WCP2552

[1]

2. Finsbury Pavement.

(Opposite South Place.)

London E.C.

11:Dec. 1875

Sir

I once witnessed, very unexpectedly, an occurrence resembling some of those mentioned in your work on "Modern Spiritualism":¹ and as it seems possible that the case may be of some little interest, I venture to think you will pardon me for troubling you with an account of it. I may say that I have never had the opportunity of seeing any spiritualistic manifestations, & that at the time of this occurrence, I had scarcely even heard of them.

I was articled, from 1851 to 1856, to Mr. J.C.Gilbert of Nottingham, who is still in practice there as an Architect. His offices were then at 13 Clinton Street. The Clerks' Office, in which I always worked, was a large light room about 20 feet by 16 feet, with the windows on the long side, & with hardly any furniture except the drawing desks and stools. There was no [2] covering on the boarded floor, & the walls were bare, or nearly so. The sketch plan below will help to explain the particulars I have to relate: the details of the occurrence are as clearly & vividly before me as if I had just observed them, so strong was the impression made on me by their apparently inexplicable nature.

[Here appears a hand-drawn plan view of the clerks' office]

About 5 o'clock one afternoon towards the end of October 1853, I was standing at my desk at "A", talking & laughing with a friend of my own age, who had just come in, & who was standing close to me at "B". It was near sunset, but broad daylight. The office door & windows were shut, & no one but ourselves was in the office. There had been no fire for several days, but a scuttle [3] full of coal was standing by the fireplace, as shewn on the plan. Suddenly we were both startled by hearing something like a small stone sharply strike the glass in the upper part of the sash window close to us, almost hard enough to break it. We watched & listened, thinking someone in the street was throwing stones. In a moment we heard the noise again, on both windows, one after the other, & to our astonishment saw small pieces of coal rebound from the glass ^{inside the room,} and roll along the desks, towards "d" and "e". They were irregular in shape & generally about the size of a large pea. ^{Similar pieces of coal} kept on striking the glass at intervals, & rebounding at right angles to it (in the direction of the arrows on plan) for about a quarter of an hour. From thirty to forty pieces fell in this time: then the display ceased, & never recurred, as far as I know. When it was about half over, Mr Gilbert came into the office, & we went & stood with him at the other desk, near "e": but the coal continued to strike both windows as before. I saw no pieces flying at the windows, but only caught sight of these as they rebounded and fell. None of these as far as I saw, struck the walls, or anything in the office except the glass in the upper part [4] of the windows. They flew with real force, & sometimes two pieces struck the two windows almost simultaneously, or with only a fraction of a second between.

I searched, & so did my friend, every part of the office, while the coal was flying about, to find any hole through which a "pea-shooter" or some similar instrument could have been introduced from the outside but I am quite sure that there was no trickery of this sort. Moreover there was a 14 inch brick wall facing the window, and a ceiled kitchen below the office: neither the wall nor the floor could have been bored through without detection, even if anyone had though it worth while to take the trouble. There was no one in the house besides ourselves, a lady, a young child & a very aged servant. My friend & I naturally watched each other while the phenomenon was going on, & I am sure again that neither of us had, consciously, any share in its production. His amazement was evidently thorough & genuine, as was my own. I was intimately acquainted with him, & never knew him play a practical joke in his life, & he never showed the least <turn?> for devising mechanical tricks. Again, had he carried about him any apparatus <efficacious?> enough to shoot all [5] the coal straight at the windows without my detecting him, he could not, when standing at "B", have made it rebound from the further window at right angles to it: it would have flown off in the direction "f", which it certainly did not do. Further, knowing his character well, I am sure if he had succeeded in playing off such a trick, he would never have resisted the impulse to have a hearty laugh at me for being made a fool of. Far from this, he always spoke of the occurrence with a sort of awe, & affirmed that he could not form a guess as to the cause of it. He is still in business at Nottingham, & when I spoke to him about it a few years since, he assured me sincerely & earnestly that he had nothing to do with producing it, & had not the faintest idea what did produce it.

One or two other unaccountable things happened in the same house, while I lived at Nottingham, but nothing so marked as this. The details of this one may seem trivial, but they made [6] so deep an impression on me that I can never forget them. I do not see how they can be explained, either by Dr. Carpenter's² "unconscious cerebration", or Mr G.H. Lewes'³ "expectant attention", or by the "illusion, collusion & delusion" of a late Reviewer in the "Academy".⁴

I am Sir | Your obedient servant | Jas. Cubitt[?] [signature]

Alfred R. Wallace Esq. FRS etc etc