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THE GHOST SEEN BY LORD BROUGHAM
By Scaife, Hazel Lewis, 1872-1939
IT is comparatively easy when seated before
a roaring fire in a well-lighted room, to
sneer ghosts out of existence, and roundly
affirm that they are without exception the
fanciful products of a heated imagination.
But the matter takes on a very different com-
plexion, when in that same room and without
so much as the opening of a door, one is unex-
pectedly confronted by the figure of an absent
friend, who, it subsequently appears, is about
that time breathing his last in another part of
the world. Especially would it seem impos-
sible to remain skeptical if there existed be-
tween oneself and the friend in question a
compact, drawn up years before in an access of
youthful enthusiasm, binding whichever should
die first to appear to the other at the moment
of death.
This, as all students of ghostology are aware,
has frequently been the case; and it was pre-
cisely the case with the ghost seen by the
famous Lord Brougham, the brilliant and
versatile Scotchman, whose astonishingly long
and successful career in England as statesman,
judge, lawyer, man of science, philanthropist,
orator, and author won him a place among the
immortals both of the Georgian and of the
Victorian era.
At the time he saw the ghost he was still a
young man, thinking far less of what the
future might hold than of the pleasures of the
present. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a
more unlikely subject for a ghostly experience.
From his earliest youth, his father, a most
matter of fact person, sedulously endeavored
to impress him with the belief that the only
spirits deserving of the name were those which
came in oddly labeled bottles; and in support
of this view the elder Brougham frequently
related the adventures of sundry persons of
his acquaintance who had engaged in the
mischievous pastime of ghost hunting. Added
to the natural effect of such tales as these was
the inherent exuberance of Brougham's dis-
position and the bent of his mind to mathe-
matics and kindred exact sciences.
It was at the Edinburgh high school that
he first met his future ghost, who at the time
was a youngster like himself, and became and
long remained his most intimate friend. The
two lads were graduated together from the
high school, and together matriculated into
the university, where, in the intervals Broug-
ham could spare from his favorite studies and
recreations, and from the company of the
daredevil students with whom he soon began
to associate, they continued their old time
walks and talks.
On one of these walks, the conversation
happened to turn to the perennial problem of
life beyond the grave and the possibility of
the dead communicating with the living
Brougham, mindful of the views maintained
by his father, doubtless treated the subject
lightly, if not scoffingly; but one word led to
another, until finally, in what he afterward
described as a moment of folly, he covenanted
with his friend that whichever of them should
happen to pass from earth first would, if it
were at all possible, show himself in spirit to
the other, and thus prove beyond peradven-
ture that the soul of man survived the death
of the body.
So far as Brougham was concerned, this
undertaking was speedily forgotten in the
pressure of the many activities into which he
plunged with all the ardor of his impetuous
nature. His days were given wholly to the
pursuit of knowledge; his nights to the pur-
suit of pleasure, as pleasure was then counted
by the roystering young Scotchmen, whose
favorite resort was the tavern, and whose most
popular pastime was filching signs, bell handles,
and knockers, and stirring the city guard to
unwonted energy. Under such conditions
neither the death pact nor the solemn minded
youth with whom he had made it could remain
long in his memory; and it is not surprising to
find that with the end of college life and the re-
moval of his boyhood's friend to India, where
he entered the civil service, they soon became
as strangers to each other.
Brougham himself remained in Edinburgh
to read for the law, and incidentally to develop
with the aid of an amateur debating society
the oratorical talents that were in time to make
him the logical successor of Pitt, Fox, and
Burke in the House of Commons. He con-
tinued none the less a lover of pleasure, some
of which, however, he now took in the healthy
form of long walking trips through the High-
lands. In this way he acquired a desire for
travel, and when, in the autumn of 1799, an
opportunity came for an extended tour of
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, he grasped
it eagerly. Together with the future diplomat,
Lord Stuart of Rothsay, then plain Charles
Stuart and the boon companion of many a
pedestrian excursion, he sailed for Copen-
hagen late in September, and by leisurely
stages made his way thence to Stockholm,
alive to all the varied interests of the novel
scenes in which he found himself; but en-
countering little that was exciting or adven-
turous, until, after a prolonged sojourn in the
Swedish capital and a brief visit to Goteborg,
he started for Norway.
By this time the weather had turned so cold
that the travelers resolved to bring their tour
to a sudden end, and to press on as rapidly
as the bad roads would permit to some Nor-
wegian port, where they hoped to find a ship
that would carry them back to Scotland. Ac-
cordingly, leaving Goteborg early in the morn-
ing of December 19, they journeyed steadily
until after midnight, when they came to an
inn that seemed to promise comfortable
sleeping accommodations. Stuart lost no
time in going to bed; but Brougham decided
to wait until a hot bath could be prepared for
him.
Plunging into it, and forgetful of everything
save the warmth that was doubly welcome
after the cold of the long drive, he suddenly
became aware that he was not alone in the
room. No door had opened, not a footstep
had been heard ; but in the light of the flicker-
ing candles he plainly saw the figure of a man
seated in the chair on which he had carelessly
thrown his clothes. And this figure he in-
stantly recognized as that of his early playmate,
the forgotten chum who, as he well knew, had
years before gone from the land of the heather
to the land of the blazing sun. Yet here he
sat, in the quaintly furnished sleeping chamber
of a Swedish roadside inn, gazing composedly
at his astounded friend. At once there flashed
into Brougham's mind remembrance of the
death pact, and he leaped from the bath, only
to lose all consciousness and fall headlong to
the floor. When he revived, the apparition
had disappeared.
There was little sleep for the hard headed
Scotchman that night. The vision had been
too definite, the shock too intense. But,
dressing, he sat down and strove to debate the
matter in the light of cold reason. He must,
he argued, have dozed off in the bath and ex-
perienced a strange dream. To be sure, he
had not been thinking of his old comrade, and
for years had had no communication with
him. Nor had anything taken place during
the tour to bring to memory either him or any
member of his family, or to turn Brougham's
mind to thoughts of India. Still, he found it
impossible to believe that he had seen a ghost.
At most, he reiterated to himself, it could have
been nothing more than an exceptionally clear
cut dream. And to this opinion he stubbornly
adhered, notwithstanding the receipt, soon
after his return to Edinburgh, of a letter from
India announcing the death of the friend who
had been so mysteriously recalled to his recol-
lection, and giving December 19 as the date
of death. More than sixty years later we
find him, in his autobiography commenting,
on the experience anew, granting that it was
a strange coincidence but refusing to admit
that it was anything more than the coincidence
of a dream.
It was in his autobiography, by the way,
that he first referred to the confirmatory letter.
This fact, taken in connection with his repu-
tation for holding the truth in light esteem
and with several vague and puzzling state-
ments contained in the detailed account of
the experience itself as set forth in his journal
of the Scandinavian tour, has led some critics
to make the suggestion that his narrative par-
takes of the nature of fiction rather than of a
sober recital of facts. Against this, however,
must be set Brougham's complete and in-
vincible repugnance to accept at face value
anything bordering on the supernatural. He
took no pleasure in the thought that he had
possibly been the recipient of a visit from a
departed spirit. On the contrary, it annoyed
him, and he sought earnestly to find a natural
explanation for an occurrence which remained
unique throughout his long life. No one
would have been readier to point out the
futility of the apparition if the absent friend
had really continued hale and hearty after
December 19. And it is therefore reasonable
to assume that had he wished to falsify at all,
he would have given an altogether different
sequel to the story of his vision or dream, as
he preferred to call it, though the evidence
which he himself furnishes shows that he was
not asleep.
The question still remains, of course,
whether he was justified in dismissing it as a
sheer chance coincidence. If it stood by itself,
it would obviously be permissible to accept
this explanation as all sufficient. But the
fact is that it is only one of many similar in-
stances. This was strikingly brought out
only a few years ago through a far reaching
inquiry, a "census of hallucinations," instituted
by a special committee of the Society for
Psychical Research.
Enlisting the services of some four hundred
"collectors," the committee instructed each
of these to address to twenty-five adults,
selected at random, the query, "Have you
ever, when believing yourself to be completely
awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or
being touched by a living being or inanimate
object, or of hearing a voice ; which impression,
so far as you could discover, was not due to any
external physical cause?" In all, seventeen
thousand people were thus questioned, and
almost ten per cent, of the answers received
proved to be in the affirmative. More than this,
it appeared that out of a total of three hundred
and fifty recognized apparitions of living per-
sons, no fewer than sixty-five were "death
coincidences," in which the hallucinatory ex-
perience occurred within from one hour to
twelve hours after the death of the person seen.
Sifting these death coincidences carefully,
the committee for various reasons rejected
more than half, and at the same time raised
the total of recognized apparitions of living
persons from three hundred and fifty to
thirteen hundred. This was done in order to
make generous allowance for the number of
such apparitions forgotten by those to whom
the question had been put, investigation show-
ing that the great majority of hallucinations
reported were given as of comparatively re-
cent occurrence, and that there was a rapid
decrease as the years of occurrence became
more remote.
As a final result, therefore, the committee
found about thirty death coincidences out of
thirteen hundred cases, or a proportion of one
in forty-three. Computing from the average
annual death-rate for England and Wales, it
was calculated that the probability that any
one person would die on a given day was
about one in nineteen thousand; in other
words, out of every nineteen thousand appari-
tions of living persons, there should occur,
by chance alone, one death coincidence.
The actual proportion, however, as established
by the inquiry, was equivalent to about four
hundred and forty in nineteen thousand, or
four hundred and forty times the most prob-
able number, and this when the apparitions
reported were considered merely collectively as
having been seen at any time within twelve
hours after death. Not a few, as a matter of
fact, were reported as having been seen within
one hour after death, and for these the im-
probability of occurrence by chance alone was
manifestly twelve times four hundred and
forty. In view of these considerations the
committee felt warranted in declaring that
"between deaths and apparitions of dying
persons a connection exists which is not due
to chance."*
Had Lord Brougham lived to study the
statistics of this remarkable census of hallucina-
tions, he might have formed a higher opinion of
his ghost; but he would also have been in a
better position to deny its supernatural attri-
butes. For, if the Society for Psychical Re-
search has made it impossible to doubt the
existence of such ghosts as that which he be-
held during his travels in Sweden, it has like-
wise made discoveries which afford a really
substantial reason for asserting that they no
more hail from the world beyond than do
ghosts that are unmistakably the creations of
fancy or fraud. This results from the so-
ciety's investigations of thought transference
or telepathy, to use the term now commonly
employed.
At an early stage of the experiments under-
taken to determine the possibility of trans-
mitting thought from mind to mind without
the intervention of any known means of com-
munication, it was found that when success
attended the efforts of the experimenters the
telepathic message was frequently received
not in the form of pure thought but as a
hallucinatory image; and what is still more
important in the present connection, it was
further found possible so to produce not
merely images of cards, flowers, books, and
other inanimate objects, but also images of
living persons.
Thus, as chronicled with corroborative evi-
dence in the society's "Proceedings," an
English clergyman named Godfrey telepathi-
cally caused a distant friend to see an appa-
rition of him one night; the same result was
achieved by a Mr. Sinclair of New Jersey,
who, during a visit to New York, succeeded
in projecting a phantasm of himself which
was clearly seen by his wife in Lake wood ; and
similarly a Mr. Kirk, while seated in his Lon-
don office, paid a telepathic visit to the home
of a young woman, who saw him as distinctly as
though he had gone there in the flesh. In all of
these, as in other cases recorded by the so-
ciety, the persons to whom the apparitions
were vouchsafed had no idea that any experi-
ment of the kind was being attempted.
Indeed, there is on record an apparently
well authenticated instance of the experimental
production of an apparition not of the living
but of the dead. This occurred in Germany
many years ago, when a certain Herr Weser-
mann undertook to "will" a military friend
into dreaming of a woman who had long been
dead. The sequel may be related in Herr
Wesermann's own words:
"A lady, who had been dead five years, was
to appear to Lieutenant N. in a dream at
10.30 P.M., and incite him to good deeds.
At half -past ten, contrary to expectation, Herr
N. had not gone to bed but was discussing the
French campaign with his friend Lieutenant
S. in the ante-room. Suddenly the door of the
room opened, the lady entered dressed in
white, with a black kerchief and uncovered
head, greeted S. with her hand three times in a
friendly manner; then turned to N., nodded
to him, and returned again through the door-
way.
"As this story, related to me by Lieutenant
N., seemed to be too remarkable from a
psychological point of view for the truth of it
not to be duly established, I wrote to Lieuten-
ant S., who was living six miles away, and
asked him to give me his account of it. He
sent me the following reply :
'"On the thirteenth of March, 1817, Herr
N. came to pay me a visit at my lodgings about
a league from A . He stayed the night
with me. After supper, and when we were
both undressed, I was sitting on my bed and
Herr N. was standing by the door of the next
room on the point also of going to bed. This was
about half -past ten. We were speaking partly
about indifferent subjects and partly about
the events of the French campaign. Sud-
denly the door of the kitchen opened without
a sound, and a lady entered, very pale, taller
than Herr N., about five feet four inches in
height, strong and broad of figure, dressed in
white, but with a large black kerchief which
reached to below the waist.
"'She entered with bare head, greeted me
with the hand three times in complimentary
fashion, turned round to the left toward Herr
N., and waved her hand to him three times;
after which the figure quietly, and again with-
out any creaking of the door, went out. We
followed at once in order to discover whether
there were any deception, but found nothing.
The strangest thing was this, that our night-
watch of two men whom I had shortly found
on the watch were now asleep, though at my
first call they were on the alert; and that the
door of the room, which always opens with a
good deal of noise, did not make the slightest
sound when opened by the figure.'"*
It is also significant that, as was made
evident by the census of hallucinations, by
far the larger number of apparitions re-
ported are those of persons still alive and
well. In these cases, nobody being dead, it
is absurd * to raise the cry of spirits, and the
only tenable hypothesis is that, through one of
the several causes which seem to quicken tele-
pathic action, a spontaneous telepathic hal-
lucination has been produced. Now, the
experiments conducted by the society and by
independent investigators have shown that
telepathic messages often lie dormant for
hours beneath the threshold of the receiver's
consciousness, being consciously apprehended
only when certain favoring conditions arise;
as, for example, when the receiver has fallen
asleep, or into a state of reverie, or when,
tired out after a long day's work, he has
utterly relaxed mentally. This is technically
known as "deferred percipience," and, con-
sidered in conjunction with the discoveries
mentioned, it is amply sufficient to dislodge
from the realm of the supernatural the ghost
seen by Lord Brougham, and every ghost
that is not a mere imposter.
In the Brougham case the exciting cause of
the hallucination seems to have been the
death pact. As he lay dying in India, the
mind of the whilom schoolboy would, con-
sciously or unconsciously, revert to that agree-
ment with the friend of his youth, and thence
would arise the desire to let him know that
the plighted word had not been forgotten.
Across the vast intervening space, by what
mechanism we as yet do not know, the mes-
sage would flash instantaneously, to remain
unapprehended, perhaps for hours after the
death of the sender, until, in the quiet of the
Swedish inn and resting from the fatigues of
the journey, Brougham's mental faculties
passed momentarily into the condition neces-
sary for its objective realization.
Then, precisely as in experimental tele-
pathy the receiver sees a hallucinatory image
of the trinket or the book; with a suddenness
and vividness that could not fail to shock him,
the message would find expression by the
creation before Brougham's startled eyes of a
hallucinatory image of the friend who, as he
was to learn later, had died that same day
thousands of miles from Sweden. Knowing
nothing of the possibilities of the human mind,
as revealed, if only faintly, by the labors of a
later generation, it was inevitable he should
believe he had no alternative between dis-
missing the experience as a peculiar dream or
admitting that in very truth he had looked
upon a ghost.
Finish