It may need a thread of its own soon but the Tower of London thing seemed worth transcribing. I started today with a post about John Keel and remarked how wrong he was to assume that strange news did not travel fast in Victorian times. I am ending the day with a transcription from one of Dickens' magazines made possible because it was picked up (probably word-for-word) by a Mexican paper!
Here it is, then. Swifte's narrative from 1865:
Recently, Mr. Edward Lenthal Swifte, former keeper of the crown jewels in the Tower, has put forth an extraordinary narrative of an appearance which he saw in the Jewel House in the year 1817.
One night in October, about twelve o'clock, as he, his wife, their little boy, and his wife's sister were sitting at supper, his wife, when about to drink a glass of wine and water, suddenly exclaimed, "Good God! What is that?" Mr. Swifte looked up and saw a cylindrical figure like a glass tube, seemingly about the thickness of his arm, hovering between the ceiling and the table. It appeared to be filled with a dense fluid, white and pale azure, incessantly rolling and mingling within the cylinder.
In about two minutes it moved towards Mrs. Swifte's sister, then passed before the boy and Mrt. Swifte, and ultimately floated behind Mrs. Swifte, who instantly crouched down, covered her shoulders with both hands, exclaimed in the utmost terror, "Oh, Christ! it has seized me!" Mr. Swifte caught up his chair, and struck at the wainscott behind her, then rushed up stairs into the children's room and told the nurse what he had seen. The phantom had previously crossed the upper end of the table and disappeared.
The strangest part of the business is, that neither the sister in-law not the boy saw anything of this appearance. Mr. Swifte says that he is bound to state that, shortly before the event, some young lady residents in the Tower had been suspected of making phantasmagorical experiments at their windows; but he alleges that those windows did not command any in his dwelling, and on the night in question the doors were all closed, and heavy dark cloth curtains were let down over the casements, The only light in the room was that of two candles on the table.
Very shortly after this strange affair, one of the night sentries at the Jewel Office was alarmed by the figure of a huge bear issuing from underneath the door; he thrust at it with his bayonet, which stuck in the door, and he then dropped into a fit, and in two or three days died. The sergeant declared that such appearances were not uncommon. The sentry, it is alleged, was not asleep or drunk at the time, but he may have been on the eve of a fit from natural causes. and the vision may have been the result of the state of his health. Mr Swifte's vision is more difficult to account for, from the fact of its having been seen by two of the persons present, and not by the other two; yet one cannot very well give a supernatural interpretation to so absurd and purposeless an appearance.
Article quote ends.
This more complete account raises a number of new questions which I may go into when leisure permits.
