The haunted trees of Mauritius Island.

— The latest news we have received from Mauritius Island confirms that the state of that unfortunate region follows exactly the phases announced. (Review of July 1867 and November 1868.) Moreover, it contains a notable fact, which furnished the subject for an important instruction at the Society of Paris.

“The heats of summer, says our correspondent, brought the terrible fever, more frequent, more tenacious than ever. My house has become a kind of hospital and I spend my time caring for myself and tending to my neighbor. The mortality is not very great, it is true, but, after the horrible sufferings that each attack causes us, we experience a general disturbance, which develops new illnesses in us: the faculties are altered little by little; the senses, above all hearing and sight, are particularly affected. Meanwhile, our good Spirits, perfectly in agreement in their communications with yours, announce to us the near end of the epidemic, plus the ruin and decline of the rich, which, moreover, has already begun. “I take advantage of the little time available to give you the details I promised, about the phenomena of which my house has been the theater. The persons to whom it belonged before me, careless and negligent, according to the custom of the region, had let it almost fall into ruin, so that I was obliged to make great repairs. The garden, transformed into scrubland, was full of those great trees of India, called multipliers, whose roots, coming out from the top of the branches, descend to the ground, where they implant themselves, now forming enormous trunks, superimposed one upon another, now rather extensive galleries. “These trees have a rather bad reputation in this region, where they are held to be haunted by evil Spirits. Without consideration for their supposed mysterious inhabitants, and as they were absolutely not to my taste and uselessly cluttered the garden, I had them cut down. From that moment on it became almost impossible for us to have a day of repose in the house. One would have to be truly a Spiritist to continue to inhabit it. At every instant we heard knocks on all sides, doors opening and closing, furniture moving, sighs, confused words; often footsteps were heard in the empty rooms. The workers who were repairing the house were disturbed many times by these strange noises, but, as it was during the day, they were not very frightened, for the manifestations are very frequent in the region. However much we made prayers, evoked these Spirits and indoctrinated them, they answered only with insults and threats and did not cease their racket. “At this time we had a meeting once a week. But you cannot imagine all the pranks that were played on us to disturb and interrupt our sessions; now the communications were intercepted, now the mediums experienced sufferings that forced them into inaction.

“It seems that the habitual clients of the house were very numerous and too wicked to be moralized, for we could not overcome their resistance, finding ourselves obliged to cease the meetings, since we obtained nothing more. Only one of them was willing to listen to us and to commend himself to our prayers. He was a poor Portuguese, named William, who supposed himself a victim of the creatures with whom he had committed I know not what wickedness, and who held him there, he said, for his punishment. I took information and learned that, in fact, a Portuguese sailor with that name had been one of the tenants of the house, and that he had died. “The fever arrived; the noises became less frequent, but did not cease; besides, we ended up growing accustomed to them. We still gathered, but the illness prevented the sessions from proceeding normally. I saw to it that they were held as much as possible in the garden, for we noticed that in the house the good communications are more difficult to obtain and that on those days we are quite tormented, above all at night.”

The question of haunted places is a proven fact; the noises and disturbances are known things. But will certain trees have a particular attractive power? In the circumstance in question, does there exist any relation between the destruction of those trees and the phenomena that immediately followed? Would the popular belief have here some reality? This is what the instruction below seems to give a logical explanation of, pending fuller confirmation.

(Society of Paris, February 19, 1869.)

All legends, whatever they may be, however ridiculous and poorly founded they may be, rest on a real basis, on an incontestable truth, demonstrated by experience, but amplified and denatured by tradition. It is said that certain plants are good for expelling evil Spirits; others can provoke possession; certain shrubs are more particularly haunted; all this is true, in isolation. A fact occurred, a special manifestation justified that saying, and the superstitious mass hastened to generalize it. It is the story of a man who lays an egg. The thing runs in secret from mouth to mouth and amplifies itself until it takes on the proportions of an incontestable law, and that law which does not exist is accepted by reason of the aspirations toward the unknown, toward the extranatural of the generality of men. The “multipliers” were, above all in Mauritius, and still are, points of reference for the evening gatherings; one leans against a trunk, breathes the air around it and shelters oneself under its foliage.

Now, on disincarnating, above all when they are in a certain inferiority, men retain their material habits; they frequent the places they liked when incarnate, gather there and remain there. This is why there are places more particularly haunted; there come not the first Spirits who arrive, but the Spirits who frequented them in life. The “multipliers” are not, then, more propitious to the habitation of inferior Spirits than any other shelter. Custom designates them to the phantoms of Mauritius, as certain castles, certain clearings of the German forests, certain lakes are haunted more particularly by Spirits, in Europe. If one disturbs these Spirits, still entirely material, and who, for the most part, believe themselves living, they grow irritated and tend to avenge themselves and to torment those who deprived them of their shelter; hence the manifestations of which this lady and so many others have had to complain.

In general, the Mauritian population being inferior, from the moral point of view, disincarnation can make of space only a breeding ground of Spirits very little dematerialized, still marked by all their earthly habits, and who continue, although Spirits, to live as if they were men. They deprive of tranquility and sleep those who deprive them of their preferred dwelling, and that is all. The nature of the shelter, its gloomy aspect, has nothing to do with it; it is simply a question of well-being. They are dislodged and they avenge themselves. Material in essence, they avenge themselves materially, knocking on the walls, lamenting, manifesting their discontent under all forms. Let the Mauritians purify themselves and progress and they will return to space with tendencies of another nature, and the “multipliers” will lose the faculty of sheltering the phantoms.

Clélie Duplantier. n [1]

[see Clélie Duplantier.]