Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920 Vol 4 by Shane McCorristine

Author:Shane McCorristine [McCorristine, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781000561470
Google: I5hREAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-24T02:48:42+00:00

A. Taylor Innes, ‘Where are the Letters?’, Nineteenth Century, 126 (1887), pp. 174–94.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112815-16

WHERE ARE THE LETTERS?

A Cross-Examination of certain Phantasms.

‘I was a student in King’s College, Aberdeen. It was either my first or my second year there, and my younger brother John was left in the manse, attending school. One night I had been working late at my books before going to bed. I dreamed that my brother, left in the little northern town a hundred miles away, had been clambering over the academy railings, and that, his foot slipping, he fell and impaled himself, suffering an injury which seemed to me in my dream to be fatal or nearly so. In the morning I was so haunted by the recollection that, half in earnest, half in jest, I wrote the whole home. My letter was crossed by one from my mother, telling me that my brother John was dangerously ill, in consequence of a wound which he had received from falling on the spikes while trying to climb the academy railings. He lingered for some time after this news came from Ross-shire to Aberdeen, and then died of the accident. I have heard of many such stories, but this is the only one for which I can personally vouch, and I give it to you at first hand.’

It was exactly the kind of first-hand story which I had long desired to receive. There could be no better witness than my informant, a man of trained veracity and masculine intellect, conscientious without a streak of fancy, and religious without any tinge of superstition. It seemed to me that what I had sought for years was found; and not till an hour had passed did a doubt arise which prompted the question:

‘Dr. M—, where are the two letters which crossed?’

There was no answer, but a long pause, for all the mind was for the first time troubled with a doubt. I ventured to press my question.

‘I remember your mother. There was no more intelligent lady in the north of Scotland. Had she received such a letter as you now believe you wrote, she would sooner have thrown a hundred-pound note into the fire than have destroyed it.’

‘You mean,’ he said slowly, ‘that I also, at the other end of the circuit, in Aberdeen, would have done anything rather than part with / the letter from my mother which I have described, had I really received it.’

I replied cautiously that what I meant rather was, that if the two letters with their postmarks could now be got, they would absolutely prove the case. My relation as a young man to Dr. M. involved a certain duty of veneration, and I had no right to play the part of Ithuriel1 to a story which had for forty years sat close by the gate of his mind. Still, from that date I have never doubted that there are cases in which the absence of documentary evidence is nearly as conclusive against a story as the presence of such evidence would be in its favour.

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