WHY do ghosts—if there are really such things as ghosts—wear clothes? This question, says Andrew Lang, only a skeptic would think of asking. But as there are still skeptics on the subject of ghosts, despite the labors of the spiritualists and the careful researches of the psychic societies, the question is still asked with frequency enough and insistence enough to compel attention of some kind from the experts in psychic affairs.
Dr. James H. Hyslop, that patient investigator in mysterious phenomena, refers to the subject somewhat gingerly, as it seems to us, in his new volume [Enigmas Of Psychical Research]. All the ghosts that have come to his attention with respectable credentials wear clothing. The testimony is generally quite explicit on that point. He cites some of it. One witness, for instance, whose tale is corroborated, tells of being in a hotel bed on a bright moonlight night, when the windows were open and the blinds up. He saw a young man of twenty-five standing at the side of the bed and pointing with his finger, who soon vanished through the door, which was shut. He was dressed, not in sheets, but in flannels. In another case, well authenticated, the narrator after going to bed about midnight saw at his bed a wraith, which, in spite of the unwonted dress, he at once recognized as a friend who had died some time before. The ghost had on a khaki coat, a leather strap, a brown leather girdle, a sword and helmet.
In these and a host of other instances for which the evidence is of a scientific and unassailable character, Dr. Hyslop is able to be specific on the subject of the clothing worn by apparitions. The conventional notion that the average ghost presents itself in a winding-sheet has been exploded by the investigations of Dr. Hyslop and the Society for Psychical Research. Ghosts dress very much as do they in the world of mortal men. It has been customary in all recent investigation to take note of that circumstance. But how do the ghosts come by their clothes? Are the clothes themselves spirit? In reply, Dr. Hyslop insists that the question is in reality irrelevant. If we regard the apparition as a real spirit we are forced to treat the apparition of clothes as an incidental phenomenon to be explained by a subsidiary hypothesis. It does not damage the spirit theory; it is simply a perplexity within it.
To the intelligent psychologist the phenomenon does not give any trouble. He is quite willing to recognize that the whole apparition, clothes and all, is an hallucination. He simply regards it as a "veridical hallucination," meaning thereby that it is caused by an extraorganic though super-normal stimulus, as subjective hallucinations are produced by intra-organic or by normal extra-organic stimuli. He does not require to believe that the spirit is actually where it is, any more than he supposes that telepathic phantasms are real. Just what Dr. Hyslop's own point of view is on the subject is not altogether clear to us. Very few of the psychic investigators have reached a point where they are to dogmatize on the main subject of their investigations, still less so on what may be called a side issue of the subject.
Another solution of the clothes enigma to which attention is called in the London Post, by Andrew Lang, himself an expert in psychic research, is that the clothes of a ghost are astral matter like the ghost itself. But we know no more about astral matter, observes Mr. Lang, commenting on Dr. Hyslop's remarks on the subject, than we know of life on another planet. Astral theories, he says, are condemned by science as purely hypothetical. Of course, if the ghosts are mere hallucinations, the clothes present no enigma. They are hallucinations, too. But this easy way of disposing of the subject does not satisfy Mr. Lang. He says:
"If I see a friend, who, on principle, never enters a motor, in motoring costume and covered with blood, and if it turns out that he has been killed at the moment of my vision in his first motor journey, then the coincidence is the puzzle. There must be some cause of the appearance beyond mere chance coincidence, or at least it is natural to think so. A pretty instance occurs, I think, in a biography of Warren Hastings. The anecdote, as I remember it, avers that at a meeting of the Council of the East India Company in Calcutta one of the members (I think several shared the experience) saw his own father, wearing a hat of a peculiar shape, hitherto strange to the observers. In due time came a ship from London bearing news of the father's death, and a large and well-selected assortment of the new hat fashionable in England. It was the hat worn by the paternal appearance! If the circumstances are recorded in the minutes of the proceedings of the Council, which I have not consulted, then the hat of that spook becomes important as evidence."
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