The Mystery of the Galloping Ghost

did begin and end at approximately the times that these
tourists reported hearing the sounds. We can also say that no other, more
ordinary explanation is available. For example, the ocean doesn’t sound like
cannon fire, and there were no large groups of people around who were shouting
at one another. What’s more, all the tourists claim that they have no knowledge
of the Battle of Dieppe. That, of course, is impossible to prove.”
    “And
nobody thinks they just made their stories up?” Trixie asked anxiously.
    “That’s
exactly what most people do think,” Wilhelmina told her, “because they are not
prepared to believe in psychic phenomena. However, the serious investigators of
the claims have found reasons to believe them. The tourists usually report
their experience quite innocently, assuming that everyone else has had it, too.
It’s only when they learn that nobody else has heard the sounds that they
realize they’ve experienced something unusual.”
    “Could
we talk about this outside, please?” Honey asked in a plaintive voice.
    Trixie
looked around the cabin and suddenly felt that she, too, would be more
comfortable elsewhere.
    “You
girls can wait outside,” Wilhelmina said. “I need to make a few notes from
direct observation.” She took out her notepad and pencil and lost herself in
her work.
    The
forest outside was nearly as gloomy as the cabin, but it was fresher-smelling
and less frightening.
    “Do
you really think we traveled backward in time?” Honey
asked.
    “I
don’t know,” Trixie told her. “Until a minute ago, I didn’t even know there was
such a thing, outside of books and movies. Wilhelmina seems to think so, and
she ought to know.”
    “Do
you think it could happen again?” Honey persisted. “Could we spend the rest of
our lives walking into places and things that happened hundreds of years ago? Oh, how awful!”
    Trixie
put her arm around her friend’s shoulder, wishing she could think of some
comforting words. Honey’s thought was a frightening one. It was one thing to go
looking for a mystery; it was quite another to stumble into an adventure in a
time and place you knew nothing about. Especially if nobody’s going to believe you when you tell them about it, Trixie thought, but of course, she’d experienced that before! “We’ll just have to find out more from
Wilhelmina,” she told Honey.
    The
psychic investigator came out of the cabin a few minutes later. “Most
interesting!” she said with relish. She started energetically back down the
path, with the girls following behind.
    “Are
there other examples of retrocognition ?” Trixie
asked.
    “Oh
my, yes,” Wilhelmina told her. “The most famous was at Versailles ,
also in France .
Two well-respected British schoolteachers visited there on August 10, 1901.
They took a wrong turn, went down a little-used path— and appear to have spent
most of the afternoon in the year 1789. They saw people dressed in period
clothes, who seemed to be carrying out the duties of people of that time.
What’s more, the people were recognizable in old court portraits that the two
women later found. One of the women appears to have been Marie Antoinette,
Queen of France.”
    “Did
the women ever experience retrocog-nition again?”
Honey asked Wilhelmina.
    “No.
They went back to Versailles repeatedly, but they were never able to duplicate the experience. Instead, they
spent most of their lives trying to convince people of what they’d seen. They
grew obsessed with the experience, until it made them a little crazy— and
nearly ruined their lives.”
    Trixie
and Honey exchanged panic-stricken glances.
    Then
Wilhelmina realized that her statement had been upsetting. “Of course, those
women may have been somewhat high-strung to begin with. Many other people have
experienced retrocognition —without similar fates.”
    Trixie
breathed a sigh of relief, but Honey’s main concern hadn’t yet been resolved.
“I still don’t understand what makes retrocognition happen,” she said. “I mean, why to some people and not others? Why in some
places and not others?”
    “We
have only theories,” Wilhelmina told her. “The most popular one is that, at
times of crisis, some intense emotional energy is discharged which lingers
around an area. Not many places are the scene of such crises, so not many are
prone to retrocognition .
    “As
for the people who experience it,” Wilhelmina went on, “they seem to be, for
some