Physical manifestations.

— We read the following in Le Spiritualiste of New Orleans, of the month of February 1857:

“Recently we asked whether all Spirits, indistinctly, make the tables move, produce noises, etc.; and at once the hand of a lady, too serious to play with such things, violently traced these words:

— “Who makes the monkeys dance in your streets? Is it the superior men?”

“A friend, a Spaniard by birth, who was a spiritualist and who died last summer, gave us several communications; in one of them we find the following passage:

“The manifestations that you seek are not among those that most please the serious and elevated Spirits. We confess, nevertheless, that they have their utility, because, perhaps more than any other, they can be useful for convincing the men of today.”

“To obtain such manifestations it is necessary, of necessity, that certain mediums be developed, whose physical constitution is in harmony with the Spirits who can produce them. No one doubts that you will see them develop later among you; and then, it will no longer be little raps that you will hear, but noises resembling the crackling of musketry, interspersed with cannon shots.”

“In a secluded part of the city there is a house inhabited by a German family; in it strange noises are heard, while certain objects are displaced; at least that is what was assured to us, for we did not verify it; but, thinking that the head of that family might be useful to us, we invited him to some of the sessions which have this kind of manifestation as their object and, later, the wife of this good man did not wish him to continue among us because, the latter told us, the noise had increased in his house. In this regard, here is what was written to us by the hand of the lady…

“We cannot prevent the imperfect Spirits from making noise or other things that disturb and even terrify; but the fact that they are in contact with us, who are well-intentioned, only diminishes the influence they exert over the medium in question.”

— We call attention to the perfect agreement existing between what the Spirits said in New Orleans, with respect to the source of the physical manifestations, and what was said to ourselves. Indeed, nothing would depict that origin with more energy than this reply, at once so witty and profound: “Who makes the monkeys dance in the streets? Is it the superior men?”

We shall have occasion to recount, according to the newspapers of America, numerous examples of this kind of manifestation, far more extraordinary than those we have just cited. No doubt they will answer us with this proverb: “A good lie comes from afar.” When things so marvelous come to us from 2,000 leagues away and we cannot verify them, doubt is conceivable; but these phenomena crossed the seas with Mr. Home, who gave us proofs of them. It is true that Mr. Home did not go to the theater to perform his prodigies and that not everyone, by paying admission, could see them; for this reason many people consider him a skillful conjurer, without reflecting that high society, which witnessed these phenomena, would not have lent itself benevolently to serving as his patron. If Mr. Home were a charlatan, he would not have taken care to refuse the brilliant offers of many public establishments, and he would have come away with gold by the handful. His disinterestedness is the most peremptory reply that can be given to his detractors. A disinterested charlatanism would be a foolishness and a monstrosity. Later we shall speak in detail of Mr. Home and of the mission that led him to France. Meanwhile, here is a fact of spontaneous manifestation that a distinguished physician, worthy of all confidence, related to us, and which is all the more authentic in that the things happened with his personal knowledge.

— A respectable family had as a domestic servant a young orphan girl of fourteen, whose natural kindness and gentleness of character had won her the affection of her employers. In the same quarter lived another family, whose wife, no one knows why, had taken a dislike to this young girl, to such a point that there was no ill treatment of which she was not the object. One day, as she was returning, the neighbor appears furious, armed with a broom, wishing to strike her. Frightened, she rushes against the door and wishes to ring the bell; unfortunately the cord is broken and she cannot reach it; but behold, the bell sets itself in motion of its own accord and someone comes to open the door for her. In her agitation she did not realize what had happened; but afterward the bell continued to ring from time to time, without apparent cause, both by day and by night and, when one went to look at the door, no one was found there. The neighbors of the quarter were accused of playing this prank of bad taste; a complaint was made to the police commissioner, who opened an inquiry, investigated whether some secret cord communicated with the exterior, but could discover nothing. The things, however, persisted more and more, to the detriment of everyone's repose and, above all, of the little servant, accused of being the cause of the noise. Heeding the advice that was given to them, the employers of the young orphan decided to send her away and placed her in the countryside, in the house of friends. From then on, the bell remained quiet and nothing of the kind occurred in her new abode. This fact, like many others that we are going to relate, did not take place on the banks of the Missouri or the Ohio, but in Paris, in the Passage des Panoramas. It now remains to explain it. The young girl did not ring the bell, that is positive; she was too terrified by what was happening to think of a farce, of which she would have been the first victim. A thing no less positive is that the ringing of the bell was due to her presence, since the effect ceased when she departed. The physician who witnessed the fact explains it by a powerful magnetic action, exercised unconsciously by the young servant. This explanation does not in any way seem conclusive to us: why would she have lost this power after her departure? As to this, he says that the terror inspired by the presence of the neighbor must have produced in the young girl an over-excitement, capable of developing the magnetic action, and that the effect ceased with the cause. We confess that we are not absolutely convinced by this reasoning. If the intervention of a hidden force is not here demonstrated in an evident manner, it is at least probable, according to analogous facts that we know. Admitting, then, this intervention, we shall say that, in the circumstances in which the fact occurred for the first time, a protecting Spirit probably wished the young girl to escape the danger she was in; that, despite the affection that her employers bore her, it was perhaps in her interest to leave that house. This is why the noise continued until she had departed.