“LECKHAMPTON HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, June 8.”

One may gather from a comparison of this letter with the foregoing records that the standard of evidence is a somewhat variable quantity in the Society for Psychical Research.  In attempting to explain the matter, Mr. Myers wrote to Lord Bute, June 11, 1897:—­

“As to haunted houses recorded at length in Proceedings, there have been several minor ones, and one especially, ’Records of a Haunted House,’ where I was instrumental in getting the account written.  The great point there was the amount of coincidence of visions seen independently....  In the B——­ case there is some coincidence of vision, but so far as I know, not nearly so much as in the Records of a Haunted House, which did appear in Proceedings.  We want to keep our level approximately the same throughout.”

Another point of view in relation to the same matter, is that taken by Miss Freer in an article in the Nineteenth Century, August 1897:—­

“That the S.P.R. recognised that haunted houses were among the alleged facts of general interest, was proved by their early appointment of a Committee of Inquiry, on the management of which it is too late to reflect.  At the end of a few months only, they practically dismissed a subject which, if considered at all, required years of patient research.  They had come across the surprising number of twenty-eight cases which they considered worth inquiry; but these were presented to the public on the evidence of only forty witnesses—­that is to say, an average of less than one and a half to each!  The appearance of figures is recorded in twenty-four of these stories, whilst four record noises only.  Ten years later the Proceedings take up the subject again, and give us at some length an elaborate story on the evidence of two or three ladies, two servants, a charwoman, and a little boy. [’Records of a Haunted House.’] No proper journal was kept, and the Society for Psychical Research came upon the scene when all was practically over.”

In relation to the period of the visit of the Myers party to B——­ House, Lord Bute received several journal letters from Professor Lodge, as well as from Mr. Myers, which, as he has made no request to the contrary, might be quoted here in extenso, were it not that they relate in considerable part to the proceedings of the medium, as to which the present editors agree with Mr. Myers, that “they greatly doubt if there was anything supernormal.”

Professor Lodge was from the first much interested in the B——­ inquiry, and wrote to Lord Bute on April 14th, two days after arrival:  “I have not found anything here as yet at all suitable for physical experiments.  I have heard a noise or two, and intelligent raps.  Nothing whatever can be normally seen so far.”