham, her next neighbour, and fainted.  Meanwhile Ann Robinson was ‘mistress of herself, though china fall,’ and seemed in no hurry to leave the threatened dwelling.  The niece of Mrs. Golding, Mrs. Pain, was sent for to Mr. Gresham’s, Mrs. Golding was bled, when, lo, ’the blood sprang out of the basin upon the floor, and the basin broke to pieces!’ A bottle of rum, of sympathetic character, also burst.  Many of Mrs. Golding’s more fragile effects had been carried into Mr. Gresham’s:  the glasses and china first danced, and then fell off the side-board and broke.  Mrs. Golding, ‘her mind one confused chaos,’ next sought refuge at Mr. Mayling’s for three-quarters of an hour.  Here nothing unusual occurred, but, at Mr. Gresham’s (where Ann Robinson was packing the remains of her mistress’s portable property) a ‘mahogany waiter,’ a quadrille box, a jar of pickles and a pot of raspberry jam shared the common doom.  ‘Their end was pieces.’  Mrs. Pain now hospitably conveyed her aunt to her house at Rush Common, ’hoping all was over’.  This was about two in the afternoon.