6. Hauntings-a

THERE are two forms of “haunting” which have to be considered, the one which is due to a discarnate soul who interferes with a particular person, and the one which is due to the conditions prevailing in a particular place, and which affects any person sufficiently sensitive who happens to go there. Except in cases where the influence is exceptionally strong, the insensitive person is immune. To perceive a “haunting” one needs, as a general rule, to be slightly psychic; it is for this reason that children, Celts and the coloured races suffer severely from such interferences, and the stolid Nordic type is comparatively immune, and, to a lesser extent, the lively, materialistic and sceptical Latin. Let us consider first of all the question of interference by a discarnate soul, It will be noted that I use the term “interference” and not “attack.” The disturbance need not necessarily be an attack, any more than the drowning man who clings to his rescuer and drags him under is motived by malice. The entity that is causing the trouble may be a soul that is itself in distress on the Inner Planes, and is too ignorant of post-mortem conditions to know the harm it is doing by clinging so desperately to the living. It is for this reason that the wide dissemination of Spiritualistic teachings is of value, for it helps to relieve the tension between this world and the next. As far as my experience goes, I am inclined to think that deliberate malevolence is rare; but this panic-stricken clinging is not uncommon, and explains why the survivor of a pair sometimes goes through very unpleasant experiences after the death of the partner. There are also cases, though rarer, wherein a soul who has some occult knowledge but is bound strongly to earth by sensual desires, uses a curious form of rapport in order to gratify those desires through the physical body of another. There are innumerable instances of both these types of astral interference in occult and spiritualistic literature, but as I am confining myself to cases within my own experience, I will not cite them, but limit myself to listing the literature of the subject in the bibliography. Someone of my acquaintance lost, after a long illness, her husband to whom she was much attached, but whom most people would have thought she was well rid of, as for many years he had been addicted to drink, and died finally after a long illness during which he was kept under morphia for prolonged periods, taking enormous quantities. He was a man of intensely malignant and selfish disposition, and died unrepentant. She, however, during the course of his last illness, when, being bedridden, he could do no more harm, elected to idolise him, and as soon as he was safely dead, canonised him into the family saint. She was interested in occultism and in the habit of practising meditation and invoking the Masters. In spite of all counsel to the contrary, she began to try and get into psychic touch with her husband, invoking him as her guide. Like many other men of a sensual disposition, he had clung desperately to life, remaining in articulo mortis for days. Fortunately for all concerned, it had been possible to persuade her to have his remains cremated, but despite all persuasion she brought all his belongings from the nursing-home where he had died and kept them in her bedroom, and made a little altar around his photograph and used it as the focus of her meditations. The last illness had been a long and trying one, and she had been living at the end of a telephone wire, in a state of constant anxiety for weeks, but had had no physical strain, so there was nothing physical to account for the serious illness which ensued after the strain was over.