Space MusicExtracted from a letter from a young man to one of his friends, a guard in Paris:
“Mulhouse, March 27th, 1868.
About five years ago - I was only eighteen at the time, and I ignored even the name Spiritism, - I was the witness and the object of a strange phenomenon that I realized only a few months ago, after having read The Spirits’ Book and The Mediums’ Book; This phenomenon consisted of an invisible music that was heard in the ambient air of the room, and accompanied my violin on which I was still taking lessons at the time. It was not a succession of sounds, like those I produced on my instrument, but perfect chords whose harmony was touching; it was like a harp touched with delicacy and feeling; sometimes we were a dozen people together, and we all heard it, without exception; but if someone came to listen out of pure curiosity, everything stopped, and as soon as the curious person was gone, the effect was immediately reestablished. I remember that meditation contributed a lot to the intensity of the sounds. What was unusual was that it only happened between five and eight in the evening. However, one Sunday, an organ from Babaria passed in front of the house around one in the afternoon and was playing a tune that called my attention; The invisible music was immediately heard in the room, accompanying that tune.
At such times, I experienced a nervous agitation that tired me noticeably and even made me suffer; it was like a kind of worry; at the same time, a heat radiated from all my body was felt at about 10 centimeters.
Since I read The Mediums’ Book, I have tried to write; an almost irresistible force carried my hand from left to right in a feverish movement, accompanied by great nervous agitation; but I have still only drawn unintelligible characters."
Since this letter was shown to us, we wrote to the young man to ask him for some additional explanations. Here are the answers to the questions we addressed to him; the questions can be easily guessed from these answers.
“1 - The event took place in Mulhouse, not in my room, but in the one where I practiced most frequently, and located in a neighboring house, in the company of two friends, one of whom played the flute and the other the violin; the latter was the one who gave me lessons. It didn't happen anywhere else.
2 - It was necessary that I played; and if sometimes I was resting too long, several sounds, and sometimes several chords were heard as if to invite me to continue. However, the day when this music was produced following an organ from Barbaria, I was not playing.
3 - That music had a sufficiently accentuated character to be able to be annotated; I did not have the thought of doing it.
4. It seemed to come from a well-defined point, but that was constantly traveling in the room; it was fixated for a few moments, so that you could point to where it came from; but when one sought that place to discover its secret, it immediately changed and moved elsewhere, or was heard in different places.
5. That effect lasted for about three months since February 1862. Here is how it stopped: One day we were together, my boss, another employee and myself; we were talking about one thing or another, when my boss, without preamble, asked me this question: "Do you believe in ghosts?" - No,” I replied. He continued to question me, and I decided to tell him what was going on. He listened to me with great awe; when I was done, he slapped me on the shoulder and said, "We'll talk about you." He spoke about it to a doctor, who is said to be very knowledgeable in physics, and who explained the fact to him by saying that I was a sensitive, a magnetized. My boss, trying to figure it out, came one day to find me in the room, and ordered me to play. I obeyed, and the invisible music was heard for a few seconds, very distinctly for me, vaguely for the boss and the assistants. The boss moved around the room in several places but could not get anything else.
The following Sunday, I returned to the bedroom; it is the one where the music was heard following the organ of Barbaria, without my playing. This was the last time, and since then nothing similar has happened.”
Observation: Before attributing a fact to the intervention of the Spirits, it is necessary to carefully study all the circumstances. The one in question here has all the characteristics of a manifestation; it is likely that it was produced by some Spirit sympathetic to the young man, to bring him to the Spiritist ideas, and to call the attention of others to these kinds of phenomena. But then, it will be said, why hasn’t the effect occurred in a more resounding manner? Why, more importantly, has it suddenly stopped? The Spirits are not held accountable to all motives that make them act; but one must assume that they were satisfied with the impression they wanted to produce. Moreover, the cessation of the phenomenon at the very moment when it was desired to continue, must have the result of proving that the young man's wishes had nothing to do with that, and that there was no deception. That music was heard by those present, excluding any effect of illusion or imagination, as well as the idea of a story for entertainment; moreover, since the young man had no notion of Spiritism, one cannot suppose that he was under the influence of preconceived ideas; it was only after several years that he was able to explain the phenomenon. Several people are in the same situation; Spiritism reminds them of forgotten facts that they attributed to hallucination, and of which they can henceforth realize. Spontaneous phenomena are what can be called natural experimental Spiritism.
