"Doyle, Arthur Conan - The New Revelation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Arthur Conan)

the same time we could not swear that some
ingenious practical joke had not been played upon us.
There the matter ended for the time. Some years
afterwards, however, I met a member of the family who
occupied the house, and he told me that after our visit
the bones of a child, evidently long buried, had been
dug up in the garden. You must admit that this was
very remarkable. Haunted houses are rare, and houses
with buried human beings in their gardens are also, we
will hope, rare. That they should have both united in
one house is surely some argument for the truth of the
phenomena. It is interesting to remember that in the
case of the Fox family there was also some word of
human bones and evidence of murder being found in the
cellar, though an actual crime was never established.
I have little doubt that if the Wesley family could
have got upon speaking terms with their persecutor,
they would also have come upon some motive for the
persecution. It almost seems as if a life cut suddenly
and violently short had some store of unspent vitality
which could still manifest itself in a strange,
mischievous fashion. Later I had another singular
personal experience of this sort which I may describe
at the end of this argument.[1]

[1] Vide Appendix III.


From this period until the time of the War I
continued in the leisure hours of a very busy life to
devote attention to this subject. I had experience of
one series of seances with very amazing results,
including several materializations seen in dim light.
As the medium was detected in trickery shortly
afterwards I wiped these off entirely as evidence. At
the same time I think that the presumption is very
clear, that in the case of some mediums like Eusapia
Palladino they may be guilty of trickery when their
powers fail them, and yet at other times have very
genuine gifts. Mediumship in its lowest forms is a
purely physical gift with no relation to morality and
in many cases it is intermittent and cannot be
controlled at will. Eusapia was at least twice
convicted of very clumsy and foolish fraud, whereas she
several times sustained long examinations under every
possible test condition at the hands of scientific
committees which contained some of the best names of
France, Italy, and England. However, I personally
prefer to cut my experience with a discredited medium
out of my record, and I think that all physical