it. Mr. M. writes that he took her to the house where he knew it to
be without telling her of its existence. Mrs. M. turned pale when she
saw it. Mr. M. knew the sad old story, but had kept it to himself.
The family in which the disgrace occurred, in 1847 or 1848, were his
relations. {78}

This vision was a veracious hallucination; it gave intelligence not
otherwise known to Mrs. M., and capable of confirmation, therefore the
appearances would be called "ghosts". The majority of people do not
believe in the truth of any such stories of veracious hallucinations,
just as they do not believe in veracious dreams. Mr. Galton, out of
all his packets of reports of hallucinations, does not even allude to
a veracious example, whether he has records of such a thing or not.
Such reports, however, are ghost stories, "which we now proceed," or
continue, "to narrate". The reader will do well to remember that
while everything ghostly, and not to be explained by known physical
facts, is in the view of science a hallucination, every hallucination
is not a ghost for the purposes of story-telling. The hallucination
must, for story-telling purposes, be _veracious_.

Following our usual method, we naturally begin with the anecdotes
least trying to the judicial faculties, and most capable of an
ordinary explanation. Perhaps of all the senses, the sense of touch,
though in some ways the surest, is in others the most easily deceived.
Some people who cannot call up a clear mental image of things seen,
say a saltcellar, can readily call up a mental revival of the feeling
of touching salt. Again, a slight accidental throb, or leap of a
sinew or vein, may feel so like a touch that we turn round to see who
touched us. These familiar facts go far to make the following tale
more or less conceivable.