Haunted houses by Camille Flammarion (6 photos)

Haunted houses are perhaps one of the most fertile themes for horror films.





And a topic that was studied in detail not only by those who like to tickle their nerves, but also by respected professionals representing serious fields of science.



Camille Flammarion

Among them was the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, who wrote many books about stars and celestial bodies, starting with La pluralité des mondes habités in 1862. At the same time, the astronomer sincerely believed in extraterrestrial life and life after death.

Flammarion believed that there is much more in the world than is accessible to our senses.

“It is unacceptable for nature, both animate and inanimate, to be limited to the visible universe,” he said. "We must think - we who do not even know the true nature of man - that there may be other beings of a different type and with extremely varied intelligence, existing both in the invisible universe and in the visible world."





Camille Flammarion

These beings may be spiritual or alien. He wrote a lot about the latter as about Martians, convinced that they had higher intelligence and lived better lives.

“You can be sure that someday we will correspond with the Martians,” Flammarion promised. Wells predicted this with rather exaggerated imagination, but we will not use machines, we will use psychic currents. I firmly believe that telepathic power is stronger than cosmic power."

On the spiritual side, he was convinced that the soul lived on after death and began collecting stories of ghosts haunting homes and speaking to loved ones left behind.

In his 1924 book Haunted Houses, he recounted 5,600 incidents relayed to him in letters and diaries. One such letter described how the spirit made contact at the moment of death:

I married July 4, 1888. My fifteen-year-old sister did not attend the wedding due to illness. On July 6, my wife and I left to celebrate our honeymoon, and my sister accompanied us.

The letters that we received from our relatives from July 6 to July 12 did not contain any information about my sister’s health. July 12 (we were in Paris at the time) was a delightful day for my wife and I, until ten o’clock in the evening. We spent the evening at the theater. At ten o'clock I was suddenly filled with a feeling of deep sadness. My young wife could not understand this sudden change in me, and neither did I myself. Leaving the theater, I hurried after her to the hotel where we were staying.

I put out the candle and lay in bed with my eyes open, silent, puzzled by my own condition. It must have been about one in the morning.



Suddenly there was a loud noise in the room, a terrible noise. My wife screamed, alarmed and scared. I lit a candle. The closet door was open. We didn't touch it and it was empty. I calmed my wife down, closed the closet door and went to bed.

The next morning, when we got up, we received a telegram calling us home. My sister died the night before at ten o'clock in the evening. She knew we were at the Hotel Spain.

Was her last thought about us, and did she convey it to us? We could only get it at that hotel. I don't need to assure you of the absolute veracity of this story.

Etienne Mimar



Among the ghosts described in Flammarion's book, there were many mischievous ones. They frolicked, hit people, grabbed their legs, spilled coffee, broke china, knocked on the walls, dripped blood, filled rooms with smoke and threw stones.

Flammarion claims that these cases were thoroughly investigated and obtained from reputable sources. However, he acknowledged that there were also cases of fraud, such as houses that were "inhabited" by scammers who wanted to reduce the value of the houses before purchasing.



But it's not fun at all. Do you admit the existence of strange and inexplicable heavy energy in homes?