How To See a Ghost

By Stephen J. Gertz

To see the spectres, it is only necessary to look steadily at the dot, or asterisk, which is to be found on each of the plates, for about a quarter of a minute...Then turning the eyes to the ceiling...of a darkened room...the spectre will soon begin to make its appearance - From the Introduction.

There are ghosts that live within us, the phantoms of friends and loved ones no longer in our lives, of relationships and actions that haunt us forever afterward. The past is a ghost that never goes away; it is immortal. It never dies. Time wears a white sheet and often jumps out from within a dark corner, suddenly, says, Boo!, and leaves you shaken with a bad case of the willies.

Then there are the ghosts that haunt us from without, the phantasms that go bump in the night, apparitions that invade the material world. If you're lucky, it's only Caspar the Friendly Ghost. If your luck has run out, you may see a banshee washing the blood-stained clothes of one who is about to die - the person who stares back at you from the mirror.

That class of wraith, author J.H. Brown proves, is an illusion, a trick of the eye.

Spectropia, written in 1864 by Brown in alarm over the popular interest in spiritualism - he called it a "mental epidemic" - was produced for children but Brown aimed to slay the dragon in adults, his goal "the extinction of the superstitious belief that apparitions are actual spirits by showing some of the ways our senses may be deceived...the eye pre-eminently so."

Brown blamed mediums, whom he considered to be charlatans preying on a gullible public and, as an early-day Amazing Randi, set out to debunk spiritualist claims.

To do so he provided ghostly plates that, when attention is concentrated upon each and then focused upon a blank wall a spectral image of the plate will be seen. He demonstrated the (then standard) optical principle of persistence of vision wherein an after-image remains on our retinas for 1/25th of a second, lingering in the visual cortex of the occipital lobe of our brains before it decays and disappears

Spectropia went though a five editions and many issues 1864-1866. An American edition appeared almost immediately after the first U.K. publication. It was translated into Dutch in 1870.  Spectropia was a very popular book.

Persistence of vision was refuted in 1912 by Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, who conclusively demonstrated that what was actually occurring was an optical illusion called the phi phenomenon in which the brain fills in information from a series of individual images that when seen at a certain speed create the sense of constant, uninterrupted flow of motion, i.e. cinema.

The Unjolly Green Giant Ghost.

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Later edition.

BROWN, J.H. Spectropia, or, Surprising spectral illusions: showing ghosts everywhere, and of any colour. London: Griffith and Farran, 1864. First edition. Octavo. 12 text pp., sixteen color plates on 16 leaves.

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Evidence of Witches and Apparitions Discovered (330 Years Ago)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Welcome to Rare Book Nightmare Alley, the series that brings antiquarian bad dreams in print to light.

This week, we tear the curtain that separates the living, naked or otherwise, and the dead, the bitch from the witch, and the doofus from the demon.

Attention Ghost Whisperers, Ghost Busters, and Witch Patrol: evidence that your job is not simply glorified make-work, ungainful employment  for the highly credulous, and the answer to "Who Y'Gonna Call?" when reason fails and whoa-nelly! prevails, has now surfaced.

 

Actually, it surfaced 330 years ago. But who, aside from those on the Other Side, is counting? The devil, witches, warlocks, and miscellaneous demonic desperados are  kvetching for their share of our waking nightmares and official recognition for their malignant presence in our otherwise benign and placid lives.

What these twisted spirits need is a Rev. Jesse Jackson to raise their self-esteem: "I AM somebody!" They want proof of their reality firmly rooted in our mental flowerbed; if only one person doubts their existence the bloom is off the black rose. Supernatural beings are only as strong as the total number of  those who believe in them; doubt is the silver bullet, the clove of garlic, the wooden stake that casts them out of our dimension, and, no insult intended to the blind, out of sight, out of mind. For the devil that just won't do.

Jesse Jackson is, alas otherwise busy. So, look no further than Joseph Glanvil, who, in his Saducimus Triumphatus (1681), provides  hard evidence for easy belief in the supernatural beings we've all come to appreciate as the beloved villains of our dark imagination, the wacked-out members of the family that periodically emerge from the worm hole in our brain to hex and vex us.

The hard evidence - anecdotal, assessed with the  critical reasoning skills usually associated with developmentally disabled mollusks  -  is hardly worth considering. But, then, there'd be no joy in Mudville, mighty Casey striking out the bats in the belfry. This is natural philosophy's last gasp before Newton and the rationalists dominated the sciences. But not before Saducismus Triumphatus's  influence upon Cotton Mather led, eleven years after its publication, to the Salem witch trials of 1692-93.

In that respect, the book is seriously frightening, truly a rare book nightmare, its text an extended footnote to a dark chapter in early American history, and a chillingly scarce volume in first edition. 

Not much point in dwelling upon the text; the book's engravings do the talking. If, however, you actually hear them talk call Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist,

or Mademoiselle Zeena, carnival spiritualist.

Hard, reliable evidence for the existence of witches and the efficacy of witchcraft was actually discovered 276 years after Glanvil's Saducimus Thriumphatus, in 1957, by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, publicly presented, with an assist from Nelson Riddle, for the first time by the Chairman of the Board, who, unsurprisingly, has the last word on the subject:

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GLANVIL, Joseph. Saducimus Triumphatus: or,  Full Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions. In Two Parts: The First Treating of their Possibility. The Second their Real Existence. With a Letter of Dr. Henry More on the same Subject. And an Authentick, but wonderful story of certain Swedish Witches. Done into English by Dr. Horneck, Preacher at the Savoy. London: Printed for J. Collins...and S. Lownds, 1681.

First edition. Octavo. [5], 58; [8], 180, [9] , 310, [5], 311-328 [i.e. 348], [1] pp. Frontispiece. Woodcut illustrations.

ESTC R25463. Allibone, p. 676.

This is an extremely rare book in its first edition, with OCLC/KVK recording only two copies in library holdings worldwide, and ABPC reporting no copies at auction within the last thirty-six years.

6:54 AM CORRECTION: Well, this is embarrassing: an initial misspelling while searching auction and library records led me astray. The first edition is actually well represented in library holdings and there have been more than few copies at auction, though the majority of those were not in the best of condition. Please forgive the error.

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