The “Frenchman” of the story was William James himself. As important, he noted that his recovery had a “religious bearing.” So “invasive and powerful” was the terror, he wrote, that only clinging to phrases from the Bible-“the eternal God is my refuge” or “I am the resurrection and the life” and other phrases-saved him from going “really insane.” As James noted concerning the power of religion to those gripped by such a “grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying” experience: “Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help!” He could not forget “that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life” and gained sympathy for similar feelings in others. Recovery came but the experience transformed him. “There fell upon me without warning,” he wrote, “just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence.” He realized that in a moment fate might reduce him to the state of a patient he had recently observed at an asylum who sat “like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non human.” He so feared becoming like that boy “that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely and I became a mass of quivering fear.” For days on end, the Frenchmen awoke with “a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before and that I have never felt since.” For months, he could not go out alone in the dark alone. In one of the many remarkable first-person narratives he reproduced, a Frenchman tells how one evening, while plagued by a “general depression of spirits,” he was overcome by a terrifying panic. Central to its appeal has been James’s focus on individual spiritual life rather than churches, theologies, rituals, and symbols.

Ghost hunters william james