Legend
< Spiritualism in India (continued from page 10-97) >
lady who had been dead twenty years at the earnest entreaty of her husband, who came to see her spirit. She came blooming, real, life-like, with her arms stretched out to her husband, a high Government official. With a loud cry he was rushing to her, when the lights all suddenly went out, the doors and windows clapped to, as if moved by a mighty wind, and the gentleman fell insensible where he expected to embrace his wife. This reads very like a fairy tale, and many, wise in their own conceit, may laugh at the recital; but it all happened, and Paul Jopper was a real man with very wonderful ability. He made a mint of money, but did not save much for his family, his charities being most extensive. By birth he was reputed a Frenchman, but he had none of his people with him in Madras. He was travelling by himself just to exercise his strange powers His end was sudden and very dreadful, lie was found one morning with his brains dashed out, and his skull much battered. The doors and windows of his room were well secured from the inside, and visible human agency could not be pointed to as being engaged in this awful end. Not a vestige of the brain was to be found anywhere, though blood was on the wall to show where the skull had been pelted; nor was the heart found, though the trunk was there, and the awestruck beholders whispered that Paul Jopper was claimed by the devil. Perhaps there are still some living in Madras who can testify to the conjuring powers of this strange man. Again, there was a Brahmin in Poona, about fifteen years after Paul Jopper, who was no disciple of his, who could perform quite as incomprehensible feats. Naked, but for the stinted yard of cloth round his middle, this man would, in a little while, cover the ground round about him with the most beautiful flowers, all as if but newly culled, and offer them to any one, in season and out of season. Where did he get his flowers from? To beholders he only drew them out of a lighted candle; it was all his apparatus; he had no sleeves, no turban, no liberal dhotee, and yet the flowers were very real indeed, and my husband once got a bouquet of them because lie doubted their reality, and the Brahmin called him a bucha. We are all of us buchas to my thinking, while we cannot explain what puzzles our understanding, pooh-poohing facts as if that disposes of them.
Clairvoyance
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Editor's notes
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 376, November 7, 1879, pp. 224-5