Page:The humbugs of the world - An account of humbugs, delusions, impositions, quackeries, deceits and deceivers generally, in all ages (IA humbugsworld00barnrich).djvu/265

 The only real ghosts, however—four in number—came out at the Museum, in an appropriate drama, which had an immense run—“all for twenty-five cents,” or only six and a quarter cents per ghost!

But I must not forget to say that, really, the details given in the “Sunday Mercury” were well calculated to lead captive a large class of minds prone to luxuriate in the marvelous when well mixed with plausible reasoning. The most circumstantial accounts were given of sundry “gifted young ladies,” “grave and learned professors,” “reliable gentlemen”—where are those not found?—“lonely watchers,” and others, who had sought interviews with the “ghost,” to their own great enlightenment, indeed, but, likewise, complete discomfiture. Pistols were fired at him, pianos played and songs sung for him, and, finally, his daguerreotype taken on prepared metallic plates set upright in the haunted room. One shrewd artist brought out an “exact photographic likeness” of the distinguished stranger on cartes de visite, and made immense sales. The apparitions, too, multiplied. An old man, a woman, and a child made their appearance in the house of wonders, and, at last, a gory head with distended eyeballs, swimming in a sea of blood, upon a platter—like that of Holofernes—capped the climax.

Certain wiseacres here began to see political allusions in the Ghost, and many actually took the whole affair to be a cunningly devised political satire upon this or that party, according as their sympathies swayed them.

It would have been a remarkable portion of “this strange, eventful history,” of course, if “Barnum”