Pennsylvania Folklore

In my last foreword I emphasized the value of folklore. Its significance grows upon me with age. I have now come to regard it as a kind of appendix to Scripture. Outside of mere magic, an abuse of correspondences, as Swedenborg calls it, there is in folklore a digest of the spiritual insight of the plain people. It also contains actual facts boiled to rags. For instance, in 1919 the dying Horace Traubel saw in vision his life-long idol, Walt Whitman, and the apparition was also seen by Colonel Cosgrave, who felt a shock when it touched him. The flimsy modern paper whereon the scientific account of this is printed will soon perish, and then there will be nothing left but loose literary references and memories to witness that it happened. Any skeptic can challenge these, and the apparition will become folklore. As it is in its scientific setting in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research for 1921, it is a side light on the Transfiguration. For if Whitman appeared to Traubel in 1919, and Swedenborg appeared to Andrew Jackson Davis in 1844, why should not the great predecessors of Christ appear also to him?