The Elliott O’Donnell Supernatural Megapack

by Elliott O'Donnell

  So writes Mrs. Crowe, and I quote the case in support of my argument that sheep, like horses, cats, dogs and all other kinds of animals, possess spirits, and consequently have a future state of existence.

  I have not yet experimented with sheep, goats, or pigs, but I do not doubt but that they are more or less sensitive to superphysical influences, and possess the psychic faculty of scenting the Unknown—though not, perhaps, in so great a degree as any of the other animals I have enumerated.

  [1] I have subsequently met several people who experienced the same phenomena in the house, which was standing a short time ago.

  ANIMAL GHOSTS, PART II

  WILD ANIMALS AND THE UNKNOWN

  CHAPTER V

  WILD ANIMALS AND THE UNKNOWN

  Apes

  The following case of animal hauntings was recorded in automatic writing:—

  “I sank wearily into my easy chair before the fire, which burned with a fitful and sullen glow in the tiny grate of my one room—bare and desolate as only the room of an unsuccessful author can be.

  “My condition was pitiable. For the past twelve months I had not earned a cent, and of my small capital there now remained but two pounds to ward the hound of starvation from my door. In the moonlight I could perceive all the bareness of the apartment. Would to God Fancy would ride to me on this moonbeam and give me inspiration! ‘Twas indeed weird—this silver ethereal path connecting the moon with the earth, and the more I gazed along it, the more I wished to leave my body and escape to the star-lighted vaults. Certainly, from a conversation I had once had with a member of the New Occult Society, I believed it possible by concentrating all the mental activities in one channel, so to overcome the barriers which prevent the soul visiting scenes of the ethereal world, as to pass materialized to the spot upon which the ideas are fixed. But although I had essayed—how many times I do not like to confess—to gain that amount of concentration necessary for the separation of the soul from the body, up to the present all my attempts had been fruitless. Doubtless there had been a something—too minute even for definition—that had interrupted my self-abstraction—a something that had wrecked my venture, just when I felt it to be on the verge of completion. And was it likely that now, when my ideas were misty and vague, I should be more successful? I wanted to quit the cruel bonds of nature and be free—free to roam and ramble. But where?

  “At length, as I gazed into the moonlight, I lost all cognizance of the objects around me, and my eyes became fixed on the mountains of the moon, which I discovered, with a start, were no longer specks. I found, to my amazement, I had left my body and was careering swiftly through space—infinite space. The range opened up in front of me, spreading out far and wide, winding, black and awful—their solemn grandeur lost in that terrible desolation which makes the moon appear like a hideous nightmare. I could see with amazing clearness the sides of the mountains; there were enormous black fissures, some of them hundreds of feet in width—and the more I gazed the more impressed I grew with the silence. There was no life. There were no seas, no lakes, no trees, no grass, no sighing nor moaning of the wind, nothing to remind me of the earth I now found to my terror I had actually quitted. Everything around me was black—the sky, the mountains, the vast pits, the dried-up mouths of which gaped dismally.

  “With the movements of a man in a fit, I essayed to hinder the finis of my mad plunge. I waved my limbs violently, kicking out and shrieking in the agonies of fear. I cursed and prayed, wept and laughed alternately, did everything, yet nothing, that could save me from contact with the lone desert so horribly close. Nearer and nearer I approached, until at last my feet rested on the hard caked soil. For the first few minutes after my arrival I was too overwhelmed with fear to do other than remain stationary. The ground beneath my feet swarmed with myriads of foul and long-legged insects, things with unwieldy pincers and protruding eyes; things covered with scaly armour; hybrids of beetles and scorpions. I have a distinct recollection of one huge-jointed centipede making a vicious grab at my leg; he failed to make his teeth meet in anything tangible, and emitting a venomous hiss disappeared in a circular pit.

  “Whilst I was the victim of this insect’s ferocity the horizon had become darkened by the shadowy outline of an enormous apish form. I wanted to run away, but could not, and was compelled, sorely against my will, to witness its approach. Never shall I forget the agonies of doubt I endured during its advance. No man in a tiger’s den, nor deer tied to a tree awaiting its destroyer, could have suffered more than I did then, and my terror increased tenfold when I recognized in the monster—Neppon—a young gorilla that had been under my charge and had given me no end of trouble when I was head keeper in the Zoological Gardens at Berne.

  “I never hated anything so much as I had hated that baboon. At my hands it had undergone a thousand subtle torments. I had pinched it, poked it, pulled its hair, frightened it by putting on masks and making all sorts of queer noises, and finally I had secretly poisoned it. And now we stood face to face without any bars between us. Never shall I forget the look of intense satisfaction in its hideous eyes, as its gaze encountered mine.

  “In that strange forlorn world we faced each other; I, the tyrant once, now the quarry. In the wildness of its glee it capered about like a mad thing, executing the most exaggerated antics that augmented my terror. Every second I anticipated an assault, and the knowledge of my fears lent additional fierceness to its gambols. A sudden change in my attitude at length made it cease. The use had returned to my limbs; my muscles were quivering, and before it could stop me I had fled! The wildest of chases then ensued. I ran with a speed that would have shamed a record-beater on earth. With extraordinary nimbleness I vaulted over titanic boulders of rocks; jumped across dykes of infinite depth, scurried like lightning over tracts of rough, lacerating ground, and never for one instant felt like flagging.

  “Suddenly, to my horror, I came to an abrupt standstill, and the cry of some hunted animal burst from my lips. Unwittingly I had run against a huge wall of granite, and escape was now impossible. Again and again I clawed the hard rock, until the skin hung in shreds from my fingers, and the blood pattered on the dark soil, that in all probability had never tasted moisture before. All this amused my pursuer vastly; it watched with the leisure of one who knows its fish will be landed in safety, and there suddenly came to me, through my olfactory nerves, a knowledge that it was speaking to me in the language of scents—the language I never understood till now was the language of all animals.

  “‘Reach, a little higher,’ it said; ‘there are niches up there, and you must stretch your limbs. Ha! ha! Do you remember how you used to make me stretch mine? You do! Well, you needn’t shiver. Explain to me how it is I find you here.’

  “‘I cannot comprehend,’ I gasped with a gesticulation that was grotesque.

  “The great beast laughed in my face. ‘How so?’ it queried. ‘You used to quibble me upon my dull wits; must I now return the compliment? Ha! There’s blood on your hands. Blood! I will lick it up.’ And with a mocking grin it advanced.

  “‘Keep off! Keep off!’ I shouted. ‘My God, will this dream never cease?’

  “‘The dream, as you call it,’ the gorilla jeered, ‘has only just begun; the climax of your horrors has yet to come. If you cannot tell me the purport of your visit I will tell you mine. Can your lordship spare the time to listen?’

  “I gave no answer. I clutched the wall and uttered incoherent cries like some frightened madman.

  “The gorilla felt the muscles in its hairy fingers, and showed its huge teeth. I looked eagerly at my enemy.

  “‘Come, you haven’t yet guessed my riddle; you are dull to-night,’ it said lightly. ‘That old wine of yours made you sleep too soundly. Don’t let me disturb you. I will explain. This moon is now my home—I share it with the spirits of all the animals and insects that were once
on your earth. And now that we are free from such as you—free to wander anywhere we like without fear of being shot, or caught and caged—we are happy. And what makes us still happier is the knowledge that the majority of men and women will never have a joyous after-state like ours. They will be earth-bound in that miserable world of theirs, and compelled to keep to their old haunts, scaring to death with their ugly faces all who have the misfortune to see them. There is another fate in store for you, however. Do you know what it is?’

  “It paused. No sound other than that occasioned by his bumping on the soil broke the impressive hush.

  “‘Do you know?’ it said again. ‘Well, I will tell you. I’m going to kill you right away, so that your spirit—it’s all nonsense to talk about souls, such as you have no soul—will be earth-bound here—here for ever—and will be a perpetual source of amusement to all of us animal ghosts.’

  “It then began to jabber ferociously, and, crouching down, prepared to spring.

  “‘For Heaven’s sake,’ I shrieked, ‘for Heaven’s sake.’

  “But I might as well have appealed to the wind. It had no sense of mercy.

  “‘He, he!’ it screamed. ‘What a joke—what a splendid joke. Your wit never seems to degenerate, Hugesson! I’m wondering if you will be as funny when you’re a ghost. Get ready. I’m coming, coming,’ and as the sky deepened to an awe-inspiring black, and the stars grew larger, brighter, fiercer; and the great lone deserts appealed to me with a force unequalled before, it sprang through the air.

  “A singing in my ears and a great bloody mist rose before my eyes. The wailing and screeching of a million souls was borne in loud protracted echoings through the drum of my ears. Men and women with evil faces rose up from crag and boulder to spit and tear at me. I saw creatures of such damning ugliness that my soul screamed aloud with terror. And then from the mountain tops the bolt of heaven was let loose. Every spirit was swept away like chaff before the burst of wind that, hurling and shrieking, bore down upon me. I gave myself up for lost. I felt all the agonies of suffocation, my lungs were torn from my palpitating body; my legs wrenched round in their sockets; my feet whirled upwards in that gust of devilish air. All—excruciating, damning pain—and pro tempore—I knew no more.”

  * * * *

  N.B.—It was subsequently ascertained, by my friend the late Mr. Supton, that a man named Hugesson, who had been for a short time head keeper at the Zoological Gardens, had been found dead, in bed, by his landlady, with a look on his face so awful that she had fled shrieking from the room. The death was, of course, attributed to syncope, but my friend—who, by the way, had never heard of Hugesson before he received the foregoing account through the medium of planchette—told me, and I agreed with him, that from similar cases that had come within his experience, it was most probable that Hugesson had in reality projected himself, and had perished in the manner described.

  No more improbable than the above story is that sent me by my old school friend Martin Tristram, who died last year.

  I style it “The Case of Martin Tristram.” It is reproduced from a magazine published some three years ago.

  After Martin Tristram once took up spiritualism his visits to me became most erratic, and I not only never knew when to expect him, but I was not always sure, when he did come, that it was he.

  This sounds extraordinary—to see a man is assuredly to recognize him! Not always—by no means always!

  There are circumstances in which a man loses his identity, when his “ego” is supplanted by another ego, when he ceases to be himself, and assumes an individuality which is entirely different from himself.

  This is undoubtedly the case in madness, imbecility, epilepsy, so-called total loss of memory through cerebral injury, hypnotism, sometimes in projection when the astral body gets detained, and also not infrequently in investigating peculiar instances of psychic phenomena.

  But if the astral body has been evicted from its carnal home, whither has it gone? and what is the nature of the thing that has taken its place?

  Ah! These are indeed puzzles—puzzles I am devoting a lifetime to solve.

  There have been moments when unseen hands have gradually begun to pull aside the obscuring veil, when the identity of the usurping spirit has seemed on the verge of being disclosed to me, and I have been about to be initiated into the greatest and most zealously guarded of all secrets.

  There have been times, I say, when my occult researches have actually brought me to this climax; but up to the present I have invariably been disappointed—the curtain has suddenly fallen, the esoteric ego has shrunk into its shell, and the mystery surrounding it has remained impenetrable.

  This is but one, albeit perhaps the most striking, of the many methods through which the superphysical endeavours to get in immediate contact with the physical.

  I was unpleasantly reminded of it when Martin Tristram’s carnal body came to visit me one night several years ago. I was aware that it was not Tristram. His mannerisms were the same, his voice had not altered; but there was an expression in his eyes that told of a very different spirit from Martin’s dwelling within that body.

  The night being cold, he closed the door carefully, and crossing the room to where I sat by the fire, threw himself in an easy chair, and gazed meditatively at me.

  My rooms in Bloomsbury were not lonely. They had more than their share of “brawling brats” on either side; there were no gloomy recesses or ghost-suggestive cupboards, and I never once experienced in them the slightest apprehension of sudden superphysical manifestations, yet I cannot help saying that as I met that glance from the pseudo-Tristram’s eyes I felt my flesh begin to creep.

  He sat for so long in silence that I began to wonder if he ever meant to speak.

  “The secret of success in seeing certain classes of apparitions,” he said at length, “to a very great extent lies in sympathy. Sympathy! And now for my story. I will tell it to you in the ‘third person.’”

  I looked at Tristram’s face in dismay. “The third person!”

  “Yes, the third person,” he gravely rejoined, “and under the circumstances the only person. You see it is now close on midnight.”

  I looked at the clock. Great heavens! What he said was correct. A whole evening had slipped by without my knowledge. He would, of course, have to stay the night. I suggested it to him.

  “My dear fellow,” he replied, with an odd smile, “don’t worry about me. I am not dependent on any trains. I shall be home by two o’clock.”

  I shivered—a draught of cold air had in all probability stolen through the cracks of the ill-fitting window-frames.

  “You have on one of your queer moods, Martin,” I expostulated. “To be home by two o’clock you must fly! But proceed—at all costs, the story.”

  Tristram raised an eyebrow, a true sign that something of special interest would follow.

  “You know Bruges?” he began.

  I nodded.

  “Very well, then,” he went on. “Exactly a week ago Martin Tristram arrived there from Antwerp. The hour was late, the weather boisterous, Tristram was tired, and any lodging was better than none.

  “Hailing a four-wheeler, he asked the Jehu to drive him to some decent hostel where the sheets were clean and the tariff moderate; and the fellow, gathering up the reins, took him at a snail’s pace to a mediæval-looking tavern in La Rue Croissante. You remember that street? Perhaps not! It is quite a back street, extremely narrow, very tortuous, and miserably lighted with a few gas-lamps of the usual antique Belgian order.

  “Tristram was too tired, however, to be fastidious; he felt he could lie down and go to sleep anywhere, and what scruples he might have had were entirely dissipated by the appearance of the charming girl who answered the door.

  “It is not expedient to dwell upon her—she plays a very
minor part, if, indeed, any, in the story. Martin Tristram merely thought her pretty, and that, as I have said, fully reconciled him to taking up his quarters in the house.

  “He has, as you are doubtless aware, a weakness for vivid colouring, and her bright yellow hair, carmine lips, and scarlet stockings struck him impressively as she led the way to his bed-chamber, where she somewhat reluctantly parted from him with a subtly attractive smile.

  “Left to himself, Martin sleepily examined his surroundings. The room, oak-panelled throughout, was long, low, and gloomy; an enormous, old-fashioned, empty fireplace occupied the centre of one of the walls; on the one side of it was an oak settee, on the other an equally ponderous black oak chest.

  “Heavy oaken beams traversed the ceiling, and the sombre, funereal character of the room was further increased by a colossal and antique four-poster which, placed in the exact middle of the chamber, faced a gigantic mirror attached to grotesquely carved and excessively lofty sable supports.

  “Viewed in the feeble, fluctuating candlelight, the latter seemed endowed with some peculiar and emphatically weird life—their glistening, polished surfaces threw a dozen and one fantastic but oddly human shadows on the boards, as at the same time they appeared in bewildering alternation to increase and diminish in stature.

  “Tristram hastily undressed, and stretching himself between the blankets, prepared to go to sleep. Like yourself, and for a similar reason, he never sleeps on his left side. Accordingly he occupied the right portion only of the enormous bed.