Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE HOLFORD WILL CASE. At one time, in common, perhaps, with most people, I took a sort of languid, amateur interest in questions of psychology, and was impelled thereby to plunge into the pages of the many curious and rather abstruse books which attempt to deal with phenomena of mind, soul and sense. Three things of the real nature of which, I am convinced, no man will ever learn more than we know at present? which is nothing. From these I strayed into the many volumes of Transactions of the Psychical Research Society, with an occasional by-excursion into mental telepathy and theosophy; the last, a thing whereof my Philistine intelligence obstinately refused to make head or tail. It was while these things were occupying part of my attention that I chanced to ask Hewitt whether, in the course of his divers odd and out- of-the-way experiences, he had met with any such weird adventures as were detailed in such profusionin the books of
authenticated spooks, doppel- gangers, poltergeists, clairvoyance, and so forth.
Well, Hewitt answered, with reflection,
I haven’t been such a wallower in the uncanny as some of the worthy people who talk at large in those books of yours, and, as a matter of fact, my little adventures, curious as some of them may seem, have been on the whole of the most solid and matter-of-fact description. One or two things have happened that perhaps your ‘ psychical’ people might be interested in, but they’ve mostly been found to be capable of a disappointingly simple explanation. One case of some genuine psychological interest, however, I have had; although there’s nothing even in that which isn’t a matter of well-known scientific possibility. And he proceeded to tell me the story that I have set down here, as well as I can, from recollection. …
