Imitating unseen letters, signatures, and languages.--Suspicions concerning Professor Bush.--Singular feat attributed to spirits. --No difficulty in raising chairs or tables.--Spirits shown by Egyptian boys.--Unbelief of practising "mediums."--School children forbidden to move tables, &c. 273
Dancing light seen in Southboro', Massachusetts.--_Ignis fatuus_ seen by Dr. Derham.--Corpusants seen by mariners.-- Dampier's account of them. 274
Sailors' omens and superstitions.--Devil's power in stirring up winds.--Losing a cat overboard, a bucket, or a mop. 276
Othello winning Desdemona by conjuration.--Execution of a young lady for giving a love powder.--Her dying confession.--A charm or an allay for love. 277
Effects of a belief in the reality of ghosts.--Case at the University at Cambridge.--A student frightened to death. 279
The invisible lady in Boston.--The invisible girl in London.-- Joice Heth, the India rubber woman.--Professor Grimes's discovery among the "rappers."--Mrs. Culver respecting the Rochester rappers. 280
Persons killed by the enemy's fires.--Singular custom in Java. 281
Men turned into tigers by eating a certain root, and turned back again by eating another.--A tiger-man shot in the woods and recognized, after having devoured some of his neighbors.--Account of the wolf mania in Egypt and in Brittany.--A husband that lived and died a wolf. 282
Astrology.--Vegetable oil of swallows, &c.--Cleanliness, diet, &c.--Ablution.--Ventilation.--Food.--Quality of meats. 284
The object of this treatise upon some of the various errors of the past and present ages is to explain their nature--investigate their origin--describe their injurious effects--and to offer and recommend the necessary measures for their banishment. Most persons, even those who have been well educated, can call to mind the avidity with which, in their days of childhood, they listened to the nursery tales of giants, dwarfs, ghosts, fairies, and witches. The effects of these juvenile impressions are not easily effaced from the mind, and the impressions themselves are but rarely, if ever, forgotten.
To doubt, in former times, the power of charms, and the veracity of omens, and ghost stories, was deemed little less than atheism. The terror caused by them imbittered the lives of persons of all ages. It either served to shut them out of their own houses, or deterred them from going abroad after it was dark. The room in which the head of a family died was for a long time untenanted; particularly if he died without a will, or was supposed to have entertained any peculiar religious opinions. If any disconsolate maiden, or love-crossed bachelor, became the instrument of their own death, the room where the fatal deed was committed was rendered forever uninhabitable, and not unfrequently nailed up. If a drunken farmer, returning from market, fell from his horse, and by the fall broke his own neck, that spot, ever after, was haunted and impassable. In truth, there was scarcely a by-lane or cross-way but had its ghost, which appeared in the shape of a headless cow or horse. Ghosts of a higher degree rode in coaches, drawn by six headless horses, and driven by a headless coachman. As for the churchyards, the legitimate habitations of spectres, clothed all in white, the numbers who swarmed there equalled the living parishioners; and to pass such a place in the night was more perilous than the storming of Badajos.