Byways of Ghost-Land   By: Elliott O'Donnell (1872-1965)

BYWAYS OF GHOST LAND

BY

ELLIOTT O'DONNELL

AUTHOR OF

"SOME HAUNTED HOUSES OF ENGLAND AND WALES," "HAUNTED HOUSES OF LONDON," "GHOSTLY PHENOMENA," "DREAMS AND THEIR MEANINGS," "SCOTTISH GHOST TALES," "TRUE GHOST TALES," ETC., ETC.

WILLIAM RIDER AND SON, LIMITED 164 Aldersgate St., London, E.C. 1911

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

1. THE UNKNOWN BRAIN 1

2. THE OCCULT IN SHADOWS 21

3. OBSESSION, POSSESSION 28

4. OCCULT HOOLIGANS 47

5. SYLVAN HORRORS 56

6. COMPLEX HAUNTINGS AND OCCULT BESTIALITIES 80

7. VAMPIRES, WERE WOLVES, FOX WOMEN, ETC. 110

8. DEATH WARNINGS AND FAMILY GHOSTS 132

9. SUPERSTITIONS AND FORTUNES 153

10. THE HAND OF GLORY; THE BLOODY HAND OF ULSTER; THE SEVENTH SON; BIRTH MARKS; NATURE'S DEVIL SIGNALS; PRE EXISTENCE; THE FUTURE; PROJECTION; TELEPATHY; ETC. 176

11. OCCULT INHABITANTS OF THE SEA AND RIVERS 198

12. BUDDHAS AND BOGGLE CHAIRS 210

INDEX 244

BYWAYS OF GHOST LAND

CHAPTER I

THE UNKNOWN BRAIN

Whether all that constitutes man's spiritual nature, that is to say, ALL his mind, is inseparably amalgamated with the whitish mass of soft matter enclosed in his cranium and called his brain, is a question that must, one supposes, be ever open to debate.

One knows that this whitish substance is the centre of the nervous system and the seat of consciousness and volition, and, from the constant study of character by type or by phrenology, one may even go on to deduce with reason that in this protoplasmic substance in each of the numerous cells into which it is divided and subdivided are located the human faculties. Hence, it would seem that one may rationally conclude, that all man's vital force, all that comprises his mind i.e. the power in him that conceives, remembers, reasons, wills is so wrapped up in the actual matter of his cerebrum as to be incapable of existing apart from it; and that as a natural sequence thereto, on the dissolution of the brain, the mind and everything pertaining to the mind dies with it there is no future life because there is nothing left to survive.

Such a condition, if complete annihilation can be so named, is the one and only conclusion to the doctrine that mind crude, undiagnosed mind is dependent on matter, a doctrine confirmed by the apparent facts that injury to the cranium is accompanied by unconsciousness and protracted loss of memory, and that the sanity of the individual is entirely contingent upon the state of his cerebral matter a clot of blood in one of the cerebral veins, or the unhealthy condition of a cell, being in itself sufficient to bring about a complete mental metamorphose, and, in common parlance, to produce madness.