TWENTY YEARS’ EXPERIENCE AS A
GHOST HUNTER

Twenty Years’ Experience
as a Ghost Hunter

BY
ELLIOT O’DONNELL
AUTHOR OF “THE SORCERY CLUB,” “WERWOLVES,”
“SOME HAUNTED HOUSES OF ENGLAND AND WALES,”
“HAUNTED HIGHWAYS,” ETC., ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
PHYLLIS VERE CAMPBELL
AND
H. C. BEVAN-PETMAN

HEATH, CRANTON, LTD.
FLEET LANE, LONDON

First Published, November, 1916.
Second Edition, February, 1917.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In presenting this volume of ghostly reminiscences to the Public I would lay stress on the fact that, in order to avoid the danger of incurring an action for slander or libel, I have—save where expressedly stated to the contrary—resorted to the use of fictitious names for all persons and houses. For the reproduction of one or two articles I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. Ralph Shirley.

ELLIOT O’DONNELL.

1916.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Twenty Years’ Experience
as a Ghost Hunter

CHAPTER I
I COMMENCE MY GHOSTLY INVESTIGATIONS IN DUBLIN

In starting a book of this sort, I believe it is usual to say something about one’s self.

I was born in the ’seventies. My father came from County Limerick, and belonged to the Truagh Castle O’Donnells, who, tracing their descent from Shane Luirg, the elder brother of Niall Garbh, the ancestor of Red Hugh, rightly claim to be the oldest branch of the great clan. He graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, was for some time vicar of a parish near Worcester, and died in Egypt, under mysterious and much discussed circumstances,[1] soon after I came into the world.

My mother was English; she belonged to an old Midland family, and only survived my father a few years.

Although I am generally known as a ghost hunter, needless to say it was not for such a career that I was educated, first of all at Clifton College, then at an Army crammer’s, and finally at Chedwode Crawley’s well-known coaching establishment in Ely Place, Dublin. There I read for the Royal Irish Constabulary, and, attending regularly, remained for a little over two years. I can safely say these two years were two of the happiest I have ever known, for my companions at that time were the nicest set of fellows I have ever met, and amongst them I formed many lifelong friendships.

When I was not working, I usually spent my time playing football or cricket, to both of which sports I was devoted, and, when I was not thus engaged, I used to tramp across hill and dale continually exploring the country in search of adventure.

But in those days I did not look for ghosts—they came to me; they came to me then, as they had come to me before, and as they have come to me ever since.

With my early experiences of the Unknown—which experiences, by the way, extend over the whole period of my youth—I have dealt fully in former works; so that in this volume I propose to confine myself to later experiences, commencing approximately with my début as an investigator of haunted houses and superphysical occurrences in general.

To begin with, however, let me state plainly that I lay no claims to being what is termed a scientific psychical researcher. I am not a member of any august society that conducts its investigations of the other world, or worlds, with test tube and weighing apparatus; neither do I pretend to be a medium or consistent clairvoyant.

I am merely a ghost hunter; merely one who honestly believes that he inherits in some degree the faculty of psychic perceptiveness from a long line of Celtic ancestry; and who is, and always has been, deeply and genuinely interested in all questions relative to phantasms and a continuance of individual life after physical dissolution. Moreover, in addition to this psychic faculty, I possess, as I have already hinted, a spirit of adventure; and since this spirit is irresistible, had I not decided to become a ghost hunter, I should doubtless have embarked upon some other and hardly less exciting pursuit.

The actual cause of my decision to adopt ghost-hunting as a profession was an experience which befel me in the summer of ’92. I was at that time a student in Ely Place, Dublin, and being in search of rooms, was recommended to try a house within a stone’s throw of the Waterloo Road.

A widow named Davis, with two leviathan daughters, Mona and Bridget, ran the establishment, and as the vacant apartments were large, apparently well ventilated and exceedingly moderate in price, I decided to take them. Consequently, I arrived there with my luggage one afternoon, and was speedily engaged in the tiring and somewhat irritating task of unpacking.

When I retired to rest that first night, I certainly had no thought of ghosts or anything in connection with them; on the contrary, my mind was wholly occupied with speculations as to how I should fare in the coming weekly examination at Crawley’s, whether the extra attention I had recently bestowed on mathematics would be of any service to me, or whether, in spite of it, I should again occupy my place at the bottom of the class. I remember thinking, however, as I blew out the light and turned into bed, that there was something about the room now—though I could not tell what—that I had not noticed by daylight; but I soon went to sleep, and although I awoke several times before morning—a phenomenon in itself—I cannot say that I thought then of any superphysical element in the atmosphere. It was not until I had been there several nights that the event occurred which effectually shaped my future career.

One evening the two girls, Mona and Bridget, were making so much racket in the room beneath me, that I found work impossible, and being somewhat tired, for I had stuck very close to it all day, I resolved to go to bed. On my way thither I encountered two young men, T.C. students, who were also lodging in the house, hotly engaged in an argument; and they appealed to me to express an opinion. I told them what I thought, as they followed me upstairs; then, when I reached my room, I abruptly bade them good-night, and, entering, locked the door behind me.

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, I quietly slipped off my clothes and put out the light. The two men were still haranguing one another for all they were worth when I got in between the sheets and prepared to lie down. The room was not entirely dark; from between the folds of the thick plush curtains that enveloped the windows stray beams from the powerful moonlight filtered through and battled their way to the foot of the bed. I was looking at them with some degree of curiosity, when I saw something move. I glanced at it in astonishment, and, to my unmitigated horror, the shape of something dark and sinister rose noiselessly from the floor and came swiftly towards me. I tried to shout, but could not make a sound. I was completely paralysed, and as I sat there, sick with fear and apprehension, the thing leaped on to me, and, gripping me mercilessly by the throat, bore me backwards.

I gasped, and choked, and suffered the most excruciating pain. But there was no relaxation—the pressure of those bony fingers only tightened and the torture went on. At last, after what seemed to me an eternity, there was a loud buzzing in my ears, my head seemed to spin round violently, and my brain to burst. I lost consciousness. On coming to, I found that my assailant had left me. I struck a light. My fellow-lodgers were still going at one another hammer and tongs—and the door was, as I had left it, locked on the inside. I searched the room thoroughly; the window was bolted; there was nothing in the cupboard; nothing under the bed; nothing anywhere. I got into bed again, full of the worst anticipations, and, if sleep came to me, it was only in the briefest snatches.

At dawn the room became suffused with a cold, grey glow, and the suggestion of something horribly evil standing close beside the bed and sardonically watching me impressed me so strongly that, yielding to a sudden impulse of terror, I hid my head under the bed-clothes, and remained in that undignified position till the morning was well advanced and I was “called.”

I got up, feeling downright ill, and although the sunlight metamorphosing everything now made the mere thought of a ghost simply ludicrous, I hurried out of the room as speedily as possible. Nor did I venture to pass another night there.

My landlady did not demur when I asked her to transfer me to another apartment, and later, before I took my final departure from her house, she confessed to me that it was haunted. She believed that it had been used as a private home for mentally afflicted people, and that someone, either one of the patients or a nurse—she did not know which—had died, under extremely painful circumstances, in the room I had first occupied.

The Davises left the house soon after I did, and who lives there now, and whether the hauntings still continue, I cannot say. When I last made enquiries, about two years ago, I learned that the then occupants had never admitted experiencing anything unusual, but that they always kept the room in which I had undergone the sensations of strangulation carefully locked.

This adventure of mine, intensely unpleasant as it had been at the time, profoundly interested me. Hitherto I had placidly accepted as truth all the dogmas of religion hurled at me from the pulpit and drilled into me at school, for the simple reason that I had always been taught to regard as infinitely correct and absolutely above criticism all that the clergy told me: God made the world, they said, and all the laws and principles appertaining to it—that was sufficient—I need not ask any questions. When I looked about me and saw men, and women, dogs, horses, and other animals suffering indescribable agonies from all kinds of foul and malignant diseases; when I encountered cripples, the maimed and blind, idiots and lunatics; or read in the papers of swindles, murders and suicides; or noted how, throughout nature, the strong animals prey upon the weak; how, for example, the tiger, the lion and the leopard terrorize the jungle, just as the shark and octopus terrorize the sea, and the wasp and spider, centipede and scorpion terrorize insect life (being furnished respectively with weapons for tearing and rending, and sucking the flesh, and entailing the most excruciating tortures on the nerve centres); when, I say, I noted all this, I was given to understand that I must on no account comment upon it—to do so was impious and wicked—I must abide by the precept of my pastor and pedagogue, namely, that “God is almighty and merciful, loving and wise.”

But now it was different—I was no longer in the schoolroom, no longer under the immediate influence of the Church. I met people in Dublin imbued with the broader instincts of a big, cosmopolitan community; I listened to their reasoning—reasoning which at first immeasurably shocked me, and afterwards struck me as horribly sane. Then, at this crisis, came the incident of the strangling. I tried to attribute it to a dream, but I was prevented by the fact that I had only just got into bed, and had not even lain down, when the figure seized me. Hence, I could only conclude that some spirit—the nature of my suffering and the horror it inspired leading me to suppose that it was a particularly evil one—had been my aggressor.

But why was it not in Hell? Had it escaped in spite of the strict supervision of the Almighty? Or could it be possible that the orthodox Paradise and Purgatory did not exist, and that the spirits of the dead were allowed to wander about at will? I became interested—deeply so; all sorts of wild speculations floated through my mind; I resolved to enquire further.

I would not be guided by any creed; I would set out on my work of investigation wholly unbiassed; I would gain whatever knowledge there was to be gained of another world without the aid either of priest or occultist, medium or scientist.

Several of my friends in Dublin were greatly interested in ghosts, and I learned from them of two houses that had long borne the reputation of being haunted. One was close to St. Stephen’s Green, within sight of the Queen’s Service Academy, and the other, a big, ugly edifice of a dingy grey, was in Blackrock. I had stayed in the former when a child, and had vivid recollections of the holes in the stone stairs, through which boiling oil was poured on the heads of the English soldiers at the time of the ’98.

There were many large and stately rooms in the house, oak-panelled and beautified throughout with much carving. I remember looking with awe and perplexity at the number of odd shadows that used to put in an appearance on the stairs and in the passages, just when it was my bed-time, but I did not then attribute them to ghosts. I simply did not know what they were. I heard sounds, too—clangs and clashes, and footsteps tramping up and down the stairs; sounds I did not attempt to analyse, possibly because I dared not. That was in 1886; I was then a small boy, and now—now only—after I had long left the house, and was back in Dublin, with the experience of the strangling ghost still fresh in my mind, I began to wonder whether these strange sounds and shadows might not have been due to the presence of the Superphysical. I mentioned the matter to my friends, and they expressed astonishment that I had not heard the house was haunted. One of them, a lady, told me that she had once stayed there and had been awakened every night by the sounds I had described—the sounds of heavy footsteps rushing up the stairs, of cries and groans, shrieks and oaths, coupled with the clashing of scabbards and sword blades, and the sound as of falling bodies.

Yet nothing was ever to be seen, saving the moonlight and shadows—plenty of shadows—shadows strangely suggestive of grotesque and fancifully clad people. I tried to obtain permission to sleep in the house, and in my innocence of the ways of landlords, I stated with the most pathetic candour my true intention—I wanted to investigate. The reply I got was certainly not courteous, neither did it permit of argument. Hence, feeling considerably crestfallen and humiliated, I found myself forced to give up my first attempt at ghost-hunting.

Then I turned my attention to the house in Blackrock, and fared no better. The landlord had been bothered to death with requests to spend nights there, and was endeavouring to discover the originator of the report that the place was haunted, in order that he might bring an action for Slander of Title. Consequently I could only examine the house from the outside, hoping that its ghostly inhabitants would one night take pity on me and exhibit themselves at one of the windows. But in this, too, I was disappointed; although, as the place invariably inspired me with the greatest dread, I have no doubt whatever but that it was genuinely and badly haunted.

There were several stories in circulation in Dublin about that time concerning the nature of the haunting, and the following—one of the most reliable—was told me by a Mrs. Blake. I will give it as nearly as I can in her own words:

“When I was a child of about twelve,” she began, “which was a good many years ago, my father, who was then stationed in Dublin, took the house on a three years’ lease, at a very low rental, due, so the owner stated, to the fact that there were far too many stairs, a feature to which most people, on account of their servants, strongly objected. Nothing was said about ghosts, and nothing was further from my parents’ minds when they took possession. We moved in towards the end of July, but it was not until the middle of September that we first became aware that the house was haunted. It happened in this way: My father and the maids were out one evening, and only my mother, my small brother and I were in the house. It was about eight o’clock. I was upstairs in the nursery reading to Teddy, and my mother was in the drawing-room, two storeys beneath. I was just in the middle of a sentence, when Teddy interrupted me. ‘Did you hear that?’ he exclaimed; ‘it’s someone on the stairs. I believe they are listening.’ I paused, and heard a loud creak. ‘Who can it be?’ I said; ‘there’s only mother in the house!’ Much mystified, I closed the book and went out on to the landing. No one was there; but when I got to the head of the stairs, I heard a loud scream, and then a dull thud, just as if someone had fallen. In an agony of mind I ran downstairs to see what had happened. As I arrived in the hall, the door of the drawing-room was slowly opened, and I saw, peeping cautiously out, a white face with two dark, gleaming, obliquely-set eyes, that filled with an expression of the most diabolical hatred as they met mine. I was so terrified that I started back some paces, and, as I did so, the door opened a little wider, and the figure of a short, elderly woman, clad in an old-fashioned black dress, and white cap crumpled closely round her lean, haggard face, glided out, and, passing by, ascended the stairs. As she came to the first bend, she turned, and looking down at me with an evil leer, shook her hand menacingly at me. She then passed out of sight, and I heard her climb the stairs, step by step, till she came to the nursery landing. A moment later, and Teddy gave a violent shriek.

“My terror was now so great that I think I should have gone mad had I been left there any longer by myself; but, by a merciful providence, a key turned in the lock of the front door, and my father entered. The sight of his well-known figure on the threshold at once loosened the spell that had bound me, and with a cry of delight I clutched him by the arms, imploring him to see at once what had happened to mother and Teddy.

“He ran into the drawing-room first and found my mother on the floor, just reviving from a faint. Lighting the gas, he fetched her some brandy, and then, bidding me stay with her, he hastened upstairs to Teddy. The latter was very badly frightened, and it was some days before he was well enough to give anything like a coherent account of what had happened. Of course, mother and father told Teddy that the queer figure they had seen was some friend of the servants, who had called while they were out, but I suppose they deemed me old enough to know the truth, for they discussed the incident openly in my presence. It appears that my mother had been quietly knitting in the drawing-room, when she suddenly felt very cold, and rising from her chair, with the intention of closing the door, found herself confronted by a hideous form. Subsequently, my father made a thorough search of the house, but he found no one, and as all the windows were fastened and the doors locked on the inside, we could only come to the conclusion that the figure my mother and Teddy and I had all seen was a ghost. A few days later it appeared to my father. He was coming out of his bedroom, when he saw a woman steal stealthily out of a room on the same landing and creep downstairs in front of him. There was something about her so intensely sinister that he felt chilled; but, determining to find out who she was, he followed her, and catching her up, demanded her name. There was a chuckling answer, the figure instantly disappeared, and a number of invisible somethings clattered down the stairs past him.

“I think my father was very scared; at all events he came into the breakfast-room with a very white face and ate hardly anything. Some time after this, when the autumn was well advanced, my uncle came to stay with us. He was a jolly, rollicking sailor, who had fought the Turks at Navarino, and had had many exciting adventures with Chinese pirates.

“No one told him the house was haunted; it was decided he should find that out for himself. One afternoon, several days after his arrival, he was taking off his boots in a room in the basement, when a current of icy air blew in on him, and, on raising his eyes to see whence the draught came, he perceived an extraordinarily pretty girl, clad in a dark green riding-habit, such as he believed were worn in the days of his great grand-parents, standing in the doorway, watching him intently. ‘This is one of Jack’s surprises’ (Jack was my father), he said to himself, ‘and a deuced pleasant one, too! The rogue, he knows nothing pleases me so much as the sight of a pretty girl, and, by Jove, she is pretty!’ Springing to his feet—for my uncle was never bashful in the presence of the fair sex—he advanced to shake hands. To his chagrin, however, she promptly turned round, and, walking swiftly away, began to ascend the stairs. My uncle followed her. On and on she led him till she came to the drawing-room; there she paused, and with the forefinger of her left hand on her lips, glanced coyly round at him. She then quietly turned the door handle, and signalling to him to follow, stole into the room on tiptoe. Charmed with this piece of acting, the naïvety of it appealing very strongly to his susceptible nature, my uncle hastened after her. The moment he crossed the threshold, however, he recoiled. Standing in the middle of the room was an old woman with a hideous, white face and black, leering eyes. There were no signs anywhere of the young and beautiful lady. She had completely vanished. My uncle was so shocked by the spectacle before him that he retreated on to the landing, and, as he did so, the drawing-room door swung to with a loud crash. He called my father, and they entered the room together; but it was quite empty, the old hag had disappeared as inexplicably as the girl. That evening there was to be a party, and the table in the dining-room groaned beneath the weight of one of those inimitable ‘spreads,’ in vogue some fifty or sixty years ago. With somewhat pardonable pride my mother took us all—my father, uncle and myself—to have a peep at it, before the guests arrived. As we drew near the room, we heard, to our astonishment, the plaintive sound of a spinet. My mother instantly drew back, trembling, whereupon my uncle, forcing a laugh, said, ‘This is one of the occasions upon which a gentleman should go first.’ He threw open the door as he spoke, and we all peered in. What I saw will never be effaced from my memory. The room exhibited a complete wreckage—the cloth was half off the table, the massive silver candlesticks were overturned, and the floor was strewn with piles of broken glass, china and eatables—everything was smashed and ruined. In the midst of the debris, her face turned towards us, lay a very beautiful girl. There were unmistakable evidences of a ghastly wound, but her eyes were partly open, and the strange light which gleamed from their blue depths revealed an expression which could only have been hatched in hell—a hell, peopled not with passive torture-torn sufferers, but with wholly abandoned beings actively engaged in licentiousness and everything that is destructive and antagonistic to man’s moral and mental progress. Standing over the woman, and holding a kind of stiletto in his hand, was a tall, fair man, in whose agonised and remorseful features we recognised at once a most startling likeness to my uncle. No detail was wanting—there was the deep scar on the temple, the curiously deep dimple in the chin; indeed, saving for the old-fashioned clothes, no likeness could have been more exact. Standing by his side, her hideous, scowling face thrust forward, her evil eyes glaring at us with the same vindictive insolence, was the old woman I had seen that night in the hall. Then, my father, uttering some exclamation, crossed himself, and, as he did so, the figures abruptly vanished, whilst the whole house echoed and re-echoed with loud peals of mocking, diabolical laughter. That was the finale; we left immediately afterwards, and from that day to this the house, I believe, has stood almost uninterruptedly empty.”

This is the gist of Mrs. Blake’s account of the happenings, and as I never found her anything but strictly truthful, I believe them to have been given me without any conscious exaggeration.

CHAPTER II
I AM PURSUED BY PHANTOM FOOTSTEPS

Before I left the west of Ireland, I set out one day to investigate a case of haunting by fairies, which was alleged to take place nightly at the junction of four cross roads on the southern slope of the Wicklow mountains.

I found a spot that seemed to correspond with the description of the scene of the haunting given me by my informant, and kept a vigil there for two consecutive nights without experiencing any of the anticipated results. However, I intended giving the place another trial, and accordingly set out; but when within half a mile or so of my destination, I began to feel very tired, and having a bad cold on me besides, I decided to put up at a cottage I espied a short distance off, instead of pursuing my way further.

The cottage stood a little back from the main road, perhaps a hundred yards or so, and was connected with it by a narrow lane. The situation was one of intense loneliness; the nearest village was a good two miles away, and few people, other than occasional cyclists, ever passed along the high road after nightfall. At the time I am speaking of, the cottage was tenanted by a couple named Mullins. The man was a drover, and his wife one of the tallest women I have ever seen; she possessed, moreover, a pair of green-grey eyes, and these were remarkable, not only for their curious colouring, but for the impression they gave one that they were perpetually trying not to see too much. Apart from these peculiarities, she seemed ordinary enough, and I felt I was in the house of very worthy and hard-working people.

I went to bed early and was given the only spare room in the cottage. It faced the front and was immediately over the tiny parlour. As the linen was spotless and felt thoroughly dry, I had no scruples about getting in between the sheets, and, stretching myself out, I was soon fast asleep.

I awoke with violent palpitations of the heart to find the room bathed with moonlight; and, as all was absolutely silent, I concluded it must be far on into the night. Suddenly I heard footsteps—footsteps in the distance, running at a well-regulated pace. They rang out sharp and clear in the still air, and gradually became more and more distinct. I was wondering who the person could be, out at such an hour, when a dog, apparently in the yard at the back of the house, set up the most unearthly howling. The next moment I heard Mrs. Mullins speak, and, inadvertently, I listened.

“John,” she said, “do you hear the dog?”

“I should be deaf and dumb if I didn’t,” Mullins replied sleepily. “What is it?”

“What is it, indeed! Why the dog never barks like that unless there is a spirit about. Do you remember those knocks on the door the night Uncle Mike died, and how the dog howled then? There’s something of the same sort about to-night. Listen!”

The steps very were near now. I listened intently. The runner, I thought, must be wearing very extraordinary boots, for every step, so it seemed to me, was accompanied by a peculiar and almost metallic click.

“John,” Mrs. Mullins suddenly resumed, “do you hear those steps? What are they? It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard anyone running along the high road like that at this time of night. Hark! They’ve got to the turning—they’re in the lane—they’re coming here! Get up at once; go and bolt the front door. The thing’s evil—evil, I’m sure, and it’s someone of us here it’s after.”

The steps grew rapidly nearer, and Mullins, stumbling hastily down the stairs, bolted both the doors and swung to the little wooden shutters. A moment later, and I heard the steps come right up to the door. There was a momentary pause, then a series of terrific knocks.

“Cross yourself, John; for God’s sake cross yourself!” Mrs. Mullins cried. “And may the Holy Virgin protect us.” She then started praying loudly and vehemently, and, whether it was the effect of her prayers or not, the knocking gradually diminished in violence, and then ceased altogether.

“Come on up, John,” Mrs. Mullins called out; “the thing, whatever it is, has ceased troubling us, and we may go to sleep in peace.”

Mullins, needing no second bidding, joined his wife, and once again the whole place was wrapped in silence.

I must confess that, whilst the knocking continued, I had no desire whatever to look out of the window, but the moment it was over I got up and peered out. I could see right down the lane and for some distance along the high road.

There was no sign of anyone or anything that could in any way account for the disturbance—the landscape was brilliantly illuminated with moonlight, every stick and stone being plainly visible, and all nature seemed to be sleeping undisturbedly, as if no interruption in its ordinary routine had occurred. I got back into bed, and, falling into a gentle doze, slept soundly till the morning. After breakfast, Mrs. Mullins said, “You’re not thinking of spending another night here, sir, are you?”

“Why, no,” I replied. “I must be back in Dublin at my work by this afternoon.”

“I’m glad of that, sir,” she went on; “because I couldn’t let you stay. I suppose you heard the rapping, sir?”

“I did,” I replied; “and the footsteps—how do you account for them?”

“Only in one way,” she said; “they came after you. At least, that was my impression, and my impressions are seldom wrong. I seemed to see some terrible form—half animal and half human—something indescribably grotesque and unnatural—something, my instinct tells me, was wanting to get at you.”

Her description of the figure reminded me so strongly of the queer thing that tried to strangle me in the house near the Waterloo Road, that I narrated my experience to her.

“You may depend upon it, sir,” she said when I had finished, “that the ghost you have just told me about and the one that came to the cottage last night are the same. I have heard that spirits will sometimes attach themselves to persons who have been staying in the house they haunt, and that they will leave the house with them and follow them wherever they go. I only hope and trust that this one will never do you any harm, and that you will succeed in ridding yourself of it, but my husband and I feel, asking your pardon, that we should not like to have you sleep here again.”

I did not tell her that even had she been willing, nothing on earth would have induced me to stay, for whether she was right in her theory about the steps or not, the neighbourhood had lost all its charms for me. Indeed, when next I had a ghostly visitation, I hoped I should be quartered in a less isolated spot.

My aunt, Mrs. Meta O’Donnell, tells me that a relative of hers once had a remarkable encounter with fairies on the road between Ballinanty and the village of Hospital in County Limerick.

He was driving home one evening in his jaunting car, unaccompanied save by his servant, Dunkley, who was sitting with his back to him, when a number of little people—fairies—sprang on the car, and clambering up, tried to pull him off.

Finding that, owing to the vigour with which they pulled, he was actually slipping from his seat, he appealed to his servant for assistance; and the latter, doing as he was told, held on to him with all his strength, and thus prevented the little people from dragging him to the ground. Mrs. Meta O’Donnell is absolutely sure that her relative never took stimulants of any sort, and that he was in a perfectly normal state of mind when this event happened.

Nor is this road haunted only by fairies, for Mrs. Meta O’Donnell again tells me that this same relative of hers, when driving home on another occasion—this time with several friends—saw a man on horseback, in a hunting coat, suddenly leap the hedge, and, after riding for some distance by the side of the car, abruptly vanish. Two of the men who were with him, she believes, also witnessed this phenomenon.

It is a long step, seemingly, from the fairy to the banshee, but these two types of spirit have at least one trait in common, namely, exclusiveness; and the banshee, even more emphatically than the fairy, will have nought to do with the alien. It will attach itself only to the family of bona-fide Irish origin, only to the clan that has been associated with Irish soil for many generations.

With the kind permission of Mr. Ralph Shirley, I will here introduce, making only slight alterations, a few extracts from an article of mine on the banshee, which appeared in the “Occult Review” for September, 1913:

“Contemporary with fairies and the Feni, phantoms typical of the great lone hills of Wicklow and Connemara, and of the bare and wind-bitten cliffs of Galway, may well have been the banshees, which, attaching themselves for divers reasons to various chieftains and sons of chieftains, eventually became recognised as family ghosts or familiars.

“Many people have fallen in the error of imagining all banshees are moulded after one pattern. Nothing could be more fallacious. The banshee of the O’Rourkes, for example, does not resemble that of the O’Donnells; there are many forms of the banshee, each clan having a distinct one—or more than one—of its own. Some of the banshees are fair to look at, and some old, and foul, and terrifying; but their mission is invariably the same, i.e., to announce a death or some great family catastrophe.

“The banshee is never joyous; it is always either sad or malevolent. Sometimes it wails once, sometimes three times—the wail in some degree, but not altogether, resembling that of a woman in great trouble or agony; sometimes, again, it groans; and sometimes it sighs, or sings. In some clans the demonstrations are both visual and auditory, in others only visual; and in others, again, only auditory. There is no really old clan but has its banshee, and few members of that clan who are not, at some time or other of their lives, made aware of it.

“How well I recollect as a child being told by those who had experienced it, that a dreadful groaning and wailing had been heard the night prior to the death of a very near relative of mine in Africa. I enquired what made the wailing, and was informed ‘the banshee,’ or the ghost woman, who never fails to announce the death of an O’Donnell.

“Years later, when in the extreme West of England, my wife and I were awakened one night by a terrible wail, which sounded just outside our door. Beginning in a low key, it rose and rose, until it ended in a shrill scream, that in time died away in a horrible groan. The idea of the banshee at once flashed through my mind, for I felt none other but a banshee could have made such a sound.

“Still, to satisfy my wife, I jumped out of bed and went on to the landing; all was dark and silent, and outside their bedrooms were assembled the rest of the household, terrified, and eager to have an explanation of what had happened. We searched the whole house and the waste land outside, but there was nothing which could in any way account for the noise, and in the morning I received news of the death of someone very closely related to me.... Whilst some writers are inclined to treat the subject jocularly, and attribute the banshee either to obviously absurd physical causes, or to the abnormally imaginative powers they insist are the birthright of all Irishmen, others dive into the pseudo-profound compilations of modern Theosophy, and reappear with the pronouncement that banshees are not spirits at all—not entities hailing from the superphysical world—but mere thought germs, created by some remote ancestor of a clan, and wafted down from one generation to another of his descendants, an idea as nonsensical as it is extravagant, and which will not for an instant hold water when looked into by those who have had a bona-fide experience of the banshee or any other ghostly phenomenon. Indeed, it is only the latter who are capable of making observations of any value on such a subject, and all effort to describe or account for the superphysical by those who have never experienced it, no matter whether those efforts are made by theosophical savants, professional mediums or scientific experts, are, in my opinion, weightless, colourless and futile.

“A geologist may describe the hydrosphere, and an astronomer the moon, and their descriptions may be swallowed with tolerable composure and assurance, because we know that the laws of similarity and analogy, when applied to the physical, generally hold good; but no scientist can teach us anything about spiritual phenomena, because such things are actually without the realm of science, just as the game of marbles is entirely without the province of theology. It is our sensations, and our sensations only, that can guide and instruct us when dealing with the superphysical. I have heard the dying screams of a woman murdered beneath my window; I have heard on hill and plain the cries of coyottes, panthers, jackals and hyenas; and I have many times listened to the dismal hooting of night birds, when riding alone through the seclusion of giant forests; but there is something in the banshee’s cry that differs from all these, that fills one with a fear and awe, far—immeasurably far—beyond that produced by a sound which is merely physical. Imagine then what it is to be haunted all one’s life by such a grim harbinger of woe, to have it ever trailing in one’s wake, always ready and, maybe, eager to make itself heard the moment it detects, by its extraordinary and unhuman powers, the advent of death. One curious idiosyncrasy of the banshee is that it never manifests itself to the person whose death it is prognosticating. Other people may see or hear it, but the doomed one never, so that when every one present is aware of it but one, the fate of that one may be regarded as pretty well certain.

“And now once again, whence comes the banshee? From heaven or from hell? What is it? It is impossible to say; at the most one can only speculate. Some banshees appear to be mournful only; others unquestionably malevolent; and whereas some very closely resemble a woman, even though of a type long passed away, others, again, differ so much from our conception of any human being, that we can only imagine them to be spirits that never have been human, that belong to a genus wholly separate and distinct from the human genus, and that have only been brought into contact with this material plane through the medium of certain magical or spiritual rites practised by the Milesians, but for some unknown reason discontinued by their descendants. This appears to me quite a possible explanation of the origin of the banshee.

“One realizes, when dabbling in spiritualism to-day, one of the greatest dangers incurred is that of attracting to one certain undesirable, mischievous, and malignant spirits—call them elementals if you will—which, when so attracted, stick to one like the proverbial leech. And what happens to-day may very well have happened thousands of years ago; in all probability, the Unknown never changes; its ways and habits may be as constant as those of Nature, guided by laws and principles which may at times vary, but which, nevertheless, undergo no material alteration. The superphysical, attracted to the ancients as it is attracted to us to-day, would adhere to them as it now adheres to us. I cannot surmise more.

“Supposing then that this theory accounts for the one class of banshee, what accounts for the other—the other that so nearly tallies with the physical? Are the latter actual phantoms of the dead; of those that died some unnatural death, and have been earth-bound and clan-bound ever since? Maybe they are. Maybe they are the spirits of women, prehistoric or otherwise, who were either suicides or were murdered, or who themselves committed some very heinous offence; and they haunt the clan to which they owed their unhappy ending; or, in the event of themselves being the malefactors, the clan to which they belonged. From all this we can conclude that, whilst the origin and constitution of banshees vary, their mission is always the same—they are solely the prognosticators of misfortune. A sorry possession for anyone; and yet, how truly in accord with the nature of the country—with its general air of discontent and barrenness, with its rain-sodden soil and gloomy atmosphere—as an unkind critic might say, could anyone imagine the presence of cheerful spirits under such conditions?

“But the banshee has the one admirable trait which the average Englishman obstinately refuses to recognize in the material Irish—the trait of loyalty and constancy. It never forsakes the object of its attachment, but clings to it in all its vicissitudes and peregrinations with a loyalty and persistency that is unmatchable. It is thoroughly Irish, essentially Irish; the one thing, apart from disposition and character, that has remained exclusively Irish through long centuries of robbery and oppression; and which, in spite of assertions to the contrary, never has been, nor ever will be shared by other than the genuine clansman.

“The banshee is most fastidious in its tastes—it will have none of the pseudo-celt; none of the individual who, possessing an absolutely English name, and coming entirely of English forefathers, terms himself Irish merely because his ancestors happen to have settled in Ireland. That is nothing like exact enough for the banshee. Others may talk of it and write of it, but they can never honestly claim it; for the banshee belongs wholly and exclusively to the bona-fide O’s and Macs—and them, and them only, will it never cease to haunt so long as there is one of them left.”

My last experience with a ghost in Dublin took place just after I had been medically examined for the R.I.C., and to my intense grief had been rejected, owing to varicose veins, which the examining doctor told me were of a far too complicated nature to permit of an operation; consequently, although I had been “cramming” for two years, and my prospects of getting through the literary examination were deemed extremely fair, it was futile to go up for it, as all chance of my ever being in the R.I.C. was now at an end.

On the night of my failure to pass the medical I had gone to bed early, as I had a splitting headache, and, after vain efforts, had at length succeeded in falling asleep. I awoke just in time to hear a clock from somewhere in the downstairs premises of the house—I was then lodging in Lower Merrion Street—strike two, and almost immediately afterwards there came a loud laugh, just over my face, and so near to me that I seemed to feel the breath of the laughter fan my nostrils. Nothing I have ever heard before, or have ever heard since, was so repulsive as that laugh—it was the very incarnation of jeering, jibing mockery; of undying, inveterate hate. I felt that nothing but a spirit of unadulterated evil could have made such a noise, and that it had come to gloat over my misfortunes—to let me know how greatly it rejoiced at the cruel blow I had suffered. I naturally associated it with the ghost that had tried to strangle me, and my heart turned sick within me at the thought that such a horrible species of phantasm was still hovering near me. Should I ever be free from it? I was not quite so frightened, however, as I had been on the occasion of its visit to me in the house near the Waterloo Road, and determining to prevent myself from falling into that kind of paralytic condition again, in which all my muscles and faculties had remained alike spell-bound and useless, I sat up. The room was in pitch darkness, and everything was breathlessly still. I waited in this posture for some seconds, my heart beating like a sledge-hammer, and then, deriving assurance from the fact that nothing happened, I got out of bed and struck a light. The door was locked on the inside, and there was nothing in hiding that could in any way account for the noise. I went to the window, and, lifting it gently, peered out into the street. There was no moon, but many stars and lamp-lights enabled me to see that the street was absolutely empty—not even a policeman was in sight. I leaned far out, and from immediately beneath me, although no one was visible, there suddenly commenced the sound of running footsteps. Ringing out loud and clear, and accompanied by a queer familiar clicking, they seemed to follow the direction of the street towards Ely Place. I wanted to get back to bed, for I was lightly clad, and the air was cool and penetrating, but something compelled me to keep on listening, and so I remained with my neck craned over the window-sill, till the steps gradually grew fainter and fainter, and suddenly ceased altogether. And with their termination this early period of my ghostly experiences in Dublin terminated, too.

CHAPTER III
SOME STRANGE CASES IN SCOTLAND

I returned to England in that “tub-like” old relic of mid-Victorian steamboats, “The Argo”—long since defunct, but which for many years sailed to and from Dublin and Bristol with as many passengers and cattle as could be crammed, with any degree of safety, into her dingy and clumsy-looking hulk. I remember the passage well, for two of my fellow students were on board, and we spent nearly all the time on deck, telling ghost tales, and earnestly discussing the possibility of a future life. In the end we made a solemn compact, whereby it was agreed that the one who died first would try his level best to give some kind of spirit demonstration to the other two. Both my friends died within a few years of that date, and within three weeks of each other. The one, who had a commission in a cavalry regiment, was killed at the Battle of Omdurman, and the other, who having followed in the footsteps of his distinguished father, had become a novelist of great promise, was kicked to death by a horse. The day after the death of the former, as I was busily engaged writing the first chapter of my novel, “For Satan’s Sake,” a portion of the mantel-piece in the room in which I was working suddenly fell with a loud crash on to the grate. Of course, the incident may not have had anything to do with the death of my friend, but it was nevertheless remarkable, as previously nothing in the nature of a flaw had been noticeable in the condition of the mantel-piece. My other friend died—as I subsequently learned, i.e., after the incident I am about to narrate had occurred—at ten o’clock one Friday morning, and that afternoon as I was changing for football, the grandfather clock on the landing outside my bedroom suddenly struck ten. I went to look, and the hands pointed to three. There had been nothing amiss with the striking before, and there was nothing amiss with the striking after.

These were the only phenomena I experienced at the time these two friends of mine died.

******

On arriving at Bristol, I spent some weeks in the West of England and then journeyed north to Scotland. My original intention had been to spend a few weeks with an old Clifton friend of mine, whose father owned an estate near Inverary; but, on arriving at Glasgow, I heard of such a promising case of haunting in that city, that, unable to resist the temptation of investigating it, I decided to postpone my journey west. The case, as outlined to me in the first instance, was this:—

A Glasgow solicitor, named James McKaye, desirous of taking a house close to his office, went one morning to look at one in Duke Street. He went there alone, and, carefully closing the front door behind him, proceeded to wander from room to room, beginning with the basement.

As he was going upstairs to the first floor, he suddenly heard footsteps following him. He turned sharply round; there was no one there. Thinking this was odd, but attributing it to the acoustic properties of the walls, he continued his ascent. Having arrived on the first landing, he went into one of the rooms. The steps followed him. A brilliant idea then occurred to him—he stamped his foot. There was no echo. He turned round and went into the next room, and the steps once again accompanied him. Then he grew frightened. It was broad daylight, the sun was shining brilliantly and the birds were singing; but there was something in this house that jarred on him horribly—a something that was completely out of humour with the golden sunbeams and the cheerful chirping of the sparrows. The day was hot, and the sun was pouring in through the blindless windows; but in spite of this the rooms were icy, and he was deliberating whether it was worth while to explore the house further, when he caught sight of a shadow on the wall. It was not his own shadow. It was that of a man with his arms stretched out horizontally on either side of him, and whereas the right arm was complete in every detail, the left had no hand. James McKaye now yielded to an ungovernable terror and rushed frantically out of the house.

One would naturally think that after all this McKaye would have vowed never to go near the place again. Nothing of the sort. The house fascinated him. He could not get it out of his mind; he even dreamed of it; dreamed of it in connection with some mystery that he must solve—that he alone could solve. Besides, there was not another house in the town so conveniently situated, nor so cheap. Consequently, he took it, and within a fortnight had moved in with all his family and household goods. For the first few weeks everything went swimmingly, and McKaye, who was shrewd, even for a Scot, congratulated himself upon having made such an excellent bargain.

Then occurred an incident which recalled sharply the day he had first seen the place. He was writing some letters one morning in his study, when the nurse-maid entered, white and agitated. “Oh, do come to the nursery, sir,” she implored; “the children are playing with something that looks like a dog, and yet isn’t one. I don’t know what it is!” And she burst out crying.

“You’re mad,” McKaye said sharply and, springing to his feet, he ran upstairs.

On reaching the nursery, the blurred outline of something like a huge dog or wolf came out of the half-open door, and raced past him, so close that he distinctly felt it brush against his clothes.

Where it went he could not say; he was thinking of the children, and did not stop to look. Oddly enough, the children were not a bit afraid; on the contrary, they were pleased and curious. “What a strange doggy it was, Daddy!” they cried; “it never wagged its tail, like other doggies, and whenever we tried to stroke it, it slipped away from us—we never touched it once.”

Sorely puzzled, McKaye told his wife, and the two decided that if anything further happened, they must leave the house.

That night McKaye happened to sit up rather late; at last he got up, and was about to turn off the gas, when he felt his upstretched hand suddenly caught hold of by something large and soft, that did not seem to have any fingers. He was so frightened that he screamed; whereupon his hand was instantly released, and there was a loud crash overhead. Thinking something had happened to his wife, he rushed upstairs, and found her sitting up in bed and talking in her sleep. She was apparently addressing a black, shadowy figure that was crouching on the floor, opposite her. As McKaye approached, the thing moved towards the wall, and vanished.

Mrs. McKaye then awoke, and begged her husband to take her out of the house at once, as she had dreamed most vividly that an appalling murder had been committed there, and that the murderer had come out of the room with outstretched hands, asking her to look at them. McKaye, who had had quite enough of it, too, promised to do as she wished, and before another twenty-four hours had passed the house was once again empty.

These were the bare facts of the case, and as they were given me by one of his clients, I had no difficulty in obtaining an interview with Mr. McKaye, who, I was told, still had the keys of the house. It was not, however, so easy to obtain consent to spend a night on the premises, and he would only permit me to do so on the condition that he himself accompanied me, and that I promised to keep the visit a profound secret.

The evening chosen for our enterprise proved ever memorable.

The rain came down in torrents, and the wind—a veritable tornado—made any attempt to hold up an umbrella utterly impossible. Indeed, it was as much as I could do to hold up myself, whilst, to add to my discomfort, at almost every step I plunged ankle-deep in icy cold puddles. At length, drenched to the skin, I arrived at the house.

McKaye was standing on the doorstep, swearing furiously. He could not, so he said, find the key. However, he produced it now, and we were soon standing inside, shaking the water from our clothes. Those were the days before pocket flashlights had become general, and we had to be content with candles.

We each lighted one, and at once commenced to search the premises to make sure no one was in hiding.

The house, as far as I can recollect, consisted of four storeys and a basement. None of the rooms were very large; the wall-papers were hideous, and I remember thanking my stars that I was not called upon to live in such hopelessly inartistic quarters. McKaye asked me if I could detect anything peculiar in the atmosphere, but I could only detect extreme mustiness, and told him so. I fancied he seemed very fidgety and ill at ease; however, as he was a much older man than myself, and had some experience of the house, I felt perfectly safe with him. After we had been in all the rooms, we descended to the ground floor, and commenced our vigil on the staircase leading from the hall to the first landing.

“I think we stand more chance of seeing something here than anywhere else,” McKaye said; “and in the case of anything very alarming happening, we are close to the front door.”

“We both looked in the direction he indicated”

He spoke only half in fun and I observed that his fingers twitched a good deal and that his eyes were never at rest.

“Oughtn’t we to put out the candles?” I said. “Ghosts surely materialise much more readily in the dark.” But he would not hear of it. All his experiences, he said, had taken place in the light, and he believed only spoof ghosts at séances required the opposite conditions. Then he regaled me once more with all that had happened during his occupation of the house. He was still telling me, when there came a loud rat-rat at the door.

“That’s a policeman,” he said; “he must have seen our light.” He spoke truly, for, when we opened the door, a burly figure in helmet and cape stood on the step and flashed his dripping bull’s-eye in our faces. On hearing McKaye’s name the constable was instantly appeased, and, when we mentioned ghosts, he laughed long and loud. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “you won’t never be alarmed by a happarition so long as you have that dog with you. I bet he would scare away any number of ghosts, and burglars, too. If I may be so bold as to ask, what breed do you call him? I’ve never seen anything quite like him before,” and he waved his lamp towards the stairs. We both looked in the direction he indicated, and there, half way up the stairs, with its face apparently turned towards us, was the black, shadowy outline of some shaggy creature, which to me looked not so much like a dog as a bear. It remained stationary for a moment or so, and then, retreating backwards, seemed to disappear into the wall.

“Well, gentlemen, good-night,” the policeman said, lowering his lamp, “it’s time I was going.” He turned on his heel, and was walking off, when McKaye called him back.

“Wait a moment, constable,” he said, “and we’ll come with you.”

He cast a swiftly furtive glance around him as he spoke, then, blowing out the lights, he caught me by the arm and dragged me away.

“But the dog, sir,” the policeman said, as the front door closed behind us with a bang; “it ain’t come out!”

“And it never will,” McKaye responded grimly. “You have seen the ghost, constable, or at least one of them.”

I have never had an opportunity of visiting the house again, but for aught I know to the contrary, it still stands there, and is still haunted.

From Glasgow I went on to Inverary, where I had the most delightful time, fishing and shooting.

I then went to Perth, and there, quite by chance, met a Mr. and Mrs. Rowlandson, who informed me that they were just quitting a badly haunted house on the outskirts of the town. The name of the house was “Bocarthe.” It was their own, and had only been built a year, but they could not possibly remain in it, they told me, owing to the perpetual disturbance to which they were subjected. They were just beginning a detailed description of the manifestations, when I begged them to desist. I would like, I explained, with their permission, to investigate the case, and I thought it would be better to do so without knowing the nature of the hauntings, as in these circumstances—should my experience happen to tally with theirs—there could be no question either of suggestion or of imagination.

I had resolved to conduct all my investigations with an absolutely open mind, and I intended, when once I had satisfied myself that the phenomena were objective, to try and alight upon some code whereby I could communicate with them, and learn from them something certain—something definite, at all events, about the other world. To what extent I have succeeded I shall make it the purpose of this volume to reveal.

But to continue: “What strikes us as so extraordinary about the whole thing,” the Rowlandsons said, “is that a new house, with absolutely no history attached to it, for we were the first people who ever inhabited it, and we can assure you,” they added laughingly, “there were no murders or suicides there during our occupancy, should be haunted. Our neighbours declare that we must have brought the ghost with us.”

I told them I thought it quite possible that such might be the case, and narrated to them my experiences in Dublin. They appeared to be greatly interested; and were, moreover, quite willing, provided I promised them not to discuss the matter too openly, as they wanted to let the house, that I should spend a few nights at “Bocarthe.” They were, in fact, rather anxious to know if anything unusual still took place there. Thinking, perhaps, that I might not like to go alone, they gave me an introduction to a young friend of theirs, Dr. Swinton, who, they thought, might be prevailed upon to accompany me; and, before I left them, all the preliminaries relating to my visit to “Bocarthe” were satisfactorily arranged.

That same day the Rowlandsons went to Edinburgh, where they told me they intended living, and the following day at noon I wended my way to the house they had vacated. As there was no story connected with “Bocarthe,” I set to work to make enquiries about the ground on which it stood, and instead of learning too little, I learned too much. An old minister, who looked fully eighty, was sure that the ground in question, until it was built upon quite recently, had been grazing land ever since he was a boy, and that it had never witnessed anything more extraordinary than the occasional death of a sheep or a cow that had been struck by lightning. An equally aged and equally positive postmistress declared that the ground had never been anything better than waste land, where, amid rubbish heaps galore, all the dogs in the parish might have been seen scratching and fighting over bones. Another person remembered a pond being there, and another a nursery garden; but from no one could I extract the slightest hint as to anything that could in any way account for the haunting.

When I entered the house, I thought I had seldom seen such a cheerful one: the rooms were light and lofty, and about them all there was an air of geniality, that hitherto, at all events, I had never dreamed of associating with ghosts.

Dr. Swinton joined me in the evening, but although we sat up till long after dawn, we neither saw nor heard anything we could not account for by natural causes. We repeated the process for two more nights, and then, feeling that we had given the house a fair trial, we concluded it was either no longer haunted, or that the hauntings were periodical, and might not occur again for years. I wrote to Mr. Rowlandson, upon returning the keys of the house, and, in reply, received the following letter from him:—

No. —, C—— Crescent,
Edinburgh.
November 8th, 1893.

Dear Mr. O’Donnell,

Many thanks for the keys. No wonder you did not see our ghost! It is here, and we are having just the same experiences in this house as we had in “Bocarthe.” If you would care to stay a few nights with us, on the chance of seeing the ghost, we shall be delighted to put you up.

Yours, etc.,
Robert Rowlandson.

I was obliged to return home very shortly, in order to decide definitely and speedily what I intended to do for a living; but although I knew I had little or no time to waste, I could not resist the Rowlandsons’ kind invitation to try and see their ghost, and accordingly accepted.

They lived in C—— Crescent. When I arrived there, I found the entire household in a panic, the ghost having appeared to one and all during the previous night.

“It was so terrible,” Mrs. Rowlandson said, “that I can’t bear even to think of it, and shall certainly never forget it. One of the maids fainted, and was so ill afterwards, we were obliged to have the doctor, and all have given notice to leave.”

“Did nothing of the sort happen before you went to ‘Bocarthe’?” I ventured to ask.

“No,” Mr. Rowlandson replied, “not a thing. We were then sceptics where ghosts were concerned, but we’re certainly not sceptical now.”

“Do you think it possible,” I said, “that the ghost is attached to some piece of old furniture? I have read of such cases.”

Mr. Rowlandson shook his head.

“No,” he said, “we have no old furniture, all our furniture is modern and new; at least, it was new when we came to ‘Bocarthe.’”

“Then, if the ghost is neither attached to the house, nor to the ground, nor to the furniture, it must surely be attached to some person,” I remarked. “I have read that one of the dangers of attending Spiritualistic Séances is that spirits occasionally attach themselves to people, and can only be got rid of with great difficulty. I suppose no one in the house has gone in for Spiritualism?”

“I can safely say I haven’t,” Mr. Rowlandson laughed; “and you haven’t, either, Maud, have you?” he said, looking at his wife.

Mrs. Rowlandson flushed.

“The only Spiritualist I ever knew,” she stammered, “was—you know, dear, whom I mean——”

Mr. Rowlandson raised his eyebrows and stared at her in astonishment.

“I don’t,” he said. “Who?”

“Ernest Dekon!”

“Dekon!” Mr. Rowlandson ejaculated. “Dekon! Why, of course, I might have guessed Spiritualism was in his line. Some years ago, Mr. O’Donnell,” he went on, turning to me, “my wife met this Mr. Dekon at a ball given by a mutual friend, and from that time, up to his death, he persecuted her with his undesirable attentions. I never knew anyone so persistent.”

“He resented your marriage, of course,” I remarked.

“Resented it!” Mr. Rowlandson responded; “I should rather think he did, though to everyone’s surprise he came to it. Ye Gods! I shall never forget the expression on his face, as we caught sight of him in the vestibule of the church. Talk about Satan! Satan never looked half as evil.”

“And Mr. Dekon was a Spiritualist!” I said.

“He was very keen on séances,” Mrs. Rowlandson interposed. “Most keen, and was at one time always trying to persuade me to go to one with him.”

“I never knew that,” Mr. Rowlandson exclaimed.

“Perhaps not,” his wife said demurely. “You see, you don’t know everything. However, I never went.”

“And how did he die?” I ventured.

“Suicide,” Mr. Rowlandson said. “He shot himself, and was dastardly enough to leave a note behind him, pinned to the toilet-cover of his dressing-table, stating that his death was entirely due to the heartless conduct of my wife.”

“When was that, Mr. Rowlandson?” I asked.

“Let me see,” Mr. Rowlandson soliloquised. “We have been married not quite eighteen months. About fifteen months ago—shortly before we came to ‘Bocarthe.’”

“I know what’s in your mind,” Mrs. Rowlandson observed. “You think that very possibly it is the spirit of Ernest Dekon that is troubling us. Do you really think it could be?”

“From what you have told me,” I said, “I should say that it is more than likely. The mere fact of his having been a Spiritualist would mean that he had, in some measure, got in touch with the Unknown; so that on passing over with his mind solely concentrated on revenge, he would, in all probability, speedily become closer acquainted with those spirits whom he had known here—not a very high class, but apparently the only class that a séance can attract—and these would undoubtedly aid him in his attempt to come back and annoy you.”

Mrs. Rowlandson gave vent to an exclamation of dismay. “I have always felt,” she said, “that there might be some mysterious connection between Ernest Dekon and the dreadful thing we have seen.”

“Of course,” I added, “that is only a suggestion on my part. When does the phenomenon usually appear?”

“At all times, and when we least expect it,” Mrs. Rowlandson said. “For example, if I am going upstairs alone, it either springs out at me or peers down at me from over the banisters. Or, again, it rouses us in the middle of the night by rocking our bed! Always some alarming trick of that kind.”

“Then you could hardly expect it to manifest itself if we all sat here in the dark?”

“Hardly.”

“You haven’t a photograph of Mr. Dekon, I suppose?” I hazarded.

“A photograph of that scoundrel,” Mr. Rowlandson cried. “If he had given her one, it wouldn’t have remained long in her possession, I can assure you.”

“Well, he never did,” Mrs. Rowlandson said, forcing a smile, “but I can describe him.”

“I don’t know whether that will do much good,” I observed. “Because I understand that if one of the lower order of earthbounds, usually called Elementals, wanted to ‘fool’ us, it could easily impersonate him. Dekon’s phantom would not, of necessity, be very like his material body; it would depend entirely on how much of the animal there was in him; if a great deal, then one might expect to see a creature with a pig’s, or some other kind of beast’s, head, with only a slight facial resemblance to Dekon. Can you describe his hands? Because I believe spirits that have lost all other resemblance with the physical body might be identified by some peculiarity in the formation of the fingers.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Rowlandson said; “I do remember his hands distinctly. They were so ugly! They were long, and red, and the tips were club-shaped; I am sure I should recognise them anywhere.”

This conversation took place in the interval between tea and dinner. After dinner we sat in the drawing-room, discussing plans for the night, and finally came to the conclusion that when bed-time came we should retire to our respective rooms, and sit there in the dark, waiting and watching for whatever might happen. It was furthermore agreed that directly anyone saw or heard anything, they should at once summon the others.

We sat up rather late, and it was close on midnight before Mrs. Rowlandson rose, and we all—there were two guests besides myself, a Colonel and Mrs. Rushworth—took our candlesticks, and followed her upstairs. We had mounted the first flight, and had turned the bend leading to the second—the house seemed all stairs—when Mrs. Rowlandson halted, and, looking back at us, said, “Hush! Do you hear anything?”

We stood still and listened. There was a thump, that apparently came from a room just at the top of the stairs—then another—and then a very curious sound, as if something was bounding backwards and forwards over bare boards with its feet tied together. At a signal from Mr. Rowlandson, we immediately blew out our lights. A church clock solemnly struck twelve. We heard it very distinctly, as the Rowlandsons, being enthusiasts for fresh air, kept every window in the house wide open. The reverberation of the final stroke had hardly ceased when a loud gasp from someone in front of me sent a chilly feeling down my spine.

At the same moment the darkness ahead of us was dissipated by a faint, luminous glow. As I watched, the glow speedily intensified, and suddenly took the shape of a cylindrical column of six or seven feet in height, and this in turn developed with startling abruptness into the form of something so shockingly grotesque and bestial that I was rendered speechless.

It is extremely difficult to give a very accurate description of it, because, like the generality of occult phenomena I have experienced in haunted houses, it was a baffling mixture of the distinct and yet vague, entirely without substance, and apparently wholly constituted of vibrating light that varied each second in tone and intensity. I can only say that the impression I derived was that of a very gross or monstrous man.

The head, ill-defined on the crown and sides, appeared to be abnormally high and long, and to be covered with a tangled mass of coarse, tow-coloured hair; the nose seemed hooked, the mouth cruel, the eyes leering. The general expression on the face was one of intense antagonism. The body of the thing was grey and nude, very like the trunk of a silver beech, the arms long and knotted, the hands huge, the fingers red and club-shaped. The latter corresponded exactly with Mrs. Rowlandson’s description.

This hideous, baleful apparition was the spirit of animal man, the symbolical representation of all carnal lusts—it was Ernest Dekon—soulless.

But although this spirit was without substance, it was composed of complex forces—forces both physical and mental. It could shut and open doors, move furniture, rap and make sundry other noises, and it could also convey the sensation of intense cold, and the feeling of the most abject fear. I now found myself wondering if it possessed other properties: Was it sensible? Could it communicate in any way?

I was thus deliberating, when the figure seemed to move forward; then someone shrieked. Mr. Rowlandson struck a light, and simultaneously the apparition vanished. The effect it had had on us all was novel and striking—we were all more or less demoralized; and yet no two of us had seen the ghost the same—and some, Mr. Rowlandson and Mrs. Rushworth, had not seen it at all.

We went back again into the drawing-room and discussed it. Mrs. Rowlandson was the first to speak. She, too, had been particularly impressed by the hands, and she was sure they were the hands of Ernest Dekon.

“I can say nothing about the face,” she cried, “as it did not appear to me, but having seen the hands, I am firmly convinced that the ghost is Ernest Dekon, and that it is Ernest Dekon who is tormenting us. Can’t any of you think of a plan to get rid of him?”

“Cremation is the only thing I can think of!” cried Colonel Rushworth, who had hitherto been silent. “That is the means employed, I believe, by the hill tribes in Northern India. When a spirit—a spirit they can identify—begins to haunt a place, they dig up the body and burn it, and they say that as soon as the last bone is consumed the haunting ceases. They have a theory that phantoms of dead people and animals can materialise as long as some remnant of their physical body remains. Where did this Ernest Dekon die?”

“In Africa,” Mr. Rowlandson said.

“That’s capital! If we can find the cemetery, there ought to be no difficulty in getting at the body. The officials are, as a rule, open to bribery. Anyhow, we might try it as an experiment.”

I left Edinburgh next day, but I heard some months later from Mr. Rowlandson.

“You may recollect Colonel Rushworth’s suggestion,” he wrote. “Well, the hauntings have ceased. We are shortly returning to ‘Bocarthe’!”

From this I gathered that an attempt to exhume and cremate Ernest Dekon’s body had been made, and had proved successful.

CHAPTER IV
I TRAVEL ACROSS THE UNITED STATES, AND DO SOME GHOST HUNTING IN SAN FRANCISCO

Upon leaving Scotland I seriously considered my future, and at length decided to go to Oregon and fruit farm. Though the expedition, through no fault of my own, proved a failure, and I had to return to England within a comparatively short time, I managed, whilst in America, to see and learn a good deal. Apart from visiting Crater Lake, which in those days was one of the wildest spots imaginable, far out of the beat of any but the most adventurous tourist, and seeing the Rogue River Indians in their native element, I spent several weeks in the big cities, and when in San Francisco obtained the services of a guide, and did a nightly tour of China Town, and several of the lesser known subterranean haunts of that city.

It was in San Francisco that I had my first experience with an American ghost. I had been out tramping all day along the southern side of the bay, and it was close on midnight before I got back to the city, feeling thoroughly done up and very footsore. The last chime of twelve o’clock sounded, as I swung wearily round 117th Street into a narrow thoroughfare leading to the obscure quarter of the town in which my finances forced me to live. As I came within sight of the end house of a block of low old-fashioned buildings, I received something of a shock. I had passed by it that morning and had noticed that it was to let. I was quite sure of this, because there was something about the house that had especially attracted my attention. I was struck with its utter loneliness, its air of past grandeur—so oddly at variance with the modern and mediocre buildings around it—and, peeping in at the windows, I had taken stock of its big oak-panelled apartments devoid of furniture and bestrewn with dust and cobwebs.

Now, to my astonishment, I perceived a bright glow—a kind of phosphorescent light—emanating from one of the rooms on the ground floor. I approached nearer, and, as I leaned against the verandah and peered in, it suddenly seemed to me that the room was no longer empty, but richly carpetted and full of ponderous, old-fashioned furniture. I also seemed to see in the centre of the room a long table covered with a snowy cloth, on which were arranged, in rich profusion, many handsome silver dishes containing a selection of the choicest food. I was dumbfounded. Twelve hours ago there was not a soul to be seen about the house nor a particle of furniture in it, and now!—well, it looked to me as if it never, never had been empty.

Whilst I was thus meditating, my face glued to the window, I thought that a sudden blaze illuminated the room, and by degrees I became conscious of the glare of countless candles, some of the candelabra branching from the walls, and others—of chased silver—standing on the table. I then saw the door at the far end of the apartment open, and a young and charming girl, dressed à la mode de Marie Antoinette, her gown high-waisted and her hair poudré, hurriedly enter. She gave a quick glance at the table, and then, advancing to the fireplace, where, for the first time, I perceived the cheery glow of a huge log of wood, gazed at herself in a large, richly-framed mirror. The reflection evidently pleased her, for she turned round all smiles; and then her eyes fell on the window, and on me.

In an instance her countenance changed. Putting a finger to her lips with a great air of mystery, she beckoned to me to come in. I started back in confusion. Again she beckoned, and with such pretty pleading in her eyes that, despite my travel-stained clothes, I yielded. I walked to the front door; she opened it, and in hushed tones, in which I detected a slight French accent, she bade me welcome.

“We are having a fancy-dress dance,” she said, “but none of the guests have as yet arrived, and I want you to come into the ball-room while I rehearse some of the dance music.”

She led the way across a big, deserted and strangely silent hall, up a flight of thickly-carpeted stairs, along a dimly lighted corridor, peopled with nothing but odd shadows, to which I could see no material counterparts, and into a room obviously prepared for a ball.

“There is no one about but you and I,” she said laughingly. “Only we two; but someone else will arrive soon. It’s not half-past twelve, is it?”

“No,” I said; “twenty past.”

“Ten more minutes!” She sighed deeply, and her expression, which up to now had been one of gay mischief, changed to one of immeasurable sadness. Then she nodded, suddenly burst out laughing, and casting the most bewitching look at me from out her long, thickly lashed blue-grey eyes, sat down at the piano and began to play a Strauss waltz.

Fascinated though I was by her extreme archness and beauty, I could not stifle the thousand and one uncomfortable thoughts that speedily crowded into my mind.

Who was this strangely friendly and peculiarly solitary girl? Surely someone must have helped her prepare the house and supper. Where were they? Besides, she couldn’t possibly live in that house alone.

And yet, apart from the music—which seemed to reverberate through every stick and stone of the building—there was no other sound. I might have been alone with her on some desert island in the far Pacific.

A feeling of intense but wholly unaccountable fear gradually crept over me.

“It is close on the half hour,” she suddenly whispered. “Listen!”

She paused for a moment, and I heard a door from somewhere in the lower part of the house open and shut. Then came the sound of muffled footsteps, stealthily feeling their way upstairs. Up and up they came, till they arrived outside the door of the room we were in. There they stopped, and I instinctively felt that their owner was listening.

Presently the girl recommenced playing, and I saw the door-handle began to turn. Slowly, very slowly, the door then opened, and on the floor of the room there appeared a black shadow—vague, indefinite and grotesque. The girl looked over her shoulder at it, and I caught an expression in her eyes that appalled me. Turning to the piano again, she played frantically, and the faster her fingers flew, the nearer crept that shadow.

Suddenly it seemed to shoot right forward, there was a wild scream of terror, a terrific crash, and all was in absolute darkness.

I groped my way frantically towards the door. Something—I could not define what—came into violent collision with me; I staggered back half stunned; and, when my brain cleared, I found myself standing in the street, weak with exhaustion, and—hatless.

I visited the house the next day, when the sun was shining brightly and there were plenty of people about. It was as I had first seen it, untenanted and unfurnished.

I must then have dreamed the whole thing. And what more likely! I was excessively tired at the time, so tired that I felt I could hardly crawl home—and without a doubt I had dropped off to sleep resting against the verandah.

Just out of curiosity, however, I determined to find out if the interior of the house in any way resembled the interior I had seen in my dream, and, with that object in view, I applied to Mr. C.——, the owner, for permission to look over it, frankly telling him why I was doing so. As he appeared to be interested, I described my dream to him in detail, and he afterwards told me the following story:—

“About fifty years ago, a very rich French family occupied the house; and at the coming of age of their daughter they gave a fancy-dress ball. Among the guests was an Italian, who, being a rejected suitor of the daughter’s, had not been invited. He appeared in some grotesque and alarming costume, and when the dance was at its height suddenly overturned a large oil lamp.

“In a moment the whole floor was ablaze; and before anyone could stop him, he had seized the daughter of the house and hurled her into the midst of the flaming mass. Both he and the girl were burned to death, and the house, although it was thoroughly restored, has never let since.”

Having concluded his story, Mr. C.—— said he would like to go with me to the house, and accordingly we set out together.

Though my experience had been only a dream, the coincidence connected with it, which only needed my identification of the scene to be complete, was startling enough, and I grew more and more excited as we neared our destination. When we arrived, Mr. C.—— insisted upon my going first; and once inside, recognising every feature in the house, I led him first to the room in which I had seen the supper-table laid, and then upstairs to the ball-room, where, to my unspeakable surprise, lying in the middle of the floor, I found my hat.

.......

What a strangely fascinating city was old San Francisco—that is to say, San Francisco before the last great fire and earthquake! Consisting of street upon street, terrace upon terrace of quaintly irregular buildings, to me its atmosphere—as no other atmosphere ever has been—was impregnated with the superphysical. I stayed for a few days in a vast hotel in 117th Street, in which I was the only visitor. I shrewdly suspect it was haunted, although I cannot truthfully say that I ever saw a ghost there, and when I retired to bed up flight after flight of stairs, and past dimly-lighted passages teeming with doors—doors with nothing, nothing material at least, behind them—the only sounds I heard were the hollow echoes of my own footsteps as I went on ascending higher, higher, and higher.

Hearing, however, that I was interested in ghosts, the landlord of the hotel introduced me one day to a Mr. Sweeney, who kept a drug store in Market Street.

“The only experience I ever had with the Supernatural,” Mr. Sweeney began, in answer to my interrogations, “took place in this very room. Exactly twelve years ago I engaged the services of a young man called Edward Marsdon. He was very amiable and capable, but highly-strung and hypernormally sensitive. He had been with me about six months, when he came into the parlour one evening with a face like a corpse. ‘I’ve poisoned someone,’ he gasped. ‘Poisoned someone?’ I ejaculated. ‘Good God, what do you mean?’ ‘What I say,’ he replied. ‘A young fellow came into the store about an hour ago and handed me a prescription. It was signed by Dr. Knelligan, of 111th Street. I made it up, as I thought, all right, and gave it him. A few minutes ago, I found I had put in salts of lemon instead of paregoric.’ ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Certain!’ he said, ‘as the bottle of salts of lemon is on the table in the laboratory with the stopper out. I must have used it in mistake. The young man will die, if, indeed, he is not dead already, and I am ruined for life.’ ‘We both are,’ I said tersely. ‘Ring up Dr. Knelligan at once, and ask him for the young man’s address. When you get it, drive round at once and see if you are in time.’ It was of no use scolding him for carelessness—he was upset enough already, and a ‘blowing up’ just then might, I thought, result in another tragedy. The only thing to be done was to hope for the best. He rang up Knelligan, got the address, drove round to it, and discovered that the young man had just left. The landlady had no idea where he had gone. To Marsdon this was the last straw. He came back in a state of utter collapse, trembling all over as if he had ague, and, after telling me what happened, he went upstairs and slammed his door. About a quarter of an hour later, my wife, the servant, and I all heard Marsdon, so we thought, come downstairs and go out. The servant then went up to his room to make the bed, and hearing her scream out, I ran upstairs, to find her standing in the middle of the floor, wringing her hands, whilst Marsdon was sitting in a chair—dead! He had been dead some minutes. That, Mr. O’Donnell, was the beginning of the strange occurrences here. If it was not Marsdon whom we all heard go out, who could it have been? There was no one in the house but we three, and the body in the chair upstairs, so that it must have been Marsdon’s ghost. Well, from that day on, we had no peace.

“Footsteps, which we all recognised as Marsdon’s, for he had a most peculiar lumping kind of walk, trod up and down the stairs all hours of the day and night, and frequently when I was in the laboratory mixing medicines I was strongly conscious of some presence standing close beside me and watching everything I did. One day my wife saw him. She was going out, and wanting some money, she called to me. As I did not answer, she went in search of me, and finding me, as she thought, standing on the hearthrug of the parlour with my back to her, she touched me on the shoulder. The next moment she discovered her mistake. The person whom she had mistaken for me turned round, and she found herself confronted with the white, scared countenance of Edward Marsdon. She started back with a loud shriek, and Marsdon walked out of the room, and apparently right through the servant who came running in to see what was the matter. My wife asked the maid if she had seen anything, and the latter said, ‘No, only a dark shadow seemed to fall right across me, and just for a second or so I felt miserably depressed.’ A week or so afterwards he was again seen; this time by my wife and the maid. They met him on the stairs. He appeared to be under the influence of some very painful emotion, and he passed them at a great rate, and so near that they felt his clothes—apparently quite material—brush against them. He disappeared in the laboratory, and on their entering it immediately afterwards, there was no one there. Something of this nature—either auditory or visual, or both—now happened pretty well daily, until one morning a young man came to the store to see me. ‘I am the young man,’ he said, ‘to whom your assistant gave that unfortunate mixture. I have just returned to San Francisco, and have heard all about it. The medicine was perfectly all right. I drank it directly I left here, and it did me the world of good. There was not even the suspicion of poison in it. Marsdon was labouring under some extraordinary delusion. If only he had told my landlady about it when he called and found I had gone, she could have given him the glass I had drank out of, which doubtless contained some dregs of the stuff—at any rate, a sufficient quantity for analysis. I am told there are rumours afloat that his apparition has been seen several times since he died; not that I believe in such things as ghosts.’

“‘Whether you believe in them or not,’ I said quietly, ‘it is a fact Edward Marsdon has both been seen and heard.’ ‘Then I hope,’ he said, ‘my visit here to-day will put matters all right, and that his poor, wandering spirit, learning that I am alive and well, will find rest, and trouble you no more.’ He then bid me good-morning and walked towards the door. ‘My God!’ he suddenly cried, coming to an abrupt halt, ‘there he is!’ I looked, and as sure as I am sitting here, Mr. O’Donnell, there was Edward Marsdon, just as I had known him in life, standing on the pavement with his face glued to the window, peering in at us. The expression in his eyes was one of infinite joy and astonishment.

“I took a step or two towards him with the intention of speaking, when he immediately vanished, and from that day to this the hauntings have entirely ceased.”

CHAPTER V
A HAUNTED OFFICE IN DENVER

After leaving San Francisco, I visited Sacramento, where I bought a pair of braces, suspenders as they call them there, that lasted me for years. They were the very best half-dollar’s worth I ever had, and I still have the remains of them stowed away in a big trunk amongst other mementos of the long past.

I can’t imagine any city in America hotter than Sacramento in the summer, or more unpleasantly cold in the winter, apart from which there was nothing about the place that caused it to be very deeply impressed on my memory, saving that I met a man in one of the streets one day who was so exactly like an old Clifton College master called Tait that I believed it was he, and accosted him accordingly.

The man gasped at me in amazement. “Why, Jupp,” he said, “how on earth have you managed it. It’s only ten minutes since I left you eating your dinner in the Eagle Hotel on the other side of the town. Have you wings?”

The moment he spoke I knew he was not Tait, but it took me some time to convince him I was not Jupp; and when he introduced me to the latter half an hour or so later, I was not surprised, for I do not think there could have been a more striking likeness to myself, even in my own portrait.

The coincidence was all the more remarkable since there was at Clifton College, contemporary with Tait, a master named Jupp, of whose cane I had the most striking recollection. In appearance, however, the Clifton Jupp was not in the least bit like me.

This was the only adventure of note, if one may so designate it, I had during this visit to Sacramento. I went on from there to Denver, where I met one or two relatives of friends of mine in England, and did a little work as a “Free Lance” journalist. It was summer when I had last stayed in Denver, and then the intense heat, combined with an injudicious consumption of fruit and iced water, had brought on a mild attack of cholera, which left me with a none too favourable impression of the place.

But now all was changed. The weather was much cooler; I was growing acclimatised, and I did not feel altogether among strangers. Consequently my apathy vanished, and, despite the fact that my employment was anything but lucrative, I enjoyed this second stay in Denver immensely.

The town had not been built long. Indeed, ten years previously it had only one anything like orthodox street; so that it was the last place in the world where one would expect to come across a haunted house. Yet I heard of three haunted houses at least whilst I was there.

The one I think most likely to interest my readers I heard of in this way. I had been to the Zoological Gardens, and was returning by tram, when a journalist called Rouillac, with whom I had a very slight acquaintance, came running up to me in a great state of excitement. “O’Donnell,” he cried, “I have unearthed something that will interest you—the case of a haunting in an office in Race Street.” He then proceeded to give me an account of it.

The office was rented by a Mrs. Bell, a typist who employed two girls, Stella Dean and Hester Holt.

One day Hester Holt failed to put in an appearance.

“If she is ill,” Mrs. Bell said to Stella Dean, “she ought to have let me know. There was nothing wrong with her yesterday, was there?”

“Not that I am aware of,” Stella Dean replied. “When she parted from me, just across the way, she went off in the best of spirits. I expect she’ll turn up all right to-morrow.”

The morrow came, and Hester Holt not arriving, Stella Dean was despatched in the dinner-hour to find out what had become of her. She returned looking very white and scared.

“Why, Stella,” Mrs. Bell exclaimed. “What on earth’s the matter?”

“Hester’s gone away without telling anyone where she was going,” Stella Dean answered.

“You don’t say so,” Mrs. Bell cried. “What can have happened?”

“She never went to her lodgings after leaving here; at least, that’s what the landlady says,” Stella Dean replied. “And she hasn’t written, either—but I think you’d better call there yourself; I don’t like the woman.” And Stella burst out crying.

This was the beginning of the mystery. Mrs. Bell interviewed the landlady, who stuck to her statement that she had neither seen Hester Holt nor heard of her since she had left the house two days ago, presumably to attend business. There had been no words between them, she said, and Hester had seemed as usual, perfectly happy. She was a singularly reserved girl, and never mentioned her family excepting when she went away for her annual holiday. She then requested that all her letters should be forwarded to the address of her married sister.

The landlady, Mrs. Britton, gave this address to Mrs. Bell, and the latter, writing off at once, received an answer by return of post to say that Hester was not there and no tidings of her had been received for over a month. The married sister, however, made an important statement. She said that one person was sure to know of Hester’s whereabouts, and that was Pete Simpkins, the young man with whom she kept company, and was hoping eventually to marry. Mrs. Bell, now keenly interested, hastened off and interviewed Simpkins. To quote her own words, he seemed “a bright, intelligent young man,” and exhibited unfeigned astonishment and perturbation on learning of the disappearance of his sweetheart.

“When did you last see her?” Mrs. Bell enquired.

“The day she left you,” he responded. “I had been out in the country all day, superintending the building of a large farm some ten miles to the east of this city, and I was cycling home along a very unfrequented route, when I met a buggy. Two girls were in it, and to my amazement, they were Hester and Stella Dean.”

“What!” Mrs. Bell cried. “Stella Dean? Are you sure?”

“Absolutely!” Simpkins replied. “I can swear to it. It astonished me because I knew they had been on very bad terms. I was engaged to Stella before I met Hester, but I could not stand her temper. One day she was so enraged with my dog because it snarled at her, that she seized my walking-stick and beat it on the head till it was dead. I found her standing over it, white with fury; and feeling that after what I had witnessed I could never like her again, I broke off our engagement there and then. After that I met Hester Holt at the same house where I had first seen Stella, and we at once became friends. Stella Dean did not like it, but she took on more than was necessary; and Hester told me there had been several very painful scenes between them. Indeed, I understood that out of business hours they were not on speaking terms; hence you can judge of my astonishment when I saw them driving in the buggy side by side.”

“It’s all very mysterious,” Mrs. Bell observed. “If she does not turn up soon, I shall have to inform the police.”

The following day, Mrs. Bell asked Stella if she had gone for a drive with Hester Holt the evening of the latter’s disappearance, and Stella Dean promptly replied, “No; the last time I saw Hester was when she left here that afternoon. She said good-bye to me as usual on the other side of the road, and I have never set eyes on her since.”

She admitted she had once been engaged to Pete Simpkins, but emphatically denied that Hester’s keeping company with him had led to any rupture between them. “Hester and I were always on the very best of terms,” she said, “and it would be downright mean of anyone to allege otherwise. Besides, I can produce proofs to the contrary.”

The next day, as Hester was still missing, Mrs. Bell told the police. The affair was at once inquired into, and Pete Simpkins’ story about the buggy was corroborated. Someone else had seen the two girls driving towards the outskirts of the town that same evening; whilst a car proprietor also came forward and declared that he recollected Miss Holt hiring a buggy from him, but that she had driven off in it alone. When the buggy was brought back, he being out, his wife had taken the money for it. But as it was then dusk, she could not possibly swear to the identity of the lady who had paid her, especially as the latter had been so muffled up, presumably on account of the coldness of the night, that practically nothing of her face was visible. She could only say Miss Dean resembled her both in build and height.

“Who is that tall, good-looking girl, Stella, that I’ve seen following you into the building...?”

Stella Dean was now asked if she could produce an alibi; and, accordingly, her mother, a very decrepit old lady, declared that Stella had come straight home from the office, and had remained indoors all that evening. To add to the complexity of the affair, someone else testified to having seen Hester Holt enter Mrs. Britton’s house with a latch key rather late on the night in question; and this of course made some people suspect Mrs. Britton, but the police could prove nothing, and the matter was eventually dropped.

All this happened about three months before I arrived in Denver.

A week after the disappearance of Hester Holt, Mrs. Bell had a new assistant called Vera Cummings, a very material, practical young lady, the daughter of a farmer somewhere near Omaha.

The day after her arrival, Miss Cummings was busy typewriting in the office with Mrs. Bell and Stella Dean, when she suddenly exclaimed, “How is it that I get convulsed with shivers whenever I sit next to you, Miss Dean? I don’t when I’m sitting next to Mrs. Bell. Eugh! I feel as if the icy east wind were blowing right through me.”

“What nonsense!” Stella Dean replied; “you imagine it.”

“No, I don’t,” Miss Cummings retorted; “I’m going to sit somewhere else,” and she moved to the other side of the table.

Mrs. Bell made no comment. An hour or so afterwards, Vera Cummings abruptly observed:

“My, Stella Dean, what long legs you have!”

“What in the world do you mean?” was the surprised and rather indignant retort.

“Why, there’s no one else on your side of the table, is there?” Vera Cummings responded; “and someone’s feet keep kicking mine.”

“You’re dreaming,” Stella Dean said, and Mrs. Bell noticed she turned very pale.

Two days now passed uneventfully, but on the third day after the above conversation, Mrs. Bell and the two girls were sitting talking—it was close on the interval for tea, and work was just then very slack—when Vera Cummings remarked, “Who is that tall, good-looking girl, Stella, that I’ve seen following you into the building on several occasions. I’ve watched her keeping close behind you till you get to the elevator, and then she disappears. Where she goes I can’t imagine.”

“A tall, good-looking girl following me to the elevator,” Stella Dean repeated, her cheeks ashy. “What do you mean? I’ve seen no one. You’ve dreamt it.”

“What was she like?” Mrs. Bell interrupted.