A Bohemian Ghost

The story below appeared in one of the 1893 editions of L’Initiation, Papus’ magazine on esoteric subjects. It  is a letter written by a reader concerning his experiences with a ghost in Czechoslovakia. While the tale is entertaining in itself, I reproduce it (in English) here as one of a number of background articles to the publication of my translation of Papus’ book, “Elementary Treatise on Practical Magic”, later this year. He refers to it extensively in one section, so it is useful to have the original story available. Other articles from L’Initiaition will follow…. Enjoy!

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In 1874, my parents had acquired a farm which was part of a small village, P…, in Bohemia.

This village was in the middle of a very high plain, which formed a plateau about 50 kilometers in circumference, completely deprived of trees and water, either running or stagnant, so that the water the inhabitants needed was drawn solely from a well which was 42 meters deep. The population of P… totaled twenty-six people: men, women and children, who lived in six houses.

The farm was situated at the entrance to the village, surrounded on three sides by cultivated fields which belonged to it. The fourth side, formed by my parent’s dwellings, looked over the road to the village on one side, and windows on the other commanded a view over the fields.

The house was separated from the road by a small kitchen garden, without any fruiting trees, around 2 meters in size. This garden was enclosed by a wooden railing 1.6 meters high.

The dining room was on the first floor of the house, next to another room, whose windows looked out over the kitchen garden and, on the other side, the fields.

Facing the house, on the other side of the road, was an inn.

The inhabitants of the farm consisted of my father, my mother, my five brothers and sisters, a young twenty-two-year-old man, a medical student who was engaged at the house as a tutor to the children, and two housemaids. I myself was a student at Prague.

The village of P… had a bad reputation in the country: P… was haunted!

The inhabitants, as well as those in the surrounding area, declared that frequently, once or twice a week, or even more often, following nightfall people saw a lighted “lantern” walk through the fields and the village, and people even insisted that this “lantern” often accompanied people who had been delayed in the field or the neighboring villages, until they got back to P…, when it would lose itself in the fields, its task accomplished. The inhabitants of the region associated this apparition with a terrible event which had taken place a few years earlier in the inn situated across from the farm.

The innkeeper had disappeared without leaving a trace, a dozen years earlier, and public rumor accused his wife, who at the time of the event had owned the house, of killing her husband and making the body disappear by reducing it to ashes in an oven which was normally used to make their bread.

Indeed, this woman had been placed in preventive custody for several months, accused of murdering her husband, but she had benefited from there being insufficient evidence to prosecute.

According to the villagers, the luminous apparition was the spirit of the dead man which came to disturb the guilty party, without doing harm to anyone else. Also, nobody had seen the widow go out after sunset, and all the doors and windows of the inn were hermetically closed at twilight.

This is the story I heard repeated with many variations every time I returned home for the holidays.

Despite the insistence of my parents, the children and all the people in the house, that they had often seen the mysterious light wandering the field in the evening, I paid no attention, all the more so because nobody in the house had observed the phenomenon up close, and because I myself considered things of this kind absurd.

In 1876, I began my military service. In the month of August, I obtained a fifteen-day pass, and returned home to P…

The day after my arrival, M.N., the young man who was teaching my brothers and sisters return home on foot from H…, a neighboring village about six kilometers away.

It was nine thirty in the evening, when M.N. returned. On his arrival, we noticed that he was in an extraordinary emotional state. When we questioned him about what had happened, at first he couldn’t reply; but after a few minutes, he was a little calmer, and then told us that around halfway back, quietly walking along the road, he suddenly saw alongside him, at the height and within reach of his left hand, a pale light, nebulous: the “lantern”!

The phenomenon, still advancing alongside him, made a to-and-fro motion, as if being carried by a person walking.

M.N. had been seized with fear – he told me he had wanted to run – but not having the power to do so, he had instead made every effort to drag himself along back to the house, and the apparition had accompanied him silently right up to the door of the farm, and there it had disappeared.

As one may believe, this adventure was the sole topic of conversation until the small hours of the night. But, personally, I couldn’t believe it and, without contradicting M.N., I thought it had been a hallucination which might be the first symptom of a fever. To calm M.N. down completely and to assuage my conscience, I set up a bed in his room. The night passed without incident and the following morning M.N. was completely calm, while retaining a profound impression of the previous evening.

It was around August 10^th or 12^th, three or four days after the events described. The day had been very nice, very warm. When the sun went down there was no trace of any clouds, and the evening was filled with a gentle clarity, as one more often sees in the South. It was seven-thirty, and I was in the room adjoining the dining room on the first floor, sitting at the table.

Suddenly I heard noises, the children’s voices calling me. I entered the dining room where the children greeted me with the cry: “The lantern! The lantern!”, extending their arms out of the open window overlooking the fields.

Then, 400 or 500 meters away, I saw something luminous, like a pellet, oscillating forwards and backwards while it approached the house. I repeat that it was still quite clear: the phenomenon didn’t appear to spread light outside of itself.

At the noise made by the children my mother, the two housemaids and M.N. also ran upstairs and everyone watched the “lantern”. It advanced at the speed of a man walking with slow footsteps, and the oscillating movement certainly resembled that of the to-and-fro of a lantern carried in the hand.

The phenomenon came to around 20 meters in front of the windows where we were standing. As the apparition approached, I could distinguish its form which was oval, measuring around 25 centimeters on its greater axis and 18 to 20 centimeters across its lesser axis. In the center there appeared to be a light as if from a fire, whose intensity weakened towards the edges; but its contours were clearly detached from the ambient air, and it wasn’t transparent.

As I just said, the phenomenon had come along a line to within 20 meters in front of the house. Then, continuing its progress towards the right, it moved around the building and I ran with all the other people present to the other window which looked out over the road, as well as the small garden and the inn. We then saw the “lantern” anew. It had reached the tower of the house and came in front of the railing of our little garden facing the inn, separated from it by the road, around 4 meters.

The phenomenon had stopped, as though leaning on our railing. It remained there for three or four seconds. Then the luminous ball suddenly rose up, as if pulled by a spring, to a height of the top of the railing (1.6 meters) and came to perch on the point of one of the wooden lathes.

The effect produced by this inexplicable luminous form, perched on the railing, four meters from us, was very impressive.

There was a profound silence, at our window too, where nobody moved, any more than outside, for there was nobody on the road. The door, shutters and other entrances to the inn facing us were, as usual at this hour, closed.

The apparition stayed immobile for two to three minutes on the railing. I broke the silence by asking M.N. in a loud voice to fetch my hunting rifle and to load it. M.N. refused, begging me strongly not to talk like that. I myself had decided not to leave the window, so as not to lose sight of the phenomenon.

The short conversation between me and M.N. hadn’t changed the state of things, and the “lantern” still continued to remain in its place for two more minutes perhaps, when it slid as if on an inclined plane down from the top of the railing, and reaching around one meter from the ground, it started to oscillate again, facing the door of the inn, before disappearing like a light which had suddenly been extinguished.

The fact I have just described is the first and most apparent of those I have observed at P…; but there are others which, while less striking, are nevertheless very curious and which appear to me to be connected with the “lantern”. I could give a description of them at another time, which will perhaps also shed more light on the preceding phenomenon.

GUSTAV BOJANOO