The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

Page 216 of 376

Page 216 of 376
The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

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assimilable. Then they'll be as reasonable as trees. By reasonableness | mean that which assimilates with a dominant force, or system, or a major body of thought--which is, itself, of course, hypnosis and delusion--developing, however, in our acceptance, to higher and higher approximations to realness. The poltergeists are now evil or absurd to me, proportionately to their present unassimilableness, compounded, however, with the factor of their possible future assimilableness. We lug in the poltergeists, because some of our own data, or alleged data, merge away indistinguishably with data, or alleged data, of them: Instances of stones that have been thrown, or that have fallen, upon a small area, from an unseen and undetectable source. London Times, April 27, 1872: "From 4 o'clock, Thursday afternoon, until half past eleven, Thursday night, the houses, 56 and 58 Reverdy Road, Bermondsey, were assailed with stones and other missiles coming from an unseen quarter. Two children were injured, every window broken, and several articles of furniture were destroyed. Although there was a strong body of policemen scattered in the neighborhood, they could not trace the direction whence the stones were thrown." "Other missiles" make a complication here. But if the expression means tin cans and old shoes, and if we accept that the direction could not be traced because it never occurred to anyone to look upward--why, we've lost a good deal of our provincialism by this time. London Times, Sept. 16, 1841: That, in the home of Mrs. Charton, at Sutton Courthouse, Sutton Lane, Chiswick, windows had been broken "by some unseen agent." Every attempt to detect the perpetrator failed. The mansion was detached and surrounded by high walls. No other building was near it. The police were called. Two constables, assisted by members of