by Charles Fort
The gap, or the supposed gap, is the difference, or the supposed, absolute difference, between the imagined and the physical.
Or, for instance, the disappearance of Ambrose Small of Toronto—and it was just about what his secretary, who had embezzled from him, probably wished for, probably unaware that an inventory would betray him. A picturization, in the secretary’s mind, of his employer, shooting away to Patagonia, to Franz Josef Land, or to the moon—so far away that he could never get back—but could the imagined realize? Or why didn’t I keep track, in the newspapers of December, 1919, for mention of the body of a man, washed up on a beach of Java, scarcely decipherable papers in the pockets indicating that the man was a Canadian? Are the so-called asteroids bodies of people who have been witched away into outer space?
Rose Smith—that when she was released from prison, her visualizations crept up behind her former employer, and killed him? According to some viewpoints, I might as well try to think of a villain, in a moving picture, suddenly jumping from the screen, and attacking people in the audience. I haven’t tried that, yet.
Case of Emma Piggott—and the fires in the home of her employers were just about what the girl, alarmed by the greediness of her thefts, may have wished for. Also there are data that may mean that, because of experiences unknown to anybody else, this girl knew that, from a distance, she could start fires.
There is an appearance of affinity between the Piggott case and the fires in the house in Bedford. There was a sulphur fire that was ordinary. It was followed by a series of fires that were, at least according to impressions in Bedford, extraordinary. In no terms of physics, nor of chemistry, was an explanation possible; yet investigators felt that a relationship of some kind did exist. The relationship may have existed in the mind of Anne Fennimore. After the sulphur fire had been put out, she may have started fearing fires, especially in the absence of the only male member of the household. Her fear may have realized.
Story of the Colwell girl—here, too, fires in a house seem to have related to a girl’s mental state—or that the fires were related to her desire to move to another house. Having the not uncommon experience of learning how persuasive are police captains, she “listened to advice,” and confessed to effects, in terms of ordinary incendiarism, though, according to reports by firemen and policemen, some of the fires could not have been produced by flipping lighted matches.
In the case of Jennie Bramwell, there is no knowing what were the feelings of this girl, who had been “adopted,” probably to do hard farmwork. If she, too, had nascently the fire-inducing power, which manifested under the influence of desire, or emotion, I think of her, in the midst of drudgery, wishing destruction upon the property of her exploiters, and fires following. At any rate, the story of the little Barnes girl, which quite equals anything from the annals of demonology, is very suggestive—or the smolder of hate, in the mind of a child, for an exploiter—and flames leaped upon a woman.
There is a particular in the case of Emma Piggott that makes it different from the other cases. In the other cases, fires broke out in the presence of girls. But, according to evidence, Emma Piggott was not in the house wherein started the fires for which she was accused. Then this seems to be a case of distance-ignition, or of distance-witchcraft. I’d not say that invisibly starting a fire, at a distance, by means of mental rays, is any more mysterious than is the shooting-off of distant explosives by means of rays called physical, which nobody understands.
I am bringing out:
That, as a “natural force,” there is a fire-inducing power;
That, mostly, it appears, independently of wishes, or of the knowledge, of the subjects, but that sometimes, conformably to wishes, it is used—
That everything that I call witchcraft is only some special manifestation of transformations, or transportations, that, in various manifestations, are general throughout “Nature.”
The “accidents” on the Dartmoor road—or that somewhere near this road lived a cripple. That his mind had shaped to his body—or that somewhere near this road lived somebody who had been injured by a motor car, and lay on his bed, or sat in his invalid’s chair, and radiated against the nearby road a hate for all motorists, sometimes with a ferocity, or with a directness, that knocked cars to destruction.
Or Brooklyn, April 10, 1893—see back to the supposed series of coincidences—man after man injured by falling from a high place, or being struck by a falling object—or that somewhere in Brooklyn was somebody who had been crippled by a fall, and, brooding over what he considered a monstrous injustice that had so singled him out, radiated influences that similarly injured others.
See back to the account of what occurred to French aeroplanes, flying over German territory. Tracks in the sands of a desert. Occurrences, about Christmas Day, 1930, in Sing Sing and Dannemora Prisons—or a prisoner in a punishment cell—and nothing to do in the dark, except to concentrate upon vengefulness. I think that sometimes, coming from dungeons, there are stinks of hates that can be smelled. It was a time that for almost everybody else was a holiday.
Tracks that stopped, in a desert—or the tracks of a child that stopped, on a farm, in Brittany—the story of Pauline Picard:
Or the hate of a neighbor for the Picards, and vengeance by teleporting their offspring—the finding of Pauline in Cherbourg—again her disappearance—
That this time the body of the child was mutilated and stripped, so that it could not be identified, and was transported to some lonely place, where it decomposed—
But a change of purpose, or a vengefulness that required that the parents should know—transportation to the field, of this body, which probably could not be identified—transportation of the “neatly folded!” clothes, so that it could be identified.
In the matter of the two bodies on benches in a Harlem park, I have another datum. I think I have. The dates of June 14 and June 16 are close together and Mt. Morris Park and Morningside Park are not far apart—
Or a man who lived in Harlem, in June, 1931—and that he was a park bencher—about whom I can say nothing except that his trousers were blue, and that his hat was gray. Something may have sapped him, pursued him, driven him into vagrancy—
But that he probably had the sense of localization, as to benches that everybody has in so many ways, such as going to the same seat or as near as possible to the same seat, upon every visit to a moving picture theater—that every morning he had sat on a particular bench, in Mt. Morris Park—
But that, upon the morning of June 14th, because of a whim, suspicion, or intuitive fear, he went to Morningside Park instead—
That somebody else sat on his particular bench—that there occurred something that was an intensification of the experiences of John Harding and another man, when crossing Fifth Avenue, at Thirty-Third Street—to the man who was sitting on this particular bench, and to another man upon a nearby bench—
But that, two days later, the trail of the intended victim was picked up—
Home News (Bronx) June 17, 1931—that in Morningside Park, morning of the 16th, a policeman noticed a man—blue trousers and gray hat—seemingly asleep on a bench. The man was dead. “Heart failure.”
At a time of intensely bitter revolts by coal miners against their hardships, there were many coal explosions, but in grates and stoves, and not in shipments. No finding of dynamite in coal was reported. If in coal there is storage of radiations from the sun, coal may be absorbent to other kinds of radiations—or a savagely vengeful miner’s hope for future harm in every lump he handled. If, in the house in Hornsey, there were not only coal explosions, but also poltergeist doings, we note that these phenomena occurred only in the presence of the two boys of the household—or especially one of these boys. Between the occultism of adolescence and the occultism of lumps of coal, surcharged with hatreds, there may have been rapport.
That, somewhere near the town of Saltdean, Sussex, September, 1924, somebody hated a shepherd, and stopped the lif
e of him, as have been stopped the motions of motors—and that the place remained surcharged with malign vibrations that affected somebody else, who came along, in a sidecar. The wedding party at Bradford—and the gaiety of weddings is sometimes the bubbling of vitriol—or that, from a witch, or a wizard, so made by jealousy, mental fumes played upon this house, and spread to other houses. At the same time, there are data that make me think that volumes of deadly gases may be occultly transported. And a young couple, walking along a shore of .the Isle of Man—that, from a state of jealousy, witchery flung them into the harbor, and that somebody who stepped into the area of this influence was knocked after them. See back to the story of a room in a house in Newton, Massachusetts. See other cases of “mass psychology.” See a general clearing up—
If I can bridge the gap between the subjective and the objective, between what is called the real and what is called the unreal, or between the imaginary and the physical.
When, in our philosophy of the hyphen, we think of neither the material nor the immaterial, but of the material-immaterial, accentuated one way or the other in all phenomena; when we think of the imaginary, as deriving from material sustenance, or, instead of transforming absolutely, only shifting accentuation, we accept that there is continuity between what is called the real and what is called the unreal, so that a passage from one state to the other is across no real gap, or is no absolute jump. If there is no realness that can be finally set apart from unrealness—in phenomenal being—my term of the “realization of the imaginary,” though a convenience is a misnomer. Maybe the word transmediumization, meaning the passage of phenomena from one medium of existence to another, is not altogether too awkward, and is long and important-enough-looking to give me the appearance of really saying something. I mean the imposition of the imaginary upon the physical. I mean, not the action of mind upon matter, but the action of mind-matter upon matter-mind.
Theoretically there is no gap. But very much mine are inductive methods. We shall have data. Not that I can more than really-unreally mean anything by that. The interpretations will be mine, but the data will be for anybody to form his own opinions upon.
Granting that the gap has not been disposed of, inductively, I reduce it to two questions:
Can one’s mind, as I shall call it, affect one’s own body, as I shall call it?
If so, that is personal witchcraft or internal witchcraft. Can one’s mind affect the bodies of other persons and other things outside?
If so, that is what I shall call external witchcraft.
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Hates and malices—murderous radiations from human minds—
Or the flashes and roars of a thunderstorm—
And there has been the equivalence of picking strokes of lightning out of the sky, and harnessing them to a job.
A house afire—or somebody boils an egg.
Devastation or convenience—
Or what of it, if I bridge a gap?
I take it that the story of Marjory Quirk is only an extreme instance of cases of internal, or personal, witchcraft that, today, are commonly accepted. London Daily Express, Oct. 3, 1911—inquest upon the body of Marjory Quirk, daughter of the Bishop of Sheffield. The girl had been ill of melancholia. In a suicidal impulse she drank, from a cup, what she believed to be paraffin. She was violently sick. She died. “There had been no paraffin in the cup. There was no trace of it in her mouth or throat.”
New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 30, 1932—Boston, Jan. 29—“Nearly half a hundred students and physicians living in Vanderbilt Hall of the Harvard Medical School have experienced mild cases of what apparently was paratyphoid it was learned today. The first thirty of the group fell ill two weeks ago, following a fraternity dinner at which Dr. George H. Bigelow, state health commissioner, discussed ‘food poisoning.’ A few days later twenty more men reported themselves ill. The food was prepared at the hall.
“Today state health officers started an examination of kitchen help in the belief that one of the employees may be a typhoid carrier. College authorities said they did not believe the food itself was at fault, but were inclined to think the subject of Dr. Bigelow’s address may have influenced some of the diners to diagnose mere gastronomic disturbances more seriously. All of the students have recovered.”
To say that fifty young men had gastronomic disturbances is to say much against conditions of health in the Harvard Medical School. To say that the subject of illness may have induced illness is to say that there was personal, or internal, witchcraft, usually called auto-suggestion. See back to “Typhoid Mary” and other probable victims of carrier-finders. To say that there may have been a carrier among the kitchen help is to attribute to him, and is to say that it was only by coincidence that illnesses occurred after a talk upon illnesses. It’s a hell of a way, anyway, to have dinner with a lot of young men, and talk to them about food poisoning. Hereafter, Dr. Bigelow may have to buy his own dinners. If he tells shark stories, while bathing, he’ll do lonesome swimming.
Physiologists deny that fright can turn one’s hair white. They argue that they cannot conceive how a fright could withdraw the pigmentation from hairs: so they conclude that all alleged records of this phenomenon are yarns. Say it’s a black-haired person. The physiologists, except very sketchily, cannot tell us how that hair became black in the first place. Somewhere, all the opposition to the data of this book is because the data are not in agreement with something that is not known.
There have been many alleged instances. See the indexes of Notes and Queries, series 6, 7, 10. I used to argue that Queen Marie Antoinette’s deprivation of cosmetics, in prison, probably accounted for her case. Now that my notions have shifted, that cynicism has lost its force to me. Mostly the instances of hair turning white, because of fright, are antiques and can’t be investigated now. But see the New York Times, Feb. 8, 1932:
Story of the sinking of a fishing schooner, by the Belgian steamship, Jean Jadot—twenty-one members of the crew drowned—six of them saved, among them Arthur Burke, aged fifty-two.
“Arthur Burke’s hair was streaked with gray before the collision, but was quite gray when Burke landed yesterday at Pier 2, Erie Basin.”
It may be that there have been thousands, or hundreds of thousands of cases in which human beings have died in violent convulsions that were the products of beliefs—and that, also, merciful, but expensive, science has saved a multitude of lives with a serum that has induced contrary beliefs—just as that serum, if injected into the veins of somebody suffering under the oppressive pronouncement that twice two are four, could be his salvation by inducing a belief that twice two are purple, if he should want so to be affected—
Or what has become of hydrophobia?
In the New York Telegram, Nov. 26, 1929, was published a letter from Gustave Stryker quoting Dr. Mathew Woods of Philadelphia, a member of the Philadelphia County Medical Society. Dr. Woods had better look out, unless he’s aiming at cutting down expenses, such as dues to societies. Said Dr. Woods: “We have observed with regret numerous sensational stories concerning alleged mad dogs and the terrible results to human beings bitten by them, which are published from time to time in the newspapers.
“Such accounts frighten people into various disorders, and cause brutal treatment of animals suspected of madness, and yet there is on record a great mass of testimony from physicians asserting the great rarity of hydrophobia even in the dog, while many medical men of wide experience are of the opinion that if it develops in human beings at all it is only upon extremely rare occasions, and that the condition of hysterical excitement in man, described by newspapers as ‘hydrophobia,’ is merely a series of symptoms due usually to the dread of the disease, such a dread being caused by realistic newspapers and other reports, acting upon the imaginations of persons scratched or bitten by animals suspected of rabies.
“At the Philadelphia dog pound, where on an average more than 6,000 vagrant dogs are taken annually and where the catchers and keepers are
frequently bitten while handling them, not one case of hydrophobia has occurred during its entire history of twenty-five years, in which time, about 150,000 have been handled.”
My own attention was first attracted long ago when I noticed, going over files of newspapers, the frequency of reported cases of hydrophobia, a generation or so ago, and the fewness of such reports in the newspapers of later times. Dogs are muzzled now—in streets, in houses they’re not. Vaccines, or powdered toads, caught at midnight in graveyards would probably cure many cases, but would not reduce the number of cases in dogs if there ever have been cases of hydrophobia in dogs.
In the New York Times, July 4, 1931, was published a report by M. Roeland, of the Municipal Council of Paris: “It will be noticed that rabies has almost entirely disappeared, although the number of dogs has increased. From 166,917 dogs in Paris in 1924, the number had risen, in 1929, to 230,674. In spite of this marked increase, only ten cases of rabies in animals were observed. There were no cases of rabies in man.”
Sometimes it is my notion that there never has been a case of hydrophobia, as anything but an instance of personal witchcraft: but there are so many data for thinking that a disease in general is very much like an individual case of the disease, in that it runs its course and then disappears—quite independently of treatment, whether by the poisoned teat of a cow or the dried sore of a mummy—that I suspect that once upon a time there was, to some degree, hydrophobia. When I was a boy, pitted faces were common. What has become of smallpox? Where are yellow fever and cholera? I’m not supposed to answer my own questions, am I? But serums, say the doctors. But there are enormous areas in the Americas and Europe, where vaccines have never penetrated. But they did it, say the doctors.
Eclipses occur, and savages are frightened. The medicine men wave wands—the sun is cured—they did it. The story of diseases reads like human history—the rise and fall of Black Death—and the appearance and rule of Smallpox—the Tubercular Empire—and the United Afflictions of Yellow Fever and Cholera. Some of them passed away before serums were thought of, and in times when sanitation was unpopular. Several hundred years ago there was a leper’s house in every good-sized city in England. A hundred years ago there had not been much of what is called improvement in medicine and sanitation, but leprosy had virtually disappeared in England. Possibly the origin of leprosy in England was in personal witchcraft—or that if the Bible had never devastated England, nobody there would have had the idea of leprosy—that when wicked doubts arose, the nasty suspicions of people made them clean.
