Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/415

Rh also the actors, according to popular opinion), the sturdy Rationalist need not be nervous: I am not telling a ghost-story; a thing excommunicated (if there be evidence for it) by scientific folklorists. I must confess that a little historical research has been needed, and historical precision is sadly alien to anthropological methods.

On May 8, 1859, in Paris, Mademoiselle de Guldenstubbé and her brother, the Baron de Guldenstubbé, told to Mr. Robert Dale Owen (late American Minister at Naples) their version of the bi-located story. He published it in i860, in the American edition of his Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (English edition, 1861, pp. 1 86-191). The two Guldenstubbés were son and daughter of a Baron of that name, who, they said, in 1844 was president of a Committee which in that year investigated strange occurrences in the Lutheran cemetery of Ahrensburg, Isle of Oesel, in the Baltic. The evidence was thus given fifteen years later than the events. I must add that the younger Baron, the narrator, declared that he saw a very strange phantasm of the dead, at Paris, in his rooms, 23 Rue St. Lazare, in March, 1854. The events at Ahrensburg, of 1844, were therefore within his own recollection, if, in 1854, he was old enough to have an establishment of his own. He also published (or was it his father?), in 1857, a book on automatic writing, which was attributed to the agency of "spirits." A distinguished member of the Society for Psychical Research informs me that the author of this book was "a thorough-going spiritualist of the most credulous and superstitious type." Mr. Dale Owen, however, regarded the younger Baron as honest, and nobody says that he was a deliberate liar with circumstance.

His story was that, in June, 1844, a chapel, that of the Buxhoewden family, in the cemetery of Ahrensburg, became noisy; that the noise (Getöse) frightened horses