Windmill of Vicq-sur-NahonWith the title: The devil of the windmill, the Moniteur de l'Indre, February 1867, contains the following story:
“Mr. Garnier, François, is a farmer and miller in the village of Vicq-sur-Nahon. He is, we like to think, a peaceful man, and yet, since the month of September, his mill has been the scene of miraculous facts, such as to suggest that the devil, or at least a facetious Spirit, has elected that place as his domicile. For example, it seems beyond doubt that, devil or Spirit, the author of the facts that we are going to report, likes to sleep at night, because he only works during the day.
Our Spirit loves to juggle with the sheets on the beds. He takes them without anyone noticing, takes them away and hides them either in a vat, in the oven, or under bundles of hay. He carries the sheets, from the boy's bed, from one stable to another, and they are found more than an hour later under hay or in a rack. To open the doors, the Spirit of Vicq-sur-Nahon does not need a key. One day Mr. Garnier, in the presence of his servants, locked the door of the bakery with a double turn and put the key in his pocket, and yet this door opens almost immediately before the eyes of Garnier and his servants, and they could not explain how.
Another time, on January 1st, a completely new way of wishing someone a Happy New Year, a little before nightfall, the feathered bed, the sheets, the blankets of a bed placed in a room, are removed without disturbing the bed, and these objects were found on the floor, near the bedroom door. Garnier and his family then imagined, in hopes of warding off all this witchcraft, to change the bedroom beds, that in fact took place; but once the move had taken place, the diabolical facts, that we have just reported, began all over again, with more intensity. On different occasions, a stable boy found the trunk where he holds his belongings open, and his things scattered in the stable.
But here are two circumstances in which all the evil cleverness of the Spirit is revealed. Among the servants of Mr. Garnier there is a 13-year-old girl, named Marie Richard. One day, this child, being in a bedroom, suddenly saw a small chapel rise up on the bed, and all the objects placed on the fireplace, 4 vases, 1 Christ, 3 glasses, 2 cups, in one of which with holy water, and a small bottle also filled with holy water, successively moving, as obeying the order of an invisible being, to take place on the improvised altar.
The bedroom door was ajar, and little Richard's sister-in-law was near the door. A shadow came out of the chapel, according to little Richard, approached the child and instructed her to invite her masters to give a blessed bread, and to have a mass said. The child promised it; for nine days calm reigned in the mill; Garnier had a mass said by the priest of Vicq, offered a blessed bread, and since the next day, January 15th, the devilish things began again.
The keys to the doors disappeared; the doors that were left open are closed, and a locksmith, called to open the door of the mill, could not do it, finding himself forced to remove the lock. These last events took place on January 29th. That same day, around noon, as the servants were having their meals, the Richard girl takes a pitcher of drink, helps herself to drink, and Mr. Garnier's watch, hanging on a nail on the fireplace, falls into her glass. The watch is put back on the fireplace; but the girl Richard, using a dish served on the table, takes the watch with her spoon. For the third time, the watch is hung in its place, and, for the third time, little Richard finds it in a pot that was boiling on the fire, as well as a small bottle of medicine, whose cork pops out on to her face.
Soon, the inhabitants of the mill were terrified; no one wanted to stay in a haunted house anymore. Finally, Garnier decided to warn the police commissioner of Valençay, who went to Vicq, accompanied by two policemen. But the devil did not see fit to show himself to the agents of the law. Only, they advised Garnier to send the little Richard away, which he did immediately. Was this measure enough to send the devil away? Hopefully, for the rest of the people of the mill.”
In a later issue, the Moniteur de l'Indre contains the following:
We told the story, in due time, of all the devilish things that happened at the mill of Vicq-sur-Nahon, of which Mr. Garnier is a tenant. Those devils, so far amusing, are beginning to turn into tragedy. After the pranks, the juggling, the conjuring tricks, the devil has resorted to fire.
On the 12th of this month, two fire attempts took place, almost simultaneously, in the stables of Mr. Garnier. The first took place around five in the evening. The fire caught in the straw, at the foot of the bed of the miller boys. The second fire broke out about an hour after the first, but in a different stable. The fire also started at the foot of a bed, and in the straw. These two fires were, fortunately, extinguished by the father of Garnier, aged eighty, and his servants, warned by the mentioned Marie Richard.
Our readers must remember that this young girl, aged fourteen, was always the first to notice the witchcraft that took place at the mill, so much so that, on the advice given to her, Garnier had dismissed the little Richard from his home. When the two fires broke out, this girl had returned to Garnier’s hose fifteen days earlier. It was she again who noticed the first of the two fires, of March 12th.
According to the research carried out at the mill, suspicion fell on two servants.
The Garnier family is so struck by the events, of which their mill has been the scene, that they have convinced themselves that the devil, or at least some evil spirit, has taken up residence in their home.”
One of our friends wrote to Mr. Garnier, asking him to let him know if the facts reported by the newspaper were real or tales made for pleasure, and in any case, what could be true or ‘exaggerated’ in this story.
Mr. Garnier replied that everything was perfectly correct, and in accordance with the declaration he himself had made to the police commissioner of Valençay. He also confirms the two fires and adds: The newspaper did not even tell everything. According to his letter, the facts had been happening for four to five months, and it was only pushed to the limit by their repetition, without being able to discover the perpetrator, that he made his statement. He ends by saying: “I do not know, Sir, for what purpose you are asking me for this information; but, if you have any knowledge of these things, I beg you to take part in my troubles, for I assure you that we are not at our ease in our house. If you can find a way to find the author of all these outrageous facts, you would be doing us a great service."
An important point to clarify was to know what the participation of the young girl could be, either voluntarily by malice, or unconsciously by her influence. On this question, the Mr. Garnier said that the child, having been out of the house for fifteen days only, he could not judge the effect of her absence; but that he has no suspicion of her malevolence, any more than the other servants; that she had almost always announced what was going on beyond her reach; that thus, she had said several times: "Here is the bed that turns upside down in such and such a room," and that, having entered it without losing sight of it, the bed was found undone; that she had similarly warned of the two fires that have occurred since her return.
These facts, as we see, belong to the same kind of phenomena as those of Poitiers (Spiritist Review, February and March 1864 and May 1865); from Marseilles (April 1865); de Dieppe (March 1860), and so many others that can be called disorderly and disturbing manifestations.
We will first point out the difference between the tone of this story and that of the Poitiers newspaper, on what happened in that city. We remember the deluge of sarcasm that it rained down on the Spiritists on this matter, and its persistence on maintaining against the evidence, that it could only be the work of bad jokers that would soon be discovered, and that, ultimately, were never discovered. Le Moniteur de l'Indre, more cautious, confines itself to a narrative, not seasoned with any inappropriate joke, and which implies rather an affirmation than a denial.
Another remark is that events of this kind took place long before there was any question of Spiritism, and that since then they have almost always happened with people that even do not know it by name, which excludes any influence due to belief and imagination. If the Spiritists were accused of faking these demonstrations, for the purpose of propaganda, one would ask who could have produced them before there were any Spiritists.
Knowing what happened at the Vicq-sur-Nahon mill only through the story that was told, we limit ourselves to noting that here nothing deviates from what Spiritism admits the possibility of, nor from the normal conditions in which such facts may occur; that these facts are explained by perfectly natural laws, and consequently, have nothing marvelous about them. Ignorance of these laws alone has been able, up to this day, to make them regarded as supernatural effects, as it has been the case with almost all the phenomena that science has later revealed the laws.
What may seem more extraordinary, and is less easily explained, is the fact that the doors are opened after having been carefully locked. Modern manifestations offer several examples of that. A similar fact happened in Limoges, a few years ago (Spiritist Review, August 1860). Considering that the state of our knowledge does not allow us to give yet a conclusive explanation, that would not prejudge anything, because we are far from knowing all the laws that govern the invisible world, all the forces that this world conceals, nor all the applications of the laws that we know. Spiritism has not yet said its last word, far from it, no more on physical things than on spiritual things. Many discoveries will be the fruit of subsequent observations. Spiritism has, in a way, until now, only laid the groundwork for a science whose reach is unknown.
With the help of what it has already discovered, it opens, to those that will come after us, the path of investigations in a special order of ideas. It proceeds only by observations and deductions, and never by supposition. If a fact is attested, it says that it must have a cause, and that this cause can only be natural, and then it seeks that. In the absence of a categorical proof, it can provide a hypothesis, but until confirmation, it only gives it as a hypothesis, and not as an absolute truth. With regards to the phenomenon of open doors, like that of transportations through rigid bodies, it is all still reduced to a hypothesis, based on the fluidic properties of matter, very imperfectly known, or to put it better, that are not suspected yet. If the fact in question is confirmed by experience, it must have, as we have said, a natural cause; if it is repeated, it is because it is not an exception but the consequence of a law. The possibility of the liberation of Saint Peter, from his prison, as reported in the Acts of the Apostles, Chap. XII, would thus be demonstrated, without the need to resort to a miracle.
Of all the mediumistic effects, the physical manifestations are the easiest to simulate; so we must be careful not to accept too lightly facts of this kind as authentic, whether they are spontaneous like those of the mill of Vicq-sur-Nahon, or consciously provoked by a medium. It is true that the imitation could only be crude and imperfect, but with skill one can easily succeed, as it was done in the past with the double sight, to those that did not know the conditions in which the real phenomena can occur. We have seen so-called mediums with a rare ability to simulate apports, direct writing, and other kinds of manifestations. It is, therefore, necessary to admit only consciously the intervention of the Spirits in these kinds of things.
In the case in question, we do not affirm this intervention; we limit ourselves to saying that it is possible. The two starts of fire alone could raise the suspicion of a human act, aroused by malice, that the future will undoubtedly reveal. It is good to note, however, that thanks to the clairvoyance of the young girl, the consequences could be prevented. Except for this last fact, the others were nothing but disruption without bad consequences. If they are the work of Spirits, they can only come from frivolous Spirits, enjoying the fears and impatience they cause. We know that they can come in all shades, like here on Earth. The best way to get rid of that is not to worry about it, and to tire their patience, that is never very long lasting, when they see that no one is bothered with it, proving to them by laughing at their mischiefs, and challenging them to do more. The surest way to get them to persevere is to become tormented and angry with them. We can still get rid of them by evoking them with the help of a good medium, and by praying for them; thus, by talking to them, we can know what they are and what they want, and make them listen to reason.
These kinds of manifestations have, moreover, a more serious result: that of propagating the idea of the invisible world, that surrounds us, and of asserting its action on the material world. That is why they occur preferably among people foreign to Spiritism, rather than among Spiritists who do not need it to be convinced. Fraud, in such a case, can sometimes be only an innocent joke, or a means of giving importance to oneself by making believe in a faculty that one does not possess, or that one possess imperfectly; but more often it has for motive an obvious or dissimulated interest, and for goal the exploitation of the confidence of too naïve or inexperienced people; it is then a real swindle. It would be superfluous to insist on saying that those that are guilty of any deception of this kind, if solicited only by self-love, are not Spiritists, even when they would pretend to be such. Real phenomena have sui generis character and occur under circumstances that defy all suspicion. A complete knowledge of these characters and circumstances can easily lead to the revelation of the deception.
If these explanations come to the knowledge of Mr. Garnier, he will find there the answer requested in his letter.
One of our correspondents sends us the report, written by an eyewitness, of similar demonstrations that took place last January, in the village of Basse-Indre (Lower Loire). They consisted on knocks beaten with obstinacy for several weeks, and that stirred up all the inhabitants of a house. All the research and investigation carried out by the authority, to discover the cause, led to nothing. As a matter of fact, this event does not present any very remarkable peculiarity, except that, like all spontaneous manifestations, it calls attention to the Spiritist phenomena.
Facts of physical manifestations, those that occur spontaneously, exert on public opinion an influence infinitely greater than the effects provoked directly by a medium, either because they have more impact and notoriety, or because they give less hold to the suspicion of charlatanism and conjuring.
This reminds us of a fact that happened in Paris, in May of last year. Here it is, as it was reported in the past by the Petit Journal.
