Yet he expected
science and the public to believe his anonymous account of a
conversation, with an unnamed person, at which he did not and could
not pretend to have been present. He had a theory of sounds heard by
himself which could have been proved, or disproved, in five minutes,
by a simple experiment. But that experiment he does not say that he
made.
This kind of evidence is thought good enough on the negative side. It
certainly would not be accepted by any sane person for the affirmative
side. If what is called psychical research has no other results, at
least it enables us to perceive the fallacies which can impose on the
credulity of common-sense.
In preparing this collection of tales, I owe much to Mr. W. A.
Craigie, who translated the stories from the Gaelic and the Icelandic;
to Miss Elspeth Campbell, who gives a version of the curious Argyll
tradition of Ticonderoga (rhymed by Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, who
put a Cameron where a Campbell should be); to Miss Violet Simpson, who
found the Windham MS. about the Duke of Buckingham's story, and made
other researches; and to Miss Goodrich Freer, who pointed out the
family version of "The Tyrone Ghost".
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