Beautiful instances of common-sense explanations, occur in two stories of the last century, the St
- Date of account
- Published 1894
- Source
- Cock Lane and Common-Sense
- Reference
- Cock Lane and Common-Sense · selected passage 146
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
Beautiful instances of common-sense explanations, occur in two stories of the last century, the St
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyBeautiful instances of common-sense explanations, occur in two stories of the last century, the St. Maur affair (1706), and the haunted house of Amiens, (1746). The author of 'Ce qu'on doit penser de l'aventure arrivee a Saint Maur,' was M. Poupart, canon of St. Maur, near Paris. The good canon, of course, admits Biblical apparitions, which are miraculous, and admits hallucination caused by the state of the visual organs and by fever, while he believes in something like the Lucretian idea, that bodies, dead bodies, at least, shell off a kind of peel, which may, on occasion, be visible. Common ghosts he dismisses on grounds of common-sense; if spirits in Purgatory _could_ appear, they would appear more frequently, and would not draw the curtains of beds, drag at coverlets, turn tables upside down, and make terrible noises, all of which feats are traditional among ghosts.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis comes from historical psychical research. Methods, witness handling and standards of evidence differ from present-day research and should be assessed from the cited passage and edition.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThe passage can support a history of claims and recurring descriptions. It does not establish a paranormal mechanism, and competing psychological, social and physical explanations remain relevant.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.