Hodgson's comments on the experiments in slate-writing made with Eglinton and Davey discussed in the next chapter. That such errors, of observation or of memory, are responsible for a great part at any rate of the marvels reported in Poltergeist cases, we can often find out by comparison of the accounts given by different witnesses of the same incident, or by the same witness at different times; or, more generally, by a comparison of the evidence given by educated and uneducated witnesses.
The following narrative, which we owe to Mr. W. G. Grottendieck, of Dordrecht, will serve to illustrate the two main sources of error above referred to. It is the more valuable as an illustration because Mr. Grottendieck is a particularly scrupulous and level-headed witness, and apparently a close observer. He writes as follows:
. . . It was in September, 1903, that the following abnormal fact occurred to me. Every detail of it has been examined by me very carefully. I had been on a long journey through the jungle of Palembang and Djambi (Sumatra) with a gang of fifty Javanese coolies for exploring purposes. Coming back from the long trip, I found that my home had been occupied by somebody else and I had to put up my bed in another house that was not yet ready, and had just been erected from wooden poles and lalang or kadiang. The roof was formed of great dry leaves of a kind called "kadjang" in Palembang. These great leaves are arranged one overlapping the other. In this way it is very easy to form a roof if it is only for a temporary house. This house was situated pretty far away from the bore-places belonging to the oil company, in whose service I was working.
