Lo! (18 page)
Authors: Charles Fort
A table was overturned, and a broken lamp was on the floor.
So there seems to be an obvious explanation. But, at the inquest, it was said that an examination of this lamp showed that it could not have caused the fire. The verdict was: “Accidental death, but by what means, they (the jury) were unable to determine.”
Both bodies had been fully dressed, “judging by fragments of clothes.” This indicates that the Kileys had been burned before their time for going to bed. Hours later, the house was in flames. At the inquest, the mystery was that two persons, neither of whom had cried for help, presumably not asleep in an ordinary sense, should have been burned to death in a fire that did not manifest as a general fire, until hours later.
Something had overturned a table. A lamp was broken. Again the phenomenon of scene-shifting—
Soon after the killing of poultry ceased, near Newcastle, there were uncanny occurrences upon Binbrook Farm, near Great Grimsby. There is an account, in the
Jour. S.P.R.,
12-138, by the Rev. A.C. Custance, of Binbrook Rectory. There was no confession, this time, but this time the girl in the case—the young housemaid again—was in no condition to be dragged to a police station. It will not be easy to think that it was trickery by the girl in this case. The story is that objects were thrown about rooms: that three times, near “a not very good, or big, fire,” things burst into flames, and that finally a servant girl was burned, or was attacked by something that burned her. In the
Liverpool Echo,
January 25, is published a letter from a school teacher of Binbrook, in which it is said that a blanket had been found burning in a room in which there was no fireplace. According to the report by Col. Taylor, to the S.P.R., the first manifestations occurred upon the 31st of December. Something was killing chickens, in the farmyard, and in the henhouse. All were killed in the same way. A vampirish way? Their throats were torn.
I go to a newspaper for an account of phenomena, at Binbrook. The writer was so far from prejudice in favor of occult phenomena that he began by saying: “Superstition dies hard.” In the
Louth and North Lincolnshire News,
January 28, he tells of objects that unaccountably fell from shelves in the farmhouse, and of mysterious transportations of objects, “according to allegations.” “A story that greatly dismays the unsophisticated is that of the servant girl, who, while sweeping the floor, was badly burned on the back. This is how the farmer relates it: ‘Our servant girl, whom we had taken from the workhouse, and who had neither kin nor friend in the world that she knows of, was sweeping the kitchen. There was a very small fire in the grate: there was a guard there, so that no one can come within two feet or more of the fire, and she was at the other end of the room, and had not been near. I suddenly came into the kitchen, and there she was, sweeping away, while the back of her dress was afire. She looked around, as I shouted, and, seeing the flames, rushed through the door. She tripped, and I smothered the fire out with wet sacks. But she was terribly burned, and she is at the Louth Hospital, now, in terrible pain.’
“This last sentence is very true. Yesterday our representative called at the hospital, and was informed that the girl was burnt extensively on the back, and lies in a critical condition. She adheres to the belief that she was in the middle of the room, when her clothes ignited.”
A great deal, in trying to understand this occurrence, depends upon what will be thought of the unseen killing of chickens—
“Out of 250 fowls, Mr. White says that he has only twenty-four left. They have all been killed in the same weird way. The skin around the neck, from the head to the breast, has been pulled off, and the windpipe drawn from its place and snapped. The fowl house has been watched night and day, and, whenever examined, four or five birds would be found dead.”
In London, a woman sat asleep, near a grate, and something, as if taking advantage of this means of commonplace explanation, burned her, behind her. Perhaps a being, of incendiary appetite, had crept up behind her, but I had no data upon which so to speculate. But, if we accept that, at Binbrook Farm, something was savagely killing chickens, we accept that whatever we mean by a
being
was there. It seems that, in the little time taken by the farmer to put out the fire of the burning girl, she could not have been badly scorched. Then the suggestion is that, unknown to her, something behind her was burning her, and that she was unconscious of her own scorching flesh. All the stories are notable for absence of outcry, or seeming unconsciousness of victims that something was consuming them.
The town of Market Rasen is near Binbrook Farm. The address of the clergyman who reported, to the S.P.R., the fires and the slaughterings of chickens, upon the farm, is “Binbrook Rectory, Market Rasen.” Upon January 16th, as told in the
Louth and North Lincolnshire News,
January 21, there was, in a chicken house, at Market Rasen, a fire in which fifty-seven chickens were consumed. Perhaps a fire in a chicken house is not much of a circumstance to record, but I note that it is said that how this fire started could not be found out.
The girl of Binbrook Farm was taken to the Louth Hospital. In
Lloyd’s Weekly News,
February 5, there is an account of “mysterious burns.” It is the case of Ashton Clodd, a man aged seventy-five, who, the week before, had died in the Louth Hospital. It is said that he had fallen into a grate, while putting coals in it, and that, for some reason, probably because of his rheumatism, had been unable to rise, and had been fatally burned. But a witness at the inquest is quoted: “If there was a fire in the fireplace, it was very little.”
All around every place that we have noted, the revival was simmering, seething, or raging. In Leeds, women, who said that they were directed by visions, stood in the streets, stopping cars, trying to compel passengers to join them. A man in Tunbridge Wells, taking an exhortation literally, chopped his right hand off. “Holy dancers” appeared in London. At Driffield, someone led a procession every night, trundling his coffin ahead of him. And all this in England. And, in England, it is very much the custom to call attention to freaks and extravagances in other parts of the world, or more particularly in one other part of the world, as if only there occurred all the freaks and extravagances. Riots broke out in Liverpool, where the revivalists, with a mediaeval enthusiasm, attacked Catholics. The Liverpool City Council censured “certain so-called religious meetings, which create danger to life and property.” Also at south end, there were processions of shouters, from which rushed missionaries to slug Catholics, and to sling bricks at houses in which lived Catholics. In the
Liverpool Echo,
February 6, is quoted a magistrate, who said to a complainant, who, because of differences in a general doctrine of loving one’s neighbors, had been assaulted: “When you see one of these processions, you should run away, as you would from a mad bull.”
Upon all the occurrences that we have noted was the one enveloping phenomenon of the revival. There is scarcely a place that I have mentioned, in any of the accounts, that was unagitated.
Why is it that youngsters have so much to do with psychic phenomena? I have gone into that subject, according to my notions. Well, then, when a whole nation, or hosts of its people, goes primitive, or gives in to atavism, or reverts religiously, it may be that conditions arise that are susceptible to phenomena that are repelled by matured mentality. A hard-headed materialist says, dogmatically: “There are no occult phenomena.” Perhaps he is fight about this, relatively to himself. But what he says may not apply to children. When, at least to considerable degree, a nation goes childish with mediaevalism, it may bring upon itself an invasion of phenomena that in the middle ages were common, but that were discouraged, or alarmed, and were driven more to concealment, when minds grew up somewhat.
If we accept that there is Teleportation, and that there are occult beings, that is going so far that we may as well consider the notion that, to stop inquiry, a marauding thing, to divert suspicion, teleported from somewhere in Central Europe, a wolf to England: or that there may be something of the nature of an occult police force, which checks mischief and slaughter by the criminals of its kind, and takes teleportative means to remove suspicion—often solving one problem, only by making another, but relying upon conventionalizations of human thought to supply cloakery.
The killing of poultry—the body on the railroad line—stoppage—scene-shifting.
The killing of sheep—the body on the railroad line—stoppage—
Farm and Home,
March 16—that hardly had the wolf been killed, at Cumwinton, in the north of England, when farmers, in the south of England, especially in the districts between Tunbridge and Seven Oaks, Kent, began to tell of mysterious attacks upon their flocks. “Sometimes three or four sheep would be found dying in one flock, having in nearly every case been bitten in the shoulder and disemboweled. Many persons had caught sight of the animal, and one man had shot at it. The inhabitants were living in a state of terror, and so, on the first of March, a search party of sixty guns beat the woods, in an endeavor to put an end to the depredations.”
A big dog? Another
malmoot?
Nothing?
“This resulted in its being found and dispatched by one of Mr. R.K. Hodgson’s gamekeepers, the animal being pronounced, on examination, to be a jackal.” The story of the shooting of a jackal, in Kent, is told in the London newspapers. See the
Times,
March 2. There is no findable explanation, nor attempted explanation, of how the animal got there. Beyond the mere statement of the shooting, there is not another line upon this extraordinary appearance of an exotic animal in England, findable in any London newspaper. It was in provincial newspapers that I came upon more of this story.
Blyth News,
March 14—“The Indian jackal, which was killed recently, near Seven Oaks, Kent, after destroying sheep and game to the value of £100, is attracting attention in the shop windows of a Derby taxidermist.”
Derby Mercury,
March 15—that the body of this jackal was upon exhibition in the studio of Mr. A.S. Hutchinson, London Road, Derby.
15
In every organism, there are, in its governance as a whole, mysterious transportations of substances and forces, sometimes in definite, circulatory paths, and sometimes specially, for special needs. In the organic view, Teleportation is a distributive force that is acting to maintain the balances of a whole; with the seeming wastefulness sometimes, and niggardliness sometimes, of other forces: providing, or sometimes providing, new islands with vegetation, and new ponds with fishes: Edens with Adams, and Adams with Eves; always dwindling when other mechanisms become established, but surviving sporadically.
Our expression is that once upon a time, showers of little frogs were manifestations of organic intelligence, in the choice of creatures that could survive, in the greatest variety of circumstances, if indefinitely translated from place to place. They’d survive in water, or on land; in warmth, or in coldness. But, if organic intelligence is like other intelligence, there is no understanding it, except as largely stupid; and, if it keeps on sending little frogs to places where they’re not wanted, we human phenomena cheer up, thinking of the follies of Existence, itself. I have never done foolisher, myself, than did Nature when it, or she—probably she—fatally loaded the tusks of mammoths, and planted a tree on the head of the Irish elk, losing species for the sake of displays. By intelligence I mean nothing that can be thought of as exclusively residing in, or operating in, brain substance: I mean equilibration, or adaptation, which pervades all phenomena. The scientific intelligence in human brains, and the physiologic intelligence that pervades the bodies of living things, wisely foolishly acts to solve problems, and somewhere in the beauty of a theorem, or of a peacock, lurks the grotesque. When Nature satisfies us critics with such a graceful stroke as a swimming seal, she fumbles her seal on land.
But there is another view. We apologizing theologians always have another view. Cleverness and stupidity are relative, and what is said to be stupidity has functional value. To keep on sending little frogs, where, so far as can be seen, there is no need for little frogs, is like persistently, if not brutally, keeping right on teaching Latin and Greek, for instance. What’s that for? Most of the somewhat good writers know little of either. According to my experience, both of these studies, if at all extended, are of no active value, except to somebody who wants to write up to the highest and noblest standards of the past, and considers himself literary. But this is an expression upon the functions of stupidity. It is likely that showers of little frogs, and the vermiform appendix, and classical studies are necessary for the preservation of continuity between the past and the present. Some persons, who know nothing about it, must for ages go on piously believing in Sir Isaac Newton’s doctrine. People who go to fortune tellers and people who go to church are functioning conservatives. If the last platypus or the last churchgoer should die off, there would be broken continuity. It would be a crack in existence. Perhaps to this day, a chink is stuffed with iguanas, which are keeping alive the dinosaur strain. Why is it that, when one’s mind is not specializing upon anything, it is given to recalling past experiences? It is preserving continuity with the past, or is preserving whatever one can be thought of, as having, of identity. We shall have instances of the interruption of this process, in human minds. Perhaps if Existence should stop sending little frogs, and stop teaching Latin and Greek, a whole would be in a state of amnesia. Our expression is that Teleportation is enormously useful to life upon this earth, but our data have been, and for a while will continue to be, mostly of its vagaries, or its conservations.
If our existence is an organism, it would seem that it must be one of the most notorious old rascals in the cosmos. It is a fabric of lies. Everywhere it conjures up appearances of realness and finality and trueness—words that I use as synonyms for one state—and then, when examined, everything is found not to be real, or final, or true, but to be depending upon something else, or some other chimera, merging away, and losing its appearance of individuality, into everything else, or every other fraud. That this pseudo-individualizing may in some cases realize itself is a view that I am not taking up in this book. Here it is our concern to find out, if we think we can, whether we be the phenomena of an organism, or not. Whether that organism be producing something, or be graduating realness out of the phenomenal, is a question that I shall take up some other time.
Imposture pervades all things phenomenal. Everything is a mirage. Nevertheless, accepting that there is continuity, I cannot accept that anybody ever has been an absolute impostor. If he’s a Tichborne Claimant, after a while he thinks that there may be some grounds for his claims. If good and evil are continuous, any crime can be linked with any virtue. Imposture merges away into self-deception so that only relatively has there ever been an impostor.
Every scientist who has played a part in any developing science has, as can be shown, if he’s been dead long enough, by comparing his views with more modern views, deceived himself. But there have been cases that look more flagrant. To what degree did Haeckel doctor illustrations in his book, to make a theory work out right? What must one think of Prof. Kammerer? In August, 1926, he was accused of faking what he called acquired characters on the feet of toads. In September, he shot himself. The only polite way of explaining Prof. Smyth, Astronomer Royal of Scotland, who founded a cult upon his measurements of the Great Pyramid, is to say that his measuring rod must have slipped. If in his calculations, Prof. Einstein made the error that two distinguished mathematicians say he made, but, if eclipses came out, as they should come out, as reported by astronomers who did not know of the error, there is very good encouragement for anybody to keep on deceiving himself.
I can draw no line between imposture and self-deception. I can draw no line between anything phenomenal and anything else phenomenal, even though I accept that also there are lines. But there are scientists who have deceived others so rankly that it seems an excess of good manners to say that also they deceived themselves. If among scientists there have been instances of rank imposture, we shall expect to come upon much imposture in our data of irresponsible persons. The story told by Prof. Martino-Fusco, of Naples, when, in August, 1924, he announced that he had discovered the 109 missing volumes of Livy’s
History of Rome,
is not commonly regarded as imposture, because when the Professor could not produce the missing volumes, his explanation that he had been indiscreet was published and accepted. This scientist’s indiscretion was glossed over, as in the time of full power of the preceding orthodoxy, the indiscretion of any priest was hushed up. The impression went abroad that all that was wrong was that the Professor had been too ardent, or so hopeful of finding the books that prematurely he had announced having found them. But there are other impressions. They are of credulous American millionaires, and of the unexpected interest that the Italian Government showed in the matter.
What about the other professors, who told that they had seen the volumes? See
Current Literature,
77-594. Here is published a
facsimile
of four lines, which Dr. Max Funcke said that he had copied from one of the manuscripts, which according to Prof. Fusco’s explanation, he had only hoped to find. I can find no explanation by Dr. Funcke.
One explanation is that perhaps there was not forgery, and that perhaps the volumes were found, and by evasion of representatives of the Italian Government, are in the collection of a silent, American millionaire, today. But I do not think that collectors care much for treasures that they can’t tell about.
The tale of an itch—Dr. Grimme and the inscribed stone—and the irritation it was to a pious Professor, until he was able to translate it, as it should be translated. In the year 1923, Dr. Grimme, Professor of Semitic Languages, at the University of Munich, sent out good cheer to the faithful. God, who had been doing poorly, got a boost. Dr. Grimme announced that, from an inscribed stone, which had been discovered in a temple, at Sinai, he had deciphered the story of the rescue of the infant Moses, from the Nile, by an Egyptian Princess.
London
Observer,
Oct. 25, 1925—a letter from Sir Flinders Petrie—that Dr. Grimme had made his translation by adding cracks in the stone, and some of its weather marks, to the hieroglyphics—that, in one division of the inscription he had “translated” as many scratches as he had veritable characters, to make the thing come out right.
If Dr. Grimme alleviated an itch with scratches, that is the temporary way by which problems always have been said to be solved.
Only to be phenomenal is to be at least questionable. Any scientist who claims more is trying to register divinity. If Life cannot be positively differentiated from anything else, the appearance of Life itself is deception. If, in mentality, there is no absolute dividing line between intellectuality and imbecility, all wisdom is partly idiocy. The seeker of wisdom departs more and more from the state of the idiot, only to find that he is returning. Belief after belief fades from his mind: so his goal is the juncture of two obliterations. One is of knowing nothing, and the other is of knowing that there is nothing to know.
But here are we, at present not so wise as no longer to have ideas. Suppose we accept that anything phenomenal ever has developed, though only relatively, into considerable genuineness, or a good deal of a look of genuineness, so long as it is not examined. But it began in what we call fraudulency. Everybody who can exceptionally do anything, began with a pose, with false claims, and with extreme self-deception. Our expression is that, in human affairs, rank imposture is often a sign of incipiency, or that astrologers, alchemists, and spiritualistic mediums are forerunners of what we shall have to call
values,
if we can no longer believe in
truths.
It could be that, with our data, we tell of nothing but lies, and at the same time be upon the track of future values.
Snails, little frogs, seals, reindeer have mysteriously appeared.
The standardized explanation of mysterious human strangers, who have appeared at points upon this earth, acting as one supposes inhabitants of some other world would act, if arriving here, or acting as inhabitants of other parts of this earth, transported in a state of profound hypnosis, would probably act, is that of imposture. Having begun with a pretty liberal view of the prevalence of impostors, I am not going much to say that the characters of our data were not impostors, but am going to examine the reasons for saying that they were. If, except fraudulently, some of them never have been explained conventionally, we are just where we are in everything else that we take up, and that is in the position of having to pretend to think for ourselves.
The earliest of the alleged impostors in my records—for which, though not absolutely, I draw a dead line at the year 1800—is the
Princess Caraboo,
if not Mary Willcocks, though possibly Mrs. Mary Baker, but perhaps Mrs. Mary Burgess, who, the evening of April 3, 1817, appeared at the door of a cottage, near Bristol, England, and in an unknown language asked for food.
But I am not so much interested in whether the
Princess,
or Mary, was a rascal, as I am in the reasons for saying that she was. It does not matter whether we take up a theorem in celestial mechanics, or the case of a girl who jabbered, we come upon the bamboozlements by which conventional thought upon this earth is made and preserved.
The case of the angles in a triangle that equal two right angles has never been made out: no matter what refinements of measurement would indicate, ultra-refinement would show that there had been errors. Because of continuity, and because of discontinuity, nothing has ever been proved. If only by making a very bad error to start with, Prof. Einstein’s prediction of the curvature of lights worked out as it should work out, we suspect, before taking up the case of the
Princess Caraboo
that the conventional conclusion in her case was a product of mistakes.
That the
Princess Caraboo
was an impostor—first we shall take up the case, as it has been made out:
London
Observer,
June 10, 1923—that the girl, who spoke unintelligibly, was taken before a magistrate, Samuel Worrall, of Knowle Park, Bristol, who, instead of committing her as a vagrant, took her to his home. It is not recorded just what Mrs. Worrall thought of that. It is recorded that the girl was at least what is said to be “not unprepossessing.” When questioned, the “mysterious stranger” wrote in unknown characters, many of which looked like representations of combs. Newspaper correspondents interviewed her. She responded with a fluency of “combs,” and a smattering of “bird cages” and “frying pans.” The news spread, and linguists traveled far to try their knowledge, and finally one of them was successful. He was “a gentleman from the East Indies,” and, speaking in the Malay language to the girl, he was answered. To him she told her story. Her name was
Caraboo,
and one day while walking in her garden in Java, she was seized by pirates, who carried her aboard a vessel, from which, after a long imprisonment, she escaped to the coast of England. The story was colorful with details of Javanese life. But then Mrs. Willcocks, not of Java, but of a small town in Devonshire, appeared and identified her daughter, Mary. Mary broke down and confessed. She was not prosecuted for her imposture: instead, Mrs. Worrall was so kind as to pay her passage to America.
Mostly our concern is in making out that this case was not made out—or, more widely, that neither this nor any other case ever has been made out—but I notice a little touch of human interest entering here. I notice that we feel a disappointment, because Mary broke down and confessed. We much prefer to hear of impostors who stick to their impostures. If no absolute line can be drawn between morality and immorality, I can show, if I want to, that this touch of rascality in all of us—or at any rate in me—is a virtuous view, instead. So when an impostor sticks to his imposture, and we are pleased, it is that we approve a resolutely attempted consistency, even when applied to a fabric of lies.