A most curious visitor today, a specimen I shall label Credulus planetarius. A Mr. Hargrave of Lydney presented himself at The Larches, armed with a letter of introduction from a distant cousin of my sister’s husband—a chain of recommendation sufficiently tenuous to guarantee eccentricity.
He claims, with an unnerving lack of irony, to be in regular communication with entities from a celestial body he refers to only as “Planet H”. Over tea (which he took with three sugars, a fact I recorded for no reason other than its specificity), he informed me that we are being watched, that our progress is being judged, and that the only way to shield oneself from the “ethereal emanations” is to sleep with a raw turnip placed under one’s pillow.
I offered him a slice of Mrs. Gable’s seed cake and enquired as to the turnip’s mechanism of action. Was it absorbent? Did it emit a counter-frequency? He waved his hand dismissively. “It is a matter of sympathetic vibration, sir. The turnip, in its humble earthiness, resonates with the planet’s core and disrupts the flow.”
I made a note that the mint tea seemed to have a more stimulating effect on his imagination than Saturn ever did on the tides. I believe he left somewhat disappointed by my lack of alarm. I, however, am left with a fine new entry for my catalogue of worldly follies.
Curator’s Note
This entry is a classic example of Bennet’s empirical scepticism clashing with the era’s burgeoning spiritualist and esoteric fads. “Mr. Hargrave of Lydney” does not appear in any other records we have found and was likely one of many such local figures who developed elaborate personal cosmologies. The reference to “Planet H” is intriguing; it is almost certainly not a reference to Uranus (discovered by Herschel and sometimes called Herschel’s Planet), but rather a name of Hargrave’s own invention. Bennet’s focus on the “mechanism” is typical of his natural-philosophy approach to all claims, human or otherwise. - Dr. E. Reed