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Updated: June 10, 2025
In his Analecta Mr. Wodrow noted down all the news that reached him, scandals about 'The Pretender, Court Gossip, Heresies of Ministers, Remarkable Providences, Woful Apparitions, and 'Strange Steps of Providence'. Ghosts, second sight, dreams, omens, premonitions, visions, did greatly delight him, but it is fair to note that he does not vouch for all his marvels, but merely jots them down, as matters of hearsay.
They were still more irritated at the sight of red colours, the influence of which on the disordered nerves might lead us to imagine an extraordinary accordance between this spasmodic malady and the condition of infuriated animals; but in the St. John's dancers this excitement was probably connected with apparitions consequent upon their convulsions.
Bayle and Chillingworth, two of the most skeptical of mankind, turned Catholics from sincere conviction. Johnson, incredulous on all other points, was a ready believer in miracles and apparitions. He would not believe in Ossian; but he was willing to believe in the second sight. He would not believe in the earthquake of Lisbon; but he was willing to believe in the Cock Lane ghost.
Here is Luke Cockrigg, too, of Aboonbeck Bank; and stout John Jackson, of Armboth, a large and living refutation of the popular fallacy that the companionship of a ghost must necessarily induce such appalling effects as are said to have attended the apparitions which presented themselves to the prophets and seers of the Hebrews.
The cookmaid lay in a little apartment contiguous to the kitchen; and whether disturbed by these horrible tales of apparitions, or titillated by the savoury steams that issued from the punch-bowl, she made a virtue of necessity, or appetite, and dressing herself in the dark, suddenly appeared before them to the no small perturbation of both.
In Gwendolen's consciousness temptation and dread met and stared like two pale phantoms, each seeing itself in the other each obstructed by its own image; and all the while her fuller self beheld the apparitions and sobbed for deliverance from them.
Continuing, the Professor says: "But similar reports have arisen in the world time and again, apparitions of the dead have been seen and have been taken for real; and yet such stories, after being current for a time, invariably have passed into oblivion. Why did this particular story persist, despite the paucity and the insufficiency of the evidence? Why did it get itself believed and take root?"
His idea, therefore, was that Signor Splendiano and little Pitichinaccio should go with him, just as they had done on the former occasion. But in addition to the spectres who had carried him off, all manner of direful apparitions had haunted Signor Splendiano on the night when he slept in his periwig near the Pyramid of Cestius.
The magician, who remained upon his knees with uplifted hands while the apparitions were visible, declared that the forces he was obliged to employ in exercising his magic power over the spirits had exhausted him. His fine, bearded face was deathly pale, and his tall form trembled and shook. His assistants had silently disappeared.
It is probable that, in addition to oral legend, there was another and more literary source of modern thaumaturgy. Moreover, the Foxes, who started spiritualism, were Methodists, and may well have been familiar with 'old Jeffrey, who haunted the Wesleys' house, and with some of the stories of apparitions in Wesley's Arminian Magazine.
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