TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD

TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD

A Record of Personal Experiences
of the Supernatural

BY

SIDNEY DICKINSON

With an Introduction By

R. H. STETSON

Professor of Psychology
Oberlin College

And a Prefatory Note By

G. O. TUBBY

Assistant Secretary American
Society Psychical Research

NEW YORK
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY
1920

Copyright, 1920, by
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

I

II
THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW

PREFATORY NOTE

It is a pleasure to testify that the MS. of this volume of stories has been submitted with abundant testimonies from the individuals who knew their author and his facts at first hand, to the American Society for Psychical Research for approval or disapproval.

No more interesting or better attested phenomena of the kind have come to our attention, and we have asked that a copy of the MS. be filed permanently in the Society's archives for preservation from loss. These accounts by Mr. Dickinson bear internal evidence to their true psychic origin and to the trained observer scarcely need corroboration or other external support. They ring true. And they are, in addition, moving human documents, with a strong literary appeal.

Gertrude Ogden Tubby,

Asst. Sec., A. S. P. R.

April 5, 1920.

INTRODUCTION

This account of striking and peculiar events by Mr. Sidney Dickinson is but the fulfillment of an intention of the writer interrupted by sudden death. Mr. Dickinson had taken careful notes of the happenings described and, being a professional observer and writer, it was inevitable that he should preserve the narrative. He had been slow to prepare it for publication because of the prominent and enabling part played by his wife in the occurrences. After her death, when an increasing interest in the subject had developed, it seemed to Mr. Dickinson that the narrative might be received as he had written it—as a careful and exact account of most remarkable events. In reverence to the memory of his wife and out of respect to the friends concerned he could not present it otherwise to the public.

As the narrative is of some time ago and the principal witnesses are dead or inaccessible the account must stand for itself; the endorsement of the American Society for Physical Research testifies to its intrinsic interest. But the character and personality of the writer is a vital consideration. Mr. Sidney Dickinson was a professional journalist and lecturer. After graduation from Amherst in 1874 he served on the Springfield Republican and the San Francisco Bulletin. Later he was prominent as an art and dramatic critic on the staff of the Boston Journal. After extended study of art in European galleries he lectured before many colleges, universities and art associations. He spent some years in Australia, where many of the events of this account took place. While travelling in Europe and Australia he was correspondent for a number of papers and magazines, including Scribner's Monthly, the New York Times, the Boston Journal, and the Springfield Republican. During a visit to New Zealand he was engaged by the Colonial Government to give lectures on New Zealand in Australia and America.

His work and his associates testify to careful observation and sane judgment. Mr. Dickinson had an unusual memory, a keen sense of accuracy and he was cool and practical rather than emotional or excitable. No one who was much with him in the later days could doubt the entire sincerity of the man. There could have been no ulterior motive as the account itself will show. The narrative was written because he felt that it might well be a contribution of some scientific interest.

R. H. Stetson,
Professor of Psychology,
Oberlin College.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

These stories are not "founded upon fact"; they are fact. If I may claim any merit for them it is this—they are absolutely and literally true. They seem to me to be unusual even among the mass of literature that has been written upon the subject they illustrate; if they possess any novelty at all it may be found in the fact that the phenomena they describe occurred, for the most part, without invitation, without reference to "conditions," favorable or otherwise, and without mediumistic intervention.

I have written these stories with no purpose to bolster up any theory or to strengthen or weaken any belief, and I must say frankly that, in my opinion, they neither prove nor disprove anything whatsoever. I am not a believer, any more than I am a sceptic, in regard to so-called "Spiritualism," and have consistently held to my non-committal attitude in this matter by refraining, all my life, from consulting a medium or attending a professional séance. In the scientific study of Psychology I have a layman's interest, but even that is curious rather than expectant;—my experience, which I think this book will show to have been considerable, in the observation of occult phenomena has failed to afford me anything like a positive clue to their causes or meaning.

In fact, I have long ago arrived at the opinion that any one who devotes himself to the study of what, for want of a better word, we may call "supernatural" will inevitably and at last find himself landed in an impasse. The first steps in the pursuit are easy, and seductively promise final arrival at the goal—but in every case of which I, at least, have knowledge the course abruptly ends (sometimes sooner, sometimes later) against a wall so high as to be unscalable, not to be broken through, extending to infinity on either hand.

That disembodied spirits can at least make their existence known to us appears to me as a well-approved fact; that they are "forbid to tell the secrets of their prison-house" is my equally firm conviction. I am aware that such an opinion can be only personal, and that it is hopeless to attempt to commend it by satisfactory evidence; those who have had experiences similar to those which I have recorded (and their number is much greater than is generally supposed) will understand how this opinion has been reached—to others it will be inconceivable, as based upon what seems to them impossible.

If what I have written should seem to throw any light, however faint, upon the problem of the Mystery of Existence in whose solution some of the profoundest intellects of the world are at present engaged, my labor will have been worth the while. I submit the results of this labor as a record, with a lively sense of the responsibility I assume by its publication.

TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD

A MYSTERY OF TWO CONTINENTS

This story, as well as the one that immediately follows it, was first related to the late Wilkie Collins, the noted English novelist, with whom I had the good fortune to be acquainted—and who, as all his intimates know, and as those whose knowledge of him is derived from his romances may surmise, was an earnest and careful student of occult phenomena. I placed in his hands all the concurrent data which I could secure, and furnished the names of witnesses to the incidents—which names are now in possession of the publishers of this volume—equipped with which he carried out a thorough personal investigation. The result of this investigation he made known to me, one pleasant spring afternoon, in his study in London.

"During my life," he said, "I have made a considerable study of the supernatural, but the knowledge I have gained is not very definite. Take the matter of apparitions, for instance, to which the two interesting stories you have submitted to me relate:—I have come to regard these as subjective rather than objective phenomena, projections from an excited or stimulated brain, not actual existences. Why, I have seen thousands of ghosts myself! Many a night, after writing until two o'clock in the morning, and fortifying myself for my work with strong coffee, I have had to shoulder them aside as I went upstairs to bed. These apparent presences were nothing to me, since I knew perfectly well that their origin was nowhere else than in my overwrought nerves—and I have come to conclude that most cases of visions of this sort are to be explained by attributing them to a temporary or permanent disorganization of the brain of the percipient. Mind, I do not say all cases—there are many that are not to be set aside so readily. Again, it is not easy to arrive at the facts in any given case; even if the observer is honest, he may not have cultivated the habit of exact statement—moreover, stories are apt to grow by repetition, and a tendency to exaggerate is common to most of us. Now and then, however, I have come upon an account of supernatural visitation which seems an exception to the general run, and upsets my theories; and I must say that, having from time to time investigated at least fifteen hundred such instances, the two stories you have furnished me are of them all the best authenticated."

Some years ago, in the course of a tour of art study which took me through the principal countries of Europe, I found myself in Naples, having arrived there by a leisurely progress that began at Gibraltar, and had brought me by easy stages, and with many stops en route, through the Mediterranean. The time of year was late February, and the season, even for Southern Italy, was much advanced;—so, in visiting the Island of Capri (the exact date, I recollect, was February 22) I found this most charming spot in the Vesuvian Bay smiling and verdant, and was tempted by the brilliant sunshine and warm breezes to explore the hilly country which rose behind the port at which I had landed.

The fields upon the heights were green with grass, and spangled with delicate white flowers bearing a yellow centre, which, while smaller than our familiar American field-daisies, and held upon more slender stalks, reminded me of them. Having in mind certain friends in then bleak New England, whence I had strayed into this Land of Summer, I plucked a number of these blossoms and placed them between the leaves of my guide-book—Baedeker's "Southern Italy,"—intending to inclose them in letters which I then planned to write to these friends, contrasting the conditions attending their "Washington's Birthday" with those in which I fortunately found myself.

Returning to Naples, the many interests of that city put out of my head for the time the thought of letter-writing, and three days later I took the train for Rome, with my correspondence still in arrears. The first day of my stay in Rome was devoted to an excursion by carriage into the Campagna, and on the way back to the city I stopped to see that most interesting and touching of Roman monuments, the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. Every tourist knows and has visited that beautiful memorial—so I do not need to describe its massive walls, its roof (now fallen and leaving the sepulchre open to the sky) and the heavy turf which covers the earth of its interior. This green carpet of Nature, when I visited the tomb, was thickly strewn with fragrant violets, and of these, as of the daisylike flowers I had found in Capri, I collected several, and placed them in my guide-book—this time Baedeker's "Central Italy."

I mention these two books—the "Southern" and the "Central Italy"—because they have an important bearing on my story.

The next day, calling at my banker's, I saw an announcement that letters posted before four o'clock that afternoon would be forwarded to catch the mail for New York by a specially fast steamer for Liverpool, and hastened back to my hotel with the purpose of preparing, and thus expediting, my much-delayed correspondence. The most important duty of the moment seemed to be the writing of a letter to my wife, then living in Boston, and to this I particularly addressed myself. I described my trip through the Mediterranean and my experience in Naples and Rome, and concluded my letter as follows:

"In Naples I found February to be like our New England May, and in Capri, which I visited on 'Washington's Birthday,' I found the heights of the island spangled over with delicate flowers, some of which I plucked, and enclose in this letter. And, speaking of flowers, I send you also some violets which I gathered yesterday at the Tomb of Cecelia Metella, outside of Rome—you know about this monument, or, if not, you can look up its history, and save me from transcribing a paragraph from the guide-book. I send you these flowers from Naples and Rome, respectively, in order that you may understand in what agreeable surroundings I find myself, as compared with the ice and snow and bitter cold which are probably your experience at this season."

Having finished the letter, I took from the guide-book on "Central Italy" which lay on the table before me, the violets from the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, enclosed them, with the sheets I had written, in an envelope, sealed and addressed it, and was about to affix the stamp, when it suddenly occurred to me that I had left out the flowers I had plucked at Capri. These, I then recalled, were still in the guide-book for "Southern Italy," which I had laid away in my portmanteau as of no further present use to me. Accordingly I unstrapped and unlocked the portmanteau, found the guide-book, took out the flowers from Capri which were still between its leaves, opened and destroyed the envelope already addressed, added the daisies to the violets, and put the whole into a new inclosure, which I again directed, stamped, and duly dropped into the mail-box at the bankers'.

I am insistent upon these details because they particularly impressed upon my mind the certainty that both varieties of flowers were inclosed in the letter to my wife. Subsequent events would have been strange enough if I had not placed the flowers in the letter at all—but the facts above stated assure me that there is no question that I did so, and make what followed more than ever inexplicable.

So much for the beginning of the affair—in Italy; now for its conclusion—in New England.

During my year abroad, my wife was living, as I have said, in Boston, occupying at the Winthrop House, on Bowdoin street—a hotel which has since, I believe, been taken down—a suite of rooms comprising parlor, bedroom and bath. With her was my daughter by a former marriage, whose mother had died at her birth, some seven years before. On the same floor of the hotel were apartments occupied by Mrs. Celia Thaxter, a woman whose name is well known in American literature, and with whom my wife sustained a very intimate friendship. I am indebted for the facts I am now setting down not only to my wife, who gave me an oral account of them on my return from Europe, four months later, but also to this lady who wrote out and preserved a record of them at the time of their occurrence, and sent me a copy of the same while I was still abroad.

About ten days after I had posted my letter, inclosing the flowers from Capri and Rome, my wife suddenly awoke in the middle of the night, and saw standing at the foot of her bed the form of the child's mother. The aspect of the apparition was so serene and gracious that, although greatly startled, she felt no alarm; moreover, it had once before appeared to her, as the reader will learn in the second story of this series, which, for reasons of my own, I have not arranged in chronological order. Then she heard, as if from a voice at a great distance, these words: "I have brought you some flowers from Sidney." At the next instant the figure vanished.

The visitation had been so brief that my wife, although she at once arose and lighted the gas, argued with herself that she had been dreaming, and after a few minutes extinguished the light and returned to bed, where she slept soundly until six o'clock the next morning. Always an early riser, she dressed at once and went from her bedroom, where the child was still sleeping, to her parlor. In the centre of the room was a table, covered with a green cloth, and as she entered and happened to glance at it she saw, to her surprise, a number of dried flowers scattered over it. A part of these she recognized as violets, but the rest were unfamiliar to her, although they resembled very small daisies.

The vision of the night before was at once forcibly recalled to her, and the words of the apparition, "I have brought you some flowers," seemed to have a meaning, though what it was she could not understand. After examining these strange blossoms for a time she returned to her chamber and awakened the child, whom she then took to see the flowers, and asked her if she knew anything about them.

"Why, no, mamma," the little girl replied; "I have never seen them before. I was reading my new book at the table last night until I went to bed, and if they were there I should have seen them."

So the flowers were gathered up and placed on the shelf above the fireplace, and during the morning were exhibited to Mrs. Thaxter, who came in for a chat, and who, like my wife, could make nothing of the matter.

At about four o'clock in the afternoon of that day the postman called at the hotel, bearing among his mail several letters for my wife, which were at once sent up to her. Among them was one that was postmarked "Rome" and addressed in my handwriting, and with this she sat down as the first to be read. It contained an account, among other things, of my experiences in Naples and Rome, and in due course mentioned the enclosure of flowers from Capri and from the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. There were, however, no flowers whatever in the letter, although each sheet and the envelope were carefully examined; my wife even shook her skirts and made a search upon the carpet, thinking that the stated enclosure might have fallen out as the letter was opened. Nothing could be found—yet ten hours before the arrival of the letter, flowers exactly such as it described had been found on the centre-table!

Mrs. Thaxter was summoned, and the two ladies marvelled greatly. Among Mrs. Thaxter's friends in the city was a well-known botanist, and she at once suggested that the flowers be offered for his inspection. No time was lost in calling upon him, and the flowers were shown (without, however, the curious facts about them being mentioned), with the request that he state, if it were possible, whence they came. He examined them carefully and then said:

"As to the violets, it is difficult to say where they grew, since these flowers, wherever they may be found in the world (and they are of almost universal occurrence, through cultivation or otherwise) may everywhere be very much alike. Certain peculiarities in these specimens, however, coupled with the scent they still faintly retain and which is characteristic, incline me to the opinion that they came from some part of Southern Europe—perhaps France, but more likely Italy. As to the others, which, as you say, resemble small daisies, they must have come from some point about the Bay of Naples, as I am not aware of their occurrence elsewhere."

"A SPIRIT OF HEALTH"

"A SPIRIT OF HEALTH"

It is common, and, in the main, a well-founded objection to belief in so-called supernatural manifestations, that they seem in general to subserve no purpose of usefulness or help to us who are still upon this mortal plane, and thus are unworthy of intelligences such as both love and reason suggest our departed friends to be. The mummeries and too-frequent juggleries of dark-séances, and the inconclusive and usually vapid "communications" that are vouchsafed through professional mediums, have done much to confirm this opinion, and the possibility of apparitions, particularly, has been weakened, rather than strengthened, in the minds of intelligent persons by the machinery of cabinets and other appliances which seem to be necessary paraphernalia in "materializing" the spirits of the dead.

That the departed ever reappear in such form as they presented during life I am not prepared to affirm, even in view of many experiences of a nature like that which I am about to relate. In the generality of such cases I am decidedly in agreement with the opinion of the late Wilkie Collins, as set forth in the preceding story—although I should be inclined to extend that opinion far enough to include the admission of the possibility that it was the actual Presence which so worked upon the mind of the percipient as to cause it to project from itself the phantom appearance. This may seem somewhat like a quibble to confirmed believers in apparitions, of whom there are many, and perhaps it is—while those who are impatient of ingenious psychological explanations may find in the following story a confirmation of the conviction which they hold, that the dead may appear in the form in which we knew them, bringing warning and aid to the living.

It is now thirty-one years ago that the wife of my youth, after less than a year of married life, was taken from me by death, leaving to me an infant daughter, in whom all the personal and mental traits of the mother gradually reproduced themselves in a remarkable degree. Some three years later I married again, and the child, who, during that period, had been in the care of her grandparents, at regular intervals, on either side of the house respectively, was taken into the newly-formed home.

A strong affection between the new mother and the little girl was established at once, and their relations soon became more like those of blood than of adoption. The latter, never having known her own mother, had no memory of associations that might have weakened the influence of the new wife, and the step-mother, as the years passed and she had no children, grew to regard the one who had come to her at her marriage as in very truth her own.

I often thought, when seeing those two together, so fond and devoted each to each, that if those we call dead still live and have knowledge of facts in the existence they have left behind, the mother of the child may have felt her natural yearnings satisfied in beholding their mutual affection, and even have found therein the medium to extend from her own sphere the influence of happiness which some may believe they see exercised in the events that this narrative, as well as others in the series, describes.

At the time in which these events occurred, I was traveling in Europe, and my wife and daughter were living in Boston, as stated in the story with which this book opens. In the adjoining town of Brookline there resided a lady of wealth and social prominence, Mrs. John W. Candler, wife of a gentleman who had large railway interests in the South, and who was, moreover, Representative for his district in the Lower House of Congress. Mrs. Candler was a woman of rare beauty and possessed unusual intellectual gifts; she was also a close personal friend of Mrs. Thaxter, whom I have before mentioned and who introduced her to my wife—the acquaintance thus formed developing into an affectionate intimacy that ended only with Mrs. Candler's death, a dozen years ago. As her husband's business interests and legislative duties frequently compelled his absence from home, it was Mrs. Candler's delight to enliven her enforced solitudes by dispensing her large and unostentatious hospitality to her chosen friends—so that it often happened that Mrs. Thaxter, and my wife and child, were guests for considerable periods at her luxurious residence.

One afternoon in mid-winter, Mrs. Candler drove into the city to call upon my wife, and, finding her suffering from a somewhat obstinate cold, urged her, with her usual warmth and heartiness, to return home with her for a couple of days, for the sake of the superior comforts which her house could afford as compared with those of the hotel. My wife demurred to this, chiefly on the ground that, as the weather was very severe, she did not like to take the child with her, since, being rather delicate that winter although not actually ill, she dared not remove her, even temporarily, from the equable temperature of the hotel.

While the matter was being discussed another caller was announced in the person of Miss Mae Harris Anson, a young woman of some eighteen years, daughter of a wealthy family in Minneapolis, who was pursuing a course of study at the New England Conservatory of Music. Miss Anson was very fond of children, and possessed an unusual talent for entertaining them—and thus was a great favorite of my little daughter, who hailed her arrival with rapture. This fact furnished Mrs. Candler with an idea which she immediately advanced in the form of a suggestion that Miss Anson might be willing to care for the child during my wife's absence. To this proposal Miss Anson at once assented, saying, in her lively way, that, as her school was then in recess for a few days, she would like nothing better than to exchange her boarding-house for a hotel for a while, and in consideration thereof to act as nursemaid for such time as might be required of her. It was finally agreed, therefore, that Miss Anson should come to the hotel the next morning, prepared for a two or three days' stay;—this she did, and early in the afternoon Mrs. Candler arrived in her sleigh, and with my wife was driven to her home.

The afternoon and evening passed without incident, and my wife retired early to bed, being assigned to a room next to Mrs. Candler, and one that could be entered only through that lady's apartment. The next morning she arose rather late, and yielding to the arguments of her hostess, who insisted that she should not undergo the exertion of going down to breakfast, that repast was served in her room, and she partook of it while seated in an easy chair at a table before an open fire that blazed cheerily in the wide chimney-place. The meal finished and the table removed, she continued to sit for some time in her comfortable chair, being attired only in dressing-gown and slippers, considering whether she should go to bed again, as Mrs. Candler had recommended, or prepare herself to rejoin her friend, whom she could hear talking in the adjoining room with another member of the household.

The room in which she was sitting had a large window fronting upon the southeast, and the morning sun, shining from a cloudless sky, poured through it a flood of light that stretched nearly to her feet, and formed a golden track across the carpet. Her eyes wandered from one to another object in the luxurious apartment, and as they returned from one of these excursions to a regard of her more immediate surroundings, she was startled to perceive that some one was with her—one who, standing in the full light that came through the window, was silently observing her. Some subtle and unclassified sense informed her that the figure in the sunlight was not of mortal mold—it was indistinct in form and outline, and seemed to be a part of, rather than separate from, the radiance that surrounded it. It was the figure of a young and beautiful woman with golden hair and blue eyes, and from both face and eyes was carried the impression of a great anxiety; a robe of some filmy white material covered her form from neck to feet, and bare arms, extending from flowing sleeves, were stretched forth in a gesture of appeal.

My wife, stricken with a feeling in which awe dominated fear, lay back in her chair for some moments silently regarding the apparition, not knowing if she were awake or dreaming. A strange familiarity in the face troubled her, for she knew she had never seen it before—then understanding came to her, and the recollection of photographs, and of the features of her daughter by adoption, flashed upon her mind the instant conviction that she was gazing at the mother who died when the child was born.

"What is it?" she finally found strength to whisper. "Why do you come to me?"

The countenance of the apparition took on an expression of trouble more acute even than before.

"The child! The child!"—the cry came from the shadowy lips distinctly, yet as if uttered at a great distance. "Go back to town at once!"

"But why?" my wife inquired. "I do not understand what you mean."

The figure began to fade away, as if reabsorbed in the light that enveloped it, but the voice came again as before:—"Go to your room and look in your bureau drawer!"—and only the sunlight was to be seen in the spot where the phantom had stood.

For some moments my wife remained reclining in her chair, completely overcome by her strange vision; then she got upon her feet, and half ran, half staggered, into the next room where Mrs. Candler and her companion were still conversing.

"Why, my dear!" exclaimed Mrs. Candler, "what in the world is the matter? You are as pale as a ghost!"

"I think I have seen one," panted my wife. "Tell me, has anyone passed through here into my room?"

"Why, no," her friend replied; "how could anyone? We have both been sitting here ever since breakfast."

"Then it is true!" cried my wife. "Something terrible is happening in town! Please, please take me to my rooms at once!"—and she hurriedly related what she had seen.

Mrs. Candler endeavored to soothe her—she had been dreaming; all must be well with the child, otherwise Miss Anson would at once inform them;—moreover, rather than have her brave a ride to town in the bitter cold of the morning, she would send a servant after luncheon to inquire for news at the hotel. My wife was not convinced by these arguments but finally yielded to them; Mrs. Candler gave her the morning paper as a medium for quieting her mind, and she returned with it to her room and resumed her seat in the easy chair.

She had hardly begun her reading, however, when the newspaper was snatched from her hand and thrown to the opposite side of the room, and as she started up in alarm she saw the apparition again standing in the sunlight, and again heard the voice—this time in a tone of imperious command—"Go to your rooms at once and look in your bureau drawer!" At the utterance of these words the apparition vanished, leaving my wife so overwhelmed with fear and amazement that for some time she was powerless to move—then reason and control of action returned to her, and she was able to regain her friend's room and acquaint her with the facts of this second visitation. This time Mrs. Candler made no attempt to oppose her earnest purpose to return to town, the horses and sleigh were ordered from the stables, my wife hurriedly dressed herself, and in half an hour both ladies were speeding toward Boston.

When they reached the entrance of the hotel, my wife, whose excitement had increased greatly during the drive, sprang from the sleigh and rushed upstairs, with Mrs. Candler close behind her, burst into the door of her rooms like a whirlwind, and discovered—the child absorbed in architectural pursuits with a set of building blocks in the middle of the sitting-room, and Miss Anson calmly reading a novel in a rocking chair by the window!

The picture thus presented was so serene and commonplace by comparison with what my wife's agitation had led her to expect, that Mrs. Candler at once burst out laughing; my wife's face also showed intense bewilderment—then, crying, "She said 'look in the bureau drawer!'" she hurried into the bedroom with Mrs. Candler at her heels.

The bureau, a conventional piece of bedroom furniture, stood at the head of the child's bed, and presented an entirely innocent appearance; nevertheless my wife went straight up to it, and, firmly grasping the handles, pulled out the topmost drawer. Instantly a mass of flame burst forth, accompanied by a cloud of acrid smoke that billowed to the ceiling, and the whole interior of the bureau seemed to be ablaze. Mrs. Candler, with great presence of mind, seized a pitcher of water and dashed it upon the fire, which action checked it for the moment, and Miss Anson flew into the hall, arousing the house with her cries. Mrs. Thaxter, who was at the moment coming to my wife's apartment from her own, hurried in and saw the blazing bureau and the two white-faced women before it and turned quickly to summon help—employes came running with an extinguisher, and in five minutes the danger was over.

When the excitement had subsided, an examination was made as to the cause of the conflagration, with the following result:

My wife, who was a skilful painter in oils, and devoted much of her time to this employment, was accustomed to keep her colors and brushes in the upper drawer of the bureau in her bedroom. She had also, and very carelessly, placed in a corner of the drawer a quantity of loose rags which had become thoroughly saturated with oil and turpentine from their use in cleaning her palette and brushes.

I am indebted for the above facts not only to Mrs. Thaxter and Mrs. Candler, both of whom I have frequently heard relate this story, but, particularly, to Miss Anson herself, who has been, at the time of writing this, for several years connected with the editorial staff of the Minneapolis Journal. In a letter which she sent me in response to my request that she should confirm my recollection, she set forth clearly the causes of the conflagration in the following words:

"Some time before she [my wife] had put a whole package of matches into a stewpan, in which she heated water, and set the pan in with these paints and rags. Then, one night, when in a hurry for some hot water, she had gone in, in the dark, and forgetting all about the matches, had dumped them upon the tubes of oil paints when she pulled out the pan.

"Every one of the heads of these matches had been burned off, evidently through spontaneous combustion. I went through them all, and not one had been ignited. The rags were burned and the whole inside of the drawer was charred. The fire could not have been kept under longer than the following night, and would probably have burned the child and me in bed, before anyone dreamed there was a fire."

THE MIRACLE OF THE FLOWERS

THE MIRACLE OF THE FLOWERS

Among the "phenomena" which attend the average spiritualistic séance a favorite one is the apparent production from space of quantities of flowers—to the supernatural source of which credence or doubt is given according to the degree of belief or scepticism inherent in the individual sitters. Having never attended one of these gatherings, I am not able to describe such an incident as occurs under such auspices; but the suggestion recalls to my mind two very remarkable events in which flowers were produced in a seemingly inexplicable manner, and without the assistance (if that be the right word) of mediumistic control. In one of these experiences I personally participated, and in both of them my wife was concerned—therefore I can vouch for their occurrence.

Some months after the happenings recorded in the two previous narratives, I was spending the summer following my return from Europe in Northampton, Massachusetts, at the residence of my father, having with me my wife and daughter. The mother of the child, who, as I have said, died in giving her birth, was a resident of the town at the time of our marriage, and her body reposed in our family's lot in the cemetery. The circumstance of this bereavement caused the warmest affections of my father and mother to centre upon my daughter, she being then their only grandchild.

The little girl was passionately fond of flowers, and her indulgent grandfather, himself a zealous horticulturist and grower of choice fruits, had that summer allotted to her sole use a plot six feet square in his spacious gardens, which became the pride of her heart from the brilliant array of blooms which she had coaxed to grow in it. Her favorite flowers were pansies, with the seeds of which she had planted nearly one-half of the space at her disposal. They had germinated successfully and flourished amazingly, and at the time of which I write that part of the bed devoted to them was a solid mass of pansies of every conceivable variety.

At about four o'clock one afternoon my wife and I set out for a walk through the famous meadows that stretched away from the back of the grounds, and on our return, some two hours later, we saw at a distance the child standing upon the terrace awaiting us, clean and wholesome in a fresh white frock, and bearing a large bouquet of her favorite pansies in her hand. As we approached she ran to meet us and extended the pansies to my wife, saying:—"Mamma, see these lovely pansies! I have picked them for you from my pansy-bed."

My wife thanked the child and kissed her, and we went upstairs to our room together to prepare for supper that was then about to be served. A vase stood on the shelf at one side of the room, and in this, first partly filling it with water, I placed the bunch of pansies.

After supper I suggested to my wife that we should call upon some relatives who lived about a quarter of a mile away, and went with her to our room while she made her preparations for our excursion. While waiting for her I took from the shelf the vase containing the pansies, and we examined and commented upon them for some time; then, her toilette being completed, I restored the vase and flowers to their former position, and we left the room, and immediately thereafter the house, together.

We found our friends at home and spent a pleasant evening with them, leaving on our return at about ten o'clock. The night was warm and perfectly calm, and, as there was no moon, the way was dark save where, here and there, a street lamp threw about its little circle of light. As we turned into the street which led to my father's house we passed under a row of maple trees whose heavy foliage made the darkness even more profound than we had known it elsewhere, and beside a high hedge which enclosed the spacious grounds of a mansion that stood at the corner of the two highways. This hedge extended for a distance of about fifty yards, and as many feet beyond the point where it terminated a lighted street lamp dimly illumined the pathway. We were at a point about midway of the hedge when my wife, who was the nearer to it, suddenly stopped and exclaimed: "Was it you that gave that pull at my shawl?" and readjusted the garment—a light fleecy affair—which I at once observed was half off her left shoulder.

"Why, no," I replied, "I did not touch your shawl. What do you mean?"

"I mean," she answered, "that I felt a hand seize my shawl and try to draw it away from me."

I pointed out the fact that I could not well have reached her shawl on the side on which it had been disarranged, and suggested that it might have caught upon a projecting twig; but although she accepted this explanation as reasonable she still insisted that she had the consciousness of some person having laid a hand upon her.

After a few moments we went on, and had left the hedge behind us and were within a few feet of the street lamp, when my wife stopped a second time, declaring that her shawl had been seized again. Sure enough, the garment was as before, lying half off her shoulder, and this time obviously not because of any projecting twig, since we were in a perfectly clear space, and could look about us over an area of several yards in every direction. This we did, puzzled but not alarmed at the twice-recurring incident; then, on a sudden, my wife seized my arm with a convulsive grip, and, raising her eyes until I thought she was looking at the light in the street lamp before us, whispered: "Heavens! Do you see that?"

I followed the direction of her gaze, but could see nothing, and told her so, in the same breath asking her what she meant.

"It is Minnie!" she gasped (thus uttering the name of my dead wife) "and she has her hands full of flowers! Oh, Minnie, Minnie, what are you doing?" and hid her face in her hands. I clasped her in my arms, thinking she was about to faint, and gazed fearfully above us in a vain effort to discern the declared apparition—and at the same moment I felt a shower of soft objects strike upon my upturned face and upon my straw hat, and saw against the light before me what seemed like blossoms floating downward to the ground.

As soon as I could quiet my wife's agitation and induce her to look again for the appearance which she believed she had beheld, but which she told me had now vanished, I made a search upon the sidewalk for the objects whose fall I had both felt and seen. They were plainly evident, even in the dim light, and I gathered up a number of them and carried them under the lamp for examination. They were pansies, freshly gathered, and with their leaves and stems damp, as if just taken from water. Hastening to the house, we went directly to our room, and lighting the gas looked eagerly toward the shelf where we had left the vase filled with pansies some three hours before. The vase was there, half-filled with water, but not a single flower was standing in it.

The next day was Sunday and all the family went to morning service at the church. As my wife and I, with our daughter between us and following my father and mother at some distance, reached the scene of our adventure on the previous night, we saw lying on the sidewalk a half-dozen pansies which we had evidently overlooked, owing to the dim light in which we had gathered up the others. At sight of them the little girl dropped my hand, to which she was clinging, and with a cry of surprise ran to pick them up.

"Why," she exclaimed, "how did these come here? They are the pansies I picked for mamma yesterday from my pansy bed!"

"Oh, no, dear," I said; "these are probably some other pansies; how can you tell they came from your bed?"

"Why," she replied, "I know every one of my pansies, and this one"—holding up a blossom that was of so deep and uniform a purple as to appear almost black—"I could tell anywhere, for there was no other in the bed like it."

So she collected all the scattered flowers and insisted on carrying them to church, and on returning home they were replaced, with their fellows, in the vase from which they had been so mysteriously transferred the night before.

It has been my purpose, in preparing these stories for publication, not to permit myself to be led into any attempt to explain them, or even to embellish them with comment, and thus perhaps weaken what I desire to present as a plain statement of fact—yet this incident of the pansies seems to me (although for quite personal reasons) so touching, and so tender in its suggestions, that I cannot forbear a word or two concerning it. In thus indulging myself I am aware that the reader may think he finds a contradiction of the statement I have made in the preface of this book as to my non-committal attitude regarding Spiritualism. On this point I can only say that while I am not convinced as to the origin of the phenomenon, I should find much comfort if I could with assurance attribute it to a spiritualistic source. There are doubtless many who will thus refer it, and I write these lines in sympathy, even if somewhat doubtingly, with their point of view.

In every way this event stands unique in my experience—in place of its occurrence, and in all its circumstances. The town was the scene of my youthful wooing—the street one in which my fiancée and I had walked and talked a thousand times on the way between my home and hers. To this town, and to this familiar path, the new wife had come with me, and with us both the child of her love and sacrifice. Is there no significance, is there no consolation, not only to myself but to others who have been bereaved, in this episode? The loving gift of flowers to her new guardian by the innocent and unconscious child; the approval of the offering through its repetition, by the apparent spirit of the mother that bore her!—these things may mean nothing, yet in me whom they approached so nearly they have strengthened the hope that lives in every human heart, that the flame of our best and purest affections shall survive the seeming extinguishment of the grave.

Science, to be sure, has its explanation, and in fairness that explanation should be heard. To quote an eminent authority who has favored me with his views on the subject:—"The power that moved the pansies was a psychic force inherent in the human personality [of your wife] and exercised without the knowledge or cooperation of the objective self." (Dr. John D. Quackenbos.)

In other words, it was not the spirit of the dead wife that lifted the pansies and showered them upon us, but what we must call, for want of a better term, the living wife's "subliminal self." The vision that appeared and seemed to be casting the flowers was a freak of the psychical consciousness—there was no apparition save in my wife's overwrought imagination.

To quote again: "But that does not preclude the possibility of the levitation of the pansies, which levitation was accomplished by the lady herself, however ignorant of the operation of this psychic force she used objectively. The fact that she was thus objectively ignorant would be no obstacle to her subjective mind using in the objective earth-life her own super-sensible attributes and powers."

The principal objection to this argument seems to me to lie in this:—the pansies did not first fall upon us, and thus, by suggestion or otherwise, so excite my wife's imagination that she thought she saw the apparition; the apparition was first manifest, and the rain of flowers followed. That is to say, an appearance of the immaterial was followed by a tangible manifestation—there was nothing imaginary about that. Had the conditions been reversed, the fall of the flowers might very well have excited apprehension of the vision—but I cannot see where there was any place for fancy in experience of this incident.

The second episode to which I have alluded in the opening paragraph of this narrative occurred in the following winter, and was, in a certain sense, a sequel to the first. Business took me from my home in Boston, and during my absence my wife and daughter were invited by the lady I have already mentioned to spend a few days at her house in Brookline. Her husband was away on one of his frequent business trips, leaving with his wife her widowed sister, Mrs. Myra Hall, his daughter, a girl of eighteen, and a young German lady, Fräulein Botha, whose acquaintance the hostess had formed abroad, and who at the time was at the head of the Department of Instruction in Art at Wellesley College. All these were witnesses, with my wife, of the remarkable event which I am about to describe.

On the afternoon of the second day of my wife's visit, the child became suddenly ill, and as evening drew on exhibited rather alarming symptoms of fever. A physician was summoned who prescribed remedies, and directed that the patient should be put to bed at once. This was done, and at about ten o'clock my wife, accompanied by the ladies I have mentioned, went quietly upstairs to observe her condition before retiring for the night themselves. The upper floor was reached by a very broad staircase which branched near the top to give access to the chambers upon a wide hall, from every part of which one could look down over a railing upon the floor below—and the room in which the child lay was about half-way around this hall on the left-hand side.

The ladies entered the chamber and the hostess turned up the gas, showing the child peacefully slumbering and with forehead and hands moist with a wholesome perspiration, although her face was still somewhat flushed. As the night was a bitter cold one in mid-January, the mistress of the house suggested that some additional covering should be placed upon the bed, and produced from another room an eider-down counterpane, covered with scarlet silk, which was carefully arranged without waking the sleeper. All then left the room and started downstairs again, the hostess being the last to go out, after lowering the gas until it showed only a point of light.

They were near the bottom of the staircase when my wife suddenly cried out: "Oh, there is Minnie! She passed up the stairs by me, all in white, and has gone into the room! Oh, I know something dreadful is going to happen!"—and she rushed frantically to the upper floor, followed by the others in a body. At the half-open door of the child's room they all stopped and listened, not daring for the moment to enter, but no sound came from within. Then, mustering up courage and clinging to each others' hands, they went softly in, and the hostess turned up the gas. With one accord they looked toward the bed, and, half-blinded by the sudden glare of the gaslight, could not for a moment credit what their eyes showed them—that the sleeping child was lying under a coverlet, not of scarlet, as they had left her hardly a minute before, but of snowy white. Recovering from their astonishment, an examination revealed the cause of the phenomenon. The scarlet eider-down counterpane was in its place, but completely covered with pure white lilies on long stalks, so spread about and lying in such quantities that the surface of the bed was hidden under their blooms. By actual count there were more than two hundred of these rich and beautiful blossoms strewn upon the coverlet, representing a moderate fortune at that time of year, and probably unprocurable though all the conservatories in the city had been searched for them.

They were carefully gathered and placed about the house in vases, jugs, and every other receptacle that could be pressed into service to hold them, filling the rooms for several days with their fragrance until, like other flowers, they faded and died.

THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN

THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN

On a brilliant moonlit evening in August, 1885, a considerable party of friends and more or less intimate acquaintances of the hostess assembled at the summer cottage of Mrs. Thaxter at Appledore Island, Isles of Shoals. Included in the company were the then editor of the New York Herald, Rev. Dr. Hepworth,—also well known as a prominent divine and pulpit orator—two of the leading musicians of Boston (Julius Eichberg and Prof. John K. Paine)—of whom one occupied a chair in Harvard University,—and, among others, my wife and myself. The cottage was the charming resort which the visitor would be led to expect from the well-known refinement and artistic taste of its occupant, and its interior attractions might well have been suggested even to the casual passer-by who looked upon its wonderful flower-garden, wherein seeds of every variety had in spring been scattered broadcast and in profusion, and now, as autumn approached, had developed into a jungle of blooms of every conceivable color.

We had some music, as I remember, and after that an interesting conversation, which, in consequence of the many varied and brilliant intellects there assembled, took a wide range, coming around finally—I do not recall by what steps—to occultism, clairvoyance, and the phenomena of so-called "Spiritualism." In the course of the discussion of this topic, the editor interested us by a humorous account of some recent experiences of his own in "table-tipping" and "communications" by rappings—and incidentally remarked that he believed any assembly of persons who wished could experience similar phenomena, even though none of them possessed what it is usual to describe as "mediumistic" powers. Some one else then suggested that, as our company seemed to fulfil this condition, the present might be a favorable time to test the theory—whereupon we all proceeded to the adjoining dining-room with the view of making experiment by means of the large dinner table that stood in the middle of it.

(I may here state that although my wife had already had some abnormal experiences, only Mrs. Thaxter and I were acquainted with the fact, and even these had come to her unsought in every instance.)

Somewhat to our disappointment, the table failed to show itself susceptible to any "influence" other than the law of gravitation, but remained insensible and immovable, even though we sat about it under approved "conditions" for half an hour or so—lights lowered, and our imposed hands touching each other in order to form upon it an uninterrupted "circuit." We finally tired of this dull sport, turned up the lights, and pushing back our chairs from the table, fell into general conversation.

Hardly had we done so, when my wife suddenly exclaimed:—"How strange! Why, the wall of the room seems to have been removed, and I can see rocks and the sea, and the moonlight shining upon them!" At this interruption our talk naturally ceased abruptly, and one of us asked her to describe more in detail what was visible to her.

"It is growing stranger still," she replied. "I do not see the sea any more. I see a long, straight road, with great trees like elms here and there on the side of it, and casting dark shadows across it. There are no trees like those and no such road near here, and I cannot understand it. There is a man standing in the middle of the road, in the shadow of one of the trees. Now he is coming toward me and I can see his face in the moonlight. Why! it is John Weiss!" (naming the Liberal clergyman and writer whom most of us had known in Boston, and who had died some five or six years before) "Why, is that you? What are you doing here, and what does this mean? He smiles, but does not speak. Now he has turned and gone back into the shadow of the tree again."

After a few moments' pause:—"Now I can see something coming along the road some distance away. It is a man on horseback. He is riding slowly, and he has his head bent and a slouch hat over his eyes, so that I cannot see his face. Now John Weiss steps out of the shadow into the moonlight; the horse sees him and stops—he rears up in the air and whirls about and begins to run back in the direction from which he came. The man on his back pulls him up, lashes him with his whip, turns him around, and tries to make him go forward. The horse is terrified and backs again, trying to break away from his rider; the man strikes him again, but he will not advance.

"The man dismounts and tries to lead the horse, looking about to see what he is frightened at. I can see his face now very clearly—I should know him anywhere! John Weiss is walking toward him, but the man does not see him. The horse does, though, and plunges and struggles, but the man is strong and holds him fast. Now John Weiss is so close to the man that he must see him. Oh! Oh! he does see him, and is horribly frightened! He steps back but John Weiss does not follow—only points his hand at him. The man jumps on his horse and beats him fiercely with his whip, and the two fly back down the road and disappear in the distance. Tell me, John Weiss, what it all means? He smiles again and shakes his head—now he is gone, too; I can see nothing more."

We were all profoundly impressed by this graphic recital and spent some time discussing what possible meaning the strange vision could have; but we were compelled to abandon all efforts to elucidate it, and it was not until some seven months later that the sequel to the mystery was furnished—a sequel that for the moment seemed about to offer an explanation, but, if anything, beclouded the matter even more deeply than before.

Early in March of the following year a party of eight or ten persons was dining at the house of Mrs. Candler, in Brookline, already mentioned in this series, and after dinner went up to the sitting-room of the hostess, upon the second floor. The weather for a week previous had been warm and spring-like, but on the day in question a heavy snowstorm had been raging, which cleared at nightfall, leaving a foot or so of snow upon the ground. Of the dinner-party only my wife and I had been at the Isles of Shoals the previous summer when the incident above narrated had occurred;—but all present were acquainted with the circumstance, which had been a frequent subject of conversation among us at our frequent gatherings at one another's houses during the autumn and winter that had followed.

As I sat near the door and let my eye wander about the apartment, I idly noticed, among the many souvenirs of foreign travel which it contained, two Japanese vases set upon brackets in opposite corners, and about six feet from the floor. These vases were, perhaps, twenty feet apart—the width of the room. The vase on the bracket at my right was empty, while the other contained a bunch of "pussy-willows," which attracted my attention as the usual season for these growths had not arrived. I commented upon this circumstance to my hostess, who replied:—"Yes, it is very early for them, is it not? I was driving yesterday, and was surprised to see a willow-tree bearing those 'pussies' in a sheltered spot beside Jamaica Pond. I had the footman get down and gather them, and when I reached home I put them in that vase."

This remark, of course, drew all eyes to the bracket bearing the vase filled with the "pussies"—which, thereupon and at the instant, disappeared, leaving the vase in its place, but quite empty; a soft thud was heard as two or three of the stalks fell upon the carpet midway between the two brackets, and a rustling sound in the right-hand corner attracted the attention of all present to the singular fact that the "pussies" were now standing in the vase on the second bracket as quietly as if they had been there at the outset.

It is to be noted that no one in the room was within a dozen feet of either of the two vases, and that neither of them could be reached by anyone who did not stand upon a chair for the purpose. Moreover, the room was brilliantly illuminated by several gas-jets. We had been accustomed to singular happenings in this particular house, and consequently were amused rather than startled by the whimsical nature of this one. In discussing it some one suggested that peculiar influences seemed to be about, and it was agreed to invite them to further manifestations if possible. Consequently the centre of the room was cleared and a large table moved into it—around which, after locking the door that led into the hall, and extinguishing all the lights but one (which also was turned down to a faint glimmer), we drew up our chairs and awaited developments. A half-hour passed without anything whatever happening—whereupon, deciding that conditions were unfavorable, we relighted all the gas-jets and fell into general conversation, although leaving the table still in its position in the middle of the room.

In a few minutes our hostess said:—"Oh, by the way, I want you to see the new decorations I have had placed in my daughter's room. You know it is her birthday"—in fact, I believe that evening's dinner party was in honor of the event—"and I have had her room entirely refitted, since she is no longer a girl, but a young lady."

So, following her lead, we all trooped away to inspect the new arrangement. In doing so we passed down the hall for a distance of some fifty feet, and entered the room in question, which was at the front of the house and overlooked its extensive grounds. The apartment was decorated with all the luxury and display of taste that large means and the command of expert skill could provide, and we spent some time in examination of its rich and beautiful details.

One item that particularly attracted our attention was a small but very heavy clock that stood on the mantelpiece, its case of Japanese carved bronze, and its interior mechanism giving forth a very peculiarly musical and rapid "tick-tock, tick-tock" as its short pendulum swung to and fro. It was, in fact, a unique and curious ornament, and all the members of the party admiringly examined it—for my own part, I was so struck with its rare character that I stood regarding it after the others had left the room, and turned from it only when our hostess, who alone remained, playfully inquired if I intended to study the clock all night, and, extinguishing the light, passed out into the hall with me.

Returning to the sitting-room, we decided to make some further experiment, and, again extinguishing the lights and relocking the door leading into the hall, seated ourselves around the table as before. We had not been in this position more than a few minutes when there came a tremendous thump upon the table, like the fall of some heavy object. Being nearest to the lowered gas-jet which gave the only light to the room, I jumped up and turned it on to its full capacity—whereupon everyone present saw standing, in the exact centre of the table, its "tick-rock, tick-tock" ringing out sonorously, the carved bronze clock which we had so recently inspected in the distant bedchamber, and which had been passed in some mysterious fashion along fifty feet of hall space, and through a shut and locked door, to astonish us by its present appearance.

Forming ourselves into a committee of the whole, we carried the clock back to its former place, which, it need not be said, we found unoccupied—then returned to the sitting-room, where, with lowered lights, we discussed the strange occurrences of the evening. Although curious to see if any other manifestations would occur, we made no effort to invite them beyond dimming the lights, and as we found the room had become rather warm and close, we opened the door into the hall for the sake of better ventilation. The hall was only partially lighted, but objects in it were easily visible in comparison with the almost total darkness that shrouded the sitting-room. Our talk was of ghosts and of other subjects uncanny to the uninitiated, and might have seemed unpleasantly interesting to anyone listening to it from the hall—as we were afterward led to believe was the case.

Directly facing the open door, and the only one of the company so seated, was my wife—who suddenly startled us all by springing to her feet and crying out:—"There he is! There is the man I saw at the Isles of Shoals last summer!"

"What is it?" we inquired; "an apparition?"

"No, no!" she exclaimed; "it is a living man! I saw him look around the edge of the door and immediately draw back again! He is here to rob the house! Stop him! Stop him!"—and she rushed out into the hall with the whole company in pursuit. The servants, who by this time had gone to bed, were aroused and set to work to examine the lower floors, while we above searched every room, but in each case without result.

Next to the sitting-room was a large apartment some thirty feet long by twenty wide, which was used for dancing parties, and dinners on occasions when many guests were invited. It was at the time unfurnished, except, I believe, that a few chairs were scattered about it, and along one side was a row of several windows, before which hung heavy crimson draperies that completely covered them. We lighted the gas in this room, but a glance was sufficient to show that it was unoccupied and afforded no possible place of concealment. I passed through it, however, and, as I did so, felt a current of cold air, which I immediately traced, by the swaying of one of the heavy curtains, to a window which its folds covered.

Going up to the drapery and drawing it aside, I saw that the window behind it was half open, and on the sill and the stone coping outside I perceived, in the several inches of snow that covered both, marks which showed the passage of what was evidently a human body. Reaching nearly to the window was the slanting roof, formed by heavy plate glass, of the conservatory, which opened from the dining-room on the lower floor—and in the snow which covered this was a furrow which indicated that someone had by this means allowed himself to slide from the second story to the ground. Further investigation below showed, by the tell-tale marks in the snow, that the person who had thus escaped from the house, and who, after gliding down the glass roof of the conservatory, had fallen sprawling under it, had lost no time in picking himself up, and making good his escape. The footsteps of a man running with long strides were traced through the grounds to the street, two hundred yards away, where they were lost in the confused tracks of the public highway—and from that time to the present the mystery has remained unsolved.

THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW

THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW

Prefatory Note

The annals of crime contain few chapters more lurid than those contributed to them by the record of Frederick Bailey Deeming, who suffered the extreme penalty of the law on the scaffold of the Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) jail on the morning of the twenty-third of May, in the year one thousand, eight hundred and ninety-two.

The details of his misdeeds, his trial, and his punishment were set forth by me at the time in letters to the New York Times and the Boston Journal—of which, as well as of several other publications, I was accredited correspondent during several years of residence and travel in Australasia and the South Seas.

In the narrative that follows, so far as it describes atrocities which shocked the whole English-speaking world, I have endeavored to subordinate particulars in the presentation of a general effect; my purpose has been, not to picture horrors, but to suggest the strange and abnormal personality that lay behind them.

In regard to the peculiar manifestations which followed the criminal's execution, and for which some undefined influence that survived his physical extinction seemed, in part at least, to be responsible, I can advance no opinion.

CHAPTER I

THE CONDEMNED

When I called upon the Colonial Secretary, in the Government Offices at Melbourne, with a request that I might be allowed to visit the prisoner as he lay in jail awaiting execution, I was informed that such permission was contrary to all precedent.

I had sat directly under the eye of the culprit four weary days while the evidence accumulated that should take away his life. I had watched his varied changes of expression as the tide of testimony ebbed and flowed, and finally swelled up and overwhelmed him. I had heard against him the verdict of "the twelve good men and true" who had sat so long as arbiters of his fate, and the words of the judge condemning him to "be hanged by the neck until he was dead," and commending his soul to the mercy of a God who seemed far aloof from the scheme of human justice so long and so laboriously planned.

Short shrift had been allowed him. Condemned and sentenced on a Monday, the date for his act of expiation had been set for the early morning of the Monday then a scant three weeks away;[1] an appeal for a respite had been quickly and formally made, and as quickly and formally disallowed; the days granted for preparation had glided by with portentous speed, and now but five remained between him and his introduction to the gallows and the cord.

As a special and gruesome favor I had received one of the few cards issued for the execution; and it was perhaps due as much to this fact as to that of my newspaper connections (as already stated) that the Colonial Secretary finally consented to waive in my interest the usual rule of exclusion, and handed me his order for my admission to the jail. I cannot confess to any high exultation when the mandate of the Secretary, bravely stamped with the Great Seal of the Colony of Victoria, was placed in my hands—particularly as it was accompanied by a strict injunction that no public account should be given of the interview.

"At least," said the Colonial Secretary, "not at present. The trial has been so sensational, the crimes traced home to this unhappy man so atrocious, that popular feeling has risen to such a pitch as to make it desirable to add thereto no new occasion of excitement. Moreover, I have refused many requests similar to yours from the local newspapers; you may imagine the position I should find myself in if it became known that I had discriminated in favor of a foreign journalist—therefore I rely upon your discretion."

Thus the Colonial Secretary—in consideration of whose injunction I made no professional use of my opportunity at the time, and report upon it now only because of its relation to this present record of events. Not that I asseverate the existence of such a relation, or theorize upon it even if it were, for the sake of argument, accepted as containing the nucleus of a mystery that, after many years of consideration, remains a mystery still.

I was not alone in my visit to the condemned cell in which, heavily ironed and guarded day and night by the death-watch, Frederick Bailey Deeming awaited his doom.[2] My wife, who was included in the warrant from the Colonial Secretary, accompanied me; she who had been my companion in journeys that had taken me twice around the globe, and who had shared with me many of the inexplicable experiences to which I have alluded in my "Preface;" and who, seeming throughout her life more sensitive than most of us to occult forces that at times appear to be in operation about us, has since crossed the frontier of the Undiscovered Country, there to find, perhaps, solution of some of the riddles that have perplexed both her and me. Intensely human as she was, and in all things womanly, her susceptibility to weird and uncomprehended influences must always seem a contradiction—and the more so since they always came upon her not only without invitation, but even in opposition to a will of unusual force and sanity, which, until the incidents occurred that I am about to relate, kept them measurably in control.

A memento of my interview with the murderer stands before me on the table as I write:—a memento also of my wife's skill in modeling, on account of which I had with difficulty induced her to be my companion on my sinister errand—an impression in plaster of his right hand; the hand against which had been proved the "deep damnation of the taking-off" of two women and four children, and in whose lines thus preserved those learned in such matters profess to discern the record of other like crimes that have been suspected of him, but could not be confirmed. I will not weary the reader with the histories that have been read to me from this grisly document, and no one now may ever know whether they be true or false:—at all events the hand that made this impress was duly found guilty of the atrocities I have recorded against it, and the price that was exacted for them will seem to none excessive, and to some a world too small.

I remember being much struck at the time with the interest which the condemned man manifested in assisting me to secure the record. My warrant from the Colonial Secretary included permission to obtain it, and the consent of the prisoner followed promptly on the asking. It came, in fact, with a sort of feverish readiness, and I fancied that his mind found in the operation some brief respite from the thoughts that his position, and the swift approach of his fate, forced upon him. He regarded with intentness the moistening of the plaster, and its manipulation into the proper degree of consistency; followed intelligently the instruction to lay his hand with even pressure upon the yielding mass, and when the cast had hardened, and was passed through the bars for his inspection, he examined it with an appearance of the liveliest satisfaction.

"Do those lines mean anything?" he asked.

"Many think so," I replied, "and even profess to read a record from them. For myself, I am ignorant of the art."

"I have heard of that," he returned. "They call it 'palmistry,' don't they? I wish you could find out whether they are going to hang me next Monday. But they'll do that, right enough. I'm thirty-nine now, and my mother always said I would die before forty. She died a good while ago—but she keeps coming back. She comes every night, and of late she comes in the daytime, too. What does she bother me so for? Why can't she leave me alone?" (glancing over his shoulder.) "She's here now—over there in the corner. You can't see her? That's queer. Can't you see her?"—addressing the governor of the jail, who accompanied me, and who shook his head to the question. "I thought perhaps you could. But you don't miss much. She ain't pretty to look at, crying all the time and wringing her hands, and saying I'm bound to be hanged! I don't mind her so much in the daylight, but coming every night at two o'clock, and waking me up and tormenting me!—that's what I can't stand."

"Is this insanity?" I asked the governor as I came away.

"I don't know what it is," he replied. "We all thought at first it was shamming crazy, and the government sent in a lot of doctors to examine him; but he seemed sane enough when they talked with him—the only thing out about him was when he complained of his mother's visits; just as he did to you. And it is certainly true that he has a sort of fit about two o'clock every morning, and wakes up screaming and crying out that his mother is in the cell with him; and talks in a frightful, blood-curdling way to someone that nobody can see, and scares the death-watch half out of their wits. Insanity, hallucination, or an uneasy conscience—it might be any of them; I can't say. Whatever it is, it seems strange that he always talks about visitations from his mother, who, as far as I can learn, died quietly in her bed, and never of apparitions of his two wives and four children whose throats he cut with a knife held in the hand whose print you've got there under your arm. Perhaps you won't mind my saying it—but it strikes me you've got a queer taste for curiosities. I wouldn't be able to sleep with that thing in the house."

I laughed at the worthy governor's comment; yet, as it turned out, his words were pregnant with prophecy.

CHAPTER II

THE CRIME

In the month of March, eighteen hundred and ninety-two, the people of Melbourne were startled by glaring headlines in the morning newspapers announcing the discovery of a murder in the suburb of Windsor.

During the historic "boom" that started into life all manner of activities in and about the Victorian capital during the middle and later "eighties," a great stimulus to building operations had been felt, not only in the city itself, but also through all the extensive district outlying it. The suburb of Windsor enjoyed its share in this evidence of prosperity, and sanguine speculators, viewing through the glasses of a happy optimism a rush of new inhabitants to the fortunate city, erected in gleeful haste a multitude of dwellings for their purchase and occupancy. New streets were laid out across the former barren stretches of the suburb, and lined on either side by "semi-detached villas"—imposing as to name, but generally more or less "jerry-built," and exceedingly modest in their aspect.[3] These structures were of what we might now call a standardized pattern—housing two families side by side with a dividing partition between them, and of a single story, with an attic above. Between each two connected dwellings (which were fronted by a shallow veranda, and contained three or four rooms for each resident family) ran a narrow alley, hardly wide enough for a real separation between one building and the next, but sufficiently so to justify the description of "semi-detached" which their inventor, by a happy inspiration, had applied to them.

The "Great Melbourne Boom"—as I believe it is still referred to as distinguishing it from all other "booms," of various dimensions, which preceded or have followed it—spent its force, unfortunately, before the hopes of the speculators who had ridden into Windsor on its flood had been realized; and amid the wreck and flotsam that remained to mark its ebb, some mournful miles of these "semi-detached villas" were conspicuous.

So complete was the disaster that many of the owners of these properties paid no further heed to them:—and it was with an emotion akin to surprise that, on a day in the month and year above mentioned, the agent of a certain house in Andrew street received a visit from a woman with a view to renting it. Why the prospective tenant should have selected this particular "villa" out of the scores of others precisely like it that lined both sides of this street, is not known—nor might she herself have had any definite reason for her choice. Perhaps it was Chance; perhaps Providence—the terms are possibly synonymous:—but at all events her action proved to be the first and most important of the threads that wove themselves together in a net to entrap, and bring to justice, one of the craftiest and most relentless murderers of the age.

The agent, apprised by his visitor of her desire to examine the house, eagerly prepared to accompany her, but could not find the key. A search among his records followed; from which the fact resulted that, in the previous December, he had rented the house to a gentlemanly stranger, who, in lieu of affording references, had established confidence by paying three months' rent in advance. In the prevailing depression of the local real estate business the agent had given so little attention to his lines of empty properties that he had not since even visited the house in question—the more so as the period for which payment had been made was not yet expired. Assured by his visitor, however, that the house was certainly unoccupied, he went with her to the door, which he opened with a master-key with which he had equipped himself.

The house was in good order throughout—in fact it seemed never to have been occupied. The prospective tenant inspected it carefully and with approval, and could discover but one objection; she was sure she noticed a disagreeable odor in the parlor. Her companion (as is natural to agents with a house to dispose of) failed to detect this:—if it existed it was doubtless due to the fact that the house had been closed for some time; he would have it thoroughly aired and overhaul the drains—after which she could call again. This she agreed to do, gave the agent her name and address, and departed.

Left to himself, the agent began an investigation. With senses quickened, perhaps, by the favorable prospect of business, he became aware that the atmosphere of the parlor was undoubtedly oppressive; and as he moved about in search of the cause he observed that near the open fireplace it was positively sickening. Examining this feature of the room more carefully, he discovered that the hearth-stone had been forced up at one end, cracking and crumbling the cement in which it had been set, and from the inch-wide aperture thus formed came forth a stench so overpowering that he recoiled in horror, and gasping and strangling, staggered into the open air.

The police authorities were notified, and a mason was sent for with his tools. The hearth-stone was wrenched from its place, and in the hollow space beneath, encased in cement, knees trussed up to chin and bound with cords, lay the body of a young woman—nude save for the mantle of luxuriant dark hair that partly shrouded her, and with her throat cut from ear to ear.

About a week before Christmas of the previous year, the North German Lloyd S. S. "Kaiser Wilhelm II." from Bremen to Plymouth via the Suez Canal and Colombo, debarked its passengers at the port of Melbourne. Among the second-class contingent who had taken ship at Plymouth were "Albert Williams" and his wife Emily. They had not been long married, and their destination was understood by their fellow-passengers to be Colombo; but on reaching that port they remained on board and continued to Melbourne. It was remarked that Mrs. Williams, who up to that time had been the life of the company, fell thereafter under increasing fits of uneasiness and melancholy—until, at the time of arrival at Melbourne, she had drawn so far aloof from her former friends of the passage that none concerned themselves regarding her plans, or even final destination, in the new land.[4]

No such change, however, was noted in the demeanor of her husband. He was well to the fore in all the interests and amusements that offer themselves on shipboard, rallied his wife in no very refined or considerate terms upon her growing depression, and devoted most of his spare time to a pet canary, which he had brought aboard in an elaborate gilt cage; keeping it constantly near him on deck by day, and at night sharing with it his stateroom.[5]

A month's association with him had not increased the liking of his fellow-voyagers. The compulsory intimacies engendered by a long journey by sea afford a trying test of character, and to it the temperament of the so-called Albert Williams failed satisfactorily to respond. Strange and contradictory moods were noticed in him. At times he was morose and "grouchy," at times feverishly jovial and even hilarious, and the transition from one to the other of these states of mind was often startlingly abrupt. He seems, indeed, to have "got on the nerves" of all his associates on the voyage—and so at length it happened that when he went ashore, carrying the cage and canary solicitously in his hand and followed by his silent and sad-faced wife, both passengers and officers were at one in the aspiration that they might never see his sort again.

Repairing to a "Coffee-Palace"—by which sounding title temperance hotels in Australia are identified—the couple spent some days in its respectable retirement; then their belongings were entrusted to a carrying-company, and were by it conveyed to the "semi-detached villa" in Windsor. The canary, chirping and fluttering joyously in its cage, which was promptly hung in the veranda, excited for several days the mild interest of the neighbors and a few casual passers-by—but of the people in the house very little was seen. Now and then a gentleman in smoking-jacket and embroidered velvet cap was observed in the veranda, feeding and chirruping to the canary, but his companion seems to have kept herself in complete seclusion. Her murder may, indeed, have followed swiftly upon her entrance into the house; however that may be, some ten days later the canary was no longer seen in the veranda, a carrier came with his cart and took away a quantity of trunks and boxes, and as he deliberately drove away his employer kept pace with him on the sidewalk, jauntily swinging the cage with its feathered occupant in his hand.

The trunks and boxes were taken to an auction-room in Melbourne, where, after due advertisement, their contents were offered for public sale; women's garments and jewelry, for the most part, and heterogeneous odds and ends. The owner of these properties was present when the sale took place, and seemed much interested in their disposition:—but when the canary and its cage were offered he suddenly declared that he would not sell them, and when the auction closed took them away with him. He subsequently appeared in the town of Sale, several hundred miles away, and at other remote localities—perhaps with the idea of misleading possible pursuit or for some other purpose unknown:—but in all his wanderings he took the canary with him, and by his devotion to it attracted an attention to himself which had much to do with his identification when he was finally apprehended.

Returning to Melbourne, where he had before assumed the new alias of "Baron Swanston," he finally disposed of the cage and the canary to the auctioneer of his former acquaintance. Then he disappeared as completely as though the earth had opened and engulfed him—his crime successfully committed and unsuspected, his very name unknown, his tracks as completely covered as was the nearly decapitated body of his victim beneath the cemented hearth-stone of the house at Windsor.

But even then the mysterious power of Chance—or Providence—was at work to his undoing. A peculiarity of many Australian dwellings—a peculiarity which the hastily-constructed "villas" in Windsor shared—is found in the fact that they have no cellars. This assists the work of rapid building, so important when a "boom" is on:—so the ground upon their sites had simply been levelled, a surface of cement laid, and the buildings set above it upon a layer of beams and brickwork. Nothing could be easier, under such a principle of construction, than to remove the hearth-stone, dig a grave under it through the thin layer of cement and into the soil below, conceal the body therein, restore the earth to its place, and fix the stone in position again.

What emotion the murderer may have felt when, after excavating under the cement to the depth of about eighteen inches, his tools struck upon solid rock, and he could dig no further, may be left to the imagination. Perhaps he felt no emotion whatever, not appreciating the fatal nature of this check to his plans. At all events he had no choice but to accept the situation, crowd the body into the shallow space, and by pouring cement about it and the covering hearth-stone insure the lasting secrecy of the crime. He may have been ignorant, too, of the enormous expansive power of the gases released by decomposition, which under ordinary conditions might have been absorbed by the covering and underlying soil:—here, however, with solid rock below, they struggled in their close confinement until their barrier at its weakest point gave way, and forcing up the hearth-stone disclosed to the world the horror that it had concealed.

And here is the strangest circumstance of all. Although it had been known to a few surveyors and builders, and to certain owners of buildings that had been erected, that a large part of the land on which the suburb was built rested upon a rock formation, examinations that were made subsequent to the discovery of the murder showed that at no point did this impenetrable foundation approach nearly to the surface of the soil, save under this particular house of the tragedy! Ages ago this flat table of stone had been laid down—and to the dwelling fortuitously built upon it, with hundreds of others lying empty about it for him to choose, the murderer had been guided across fifteen thousand miles of sea, there to prepare for himself detection not only for one crime, but for the other even more heinous which had so briefly preceded it.

CHAPTER III

THE FLIGHT AND CAPTURE

Prominent among the many commonplaces current among men is the one that "truth is stranger than fiction," and the other that Life, in building up her dreams, employs "situations" which the boldest playwright would hesitate to present upon the stage. Yet the lines that Life lays down for her productions are, in the main, closely followed by those who are ranked as among the world's greatest dramatists. She, like them, leads up to a climax by a mass of incidents that may severally be trivial, but combine together with tremendous weight; she follows farce with tragedy, and lightens tragedy with comedy; she brings her heroes in touch with clowns, her lovers with old women and comic countrymen—and in the complexities of her plots mingles them together so bewilderingly that the wonder and interest of the audience are kept vigorously alive until the curtain's fall.

So in this sordid Windsor tragedy she introduces between the first and third acts a second, where the tension is relaxed and the milder interest of Romance appears.

It was not the purpose of the murderer to remain near the scene, or even in the country, of his crime:—he was a shrewd as well as merciless villain, and he turned his face towards Sydney, evidently with the intention of taking a steamer then about to sail for San Francisco, and sinking his identity in the vast areas and amid the swarming millions of the United States.

Nemesis accompanied him, but in the disguise of Cupid. On the coastwise steamer by which he traveled to Sydney was a young woman by the name of Rounsfell, who was returning to her home in the interior of New South Wales from a visit to her brother near the border-line between Victoria and South Australia. She was about eighteen years of age, and from an interview I later had with her I estimated her as an attractive and modest girl, not strikingly intellectual, but of kindly disposition and affectionate nature. To her the fugitive, introducing himself by his latest-assumed name, paid regardful court, and relieved the tedium of the voyage by devoted attentions; and when the boat arrived at Sydney, where she was to remain a few days, he escorted her to one hotel and saw to her satisfactory accommodation, while he himself, with admirable delicacy, took up quarters at another. During her stay he continued his attentions with equal respect and assiduity; his attitude, as she told me afterward, was more like that of an elder brother than a lover—this attitude being confirmed by judicious advice and counsel, and even by moral admonition:—as when he gently chided her for her confessed fondness for dancing, sagely implying that he regarded this form of amusement as one of the most insidious wiles of the Adversary.

It was at Coogee, on the shores of the beautiful harbor of Sydney, that this chaste and improving courtship culminated in his asking her to marry him. He was a man of wealth, he told her, a mining engineer by profession, and with several lucrative positions in Australia at the moment waiting upon his selection. To these practical considerations he added the plea of his devotion. He had "lately lost his wife" (delicate euphemism!) he said, and stirred her sympathies by eloquent and tearful descriptions of the lonely and unsatisfactory life he led in consequence of this bereavement—the hollowness of which life he felt more acutely than ever now that she had crossed his path. She was, as I have said, a tender-hearted girl, and what more natural than that she should willingly incline her ear to words which every woman loves to hear?—the more so when they were uttered by a man whose history indicates him to have inherited all the persuasiveness of the original Serpent in dealings with the sex, and who, as my interview with him in the condemned cell caused me to remark, possessed one of the sweetest and most sympathetic voices I ever heard in human throat.

It would be no discredit to Miss Rounsfell if she had accepted him then and there; but it speaks well for her prudence and self-command that she asked for delay in giving her answer until she could lay the matter before her parents. To this he promptly assented, adding the suggestion that he should accompany her to her home, and give her friends an opportunity to become acquainted with him. This plan was carried out, and the successful conquest of the daughter was completed by the capitulation of the family; the engagement was formally announced, and the joyful contract sealed by the installation upon the hand of the fiancée of the costly diamond ring so lately worn by the woman whose mutilated body was at the moment mouldering under the hearth-stone at Windsor.

The ecstasy of the betrothal inspired a consideration of ways and means to hasten the wedding. The ardent lover pleaded for the celebration of the nuptials without further ado; but his more prudent mistress urged the possession of a home, and definite employment as surety of maintaining it. This point conceded, the question arose as to what particular section of the Colonies seemed to offer the most attractive opportunities. The bride-elect objected to New South Wales as being too near home (she had always been a home-body, and wished to see the world); Victoria, also, was not to her taste for some other feminine but conclusive reason; Western Australia had just begun to come into notice as likely to become one of the world's greatest gold-producers—there, it seemed to her, was the land of promise for a young and experienced mining-engineer.

This opinion prevailed, and the fugitive, abandoning any idea he may have had of escaping to America, set out for the new El Dorado; and in a few weeks his fiancée was cheered by a letter giving news of his arrival at Southern Cross—a mining-camp some hundred and fifty miles in the interior—where he had secured the post of manager for a company which owned a rich deposit, and where he was already preparing for her coming. Thus some weeks passed, until another letter came informing her that a house had been secured and fitted up for her, and enclosing sufficient funds for her journey. She replied, fixing the date of her departure from Sydney, and on the day appointed took train for Melbourne, intending to continue thence to Albany by sea.

Arriving at Melbourne the following morning—where by chance she took a room in the same "Coffee Palace" to which her prospective bridegroom had resorted upon his arrival from England—she despatched a note to a young man who was a long-time friend of her family, and when he called in the evening went out with him for a stroll through the city. As they passed the office of The Age newspaper on Collins street, they saw an excited crowd surrounding the bulletin-board, and crossed the roadway to read the announcement that it bore. As her eyes rested upon it, Miss Rounsfell gave a piercing shriek, and fell senseless upon the ground.

The announcement upon the board was this:

"BARON SWANSTON, THE WINDSOR MURDERER, ARRESTED AT SOUTHERN CROSS."

Taken to her hotel and revived with difficulty, she told her sensational story, with which the newspapers of the whole country were filled next day; then, broken and trembling, she returned to her home, there to remain until summoned again to Melbourne to give her testimony at the trial which took place a month later.

Most strangely had it happened that by her unwitting influence the criminal career of Frederick Bailey Deeming had been brought to an end. Had she consented to live, after her anticipated marriage, in New South Wales or Victoria, he might never have been apprehended. In these two colonies—except for the seeming impossibility of the murdered body being discovered—he might have come and gone without suspicion; his only peril being the almost negligible one that some associate of his voyage from England, or one of the very few persons in Melbourne who had seen him with his former wife, might encounter him and inquire as to his changed name and partner:—but the extrication of himself from such an entanglement would have been merely a stimulating mental exercise to Deeming, whose record, as searched after his latest crime was known and the hue-and-cry was on his trail, shows him to have been a most accomplished swindler, and a man of singular address in all forms of deceit.

In these comparatively populous sections, too, the free and wide circulation of newspapers would have brought immediate warning, by announcement of the discovery of the Windsor murder, of the danger he was in, and thus have aided his escape; for it was not until several days after the body was found that its identity was revealed, and many more before any clue was found to Deeming's whereabouts. With railways extending to ports in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland, his opportunities for quitting the country quickly and secretly were numerous; and once away before the search for him had even been started, the chance of capturing him would have been poor indeed.

In Western Australia, whither Miss Rounsfell had been innocently instrumental in sending him, the situation was entirely different. No railways connect the colony with the others, and ingress and egress are alike possible only by sea. Moreover, being the latest of the Colonies in which the old English system of penal-transportation was abolished, and still harboring many of the former subjects of that régime, Western Australia at this time maintained through its police a close system of espionage over all who arrived or departed by the few seaports of the district. Thus did the murderer walk into a cul-de-sac; and when the pursuit (by an extraordinarily sagacious piece of deductive work on the part of the Melbourne detectives, which it would interfere with the purpose of this narrative to describe) reached Albany, the officers, armed with warrants for his arrest and learning from the local police records that a man such as they described had "gone up country" and had not returned, had only to endure the tedious desert journey to Frazer's gold-mines at Southern Cross, and apprehend him in the very house he had prepared for his awaited bride.

CHAPTER IV

The Expiation

Run to earth, and captured like a rabbit at the end of its burrow, the murderer was brought to Albany, and shipped to Melbourne by the liner "Ballaarat." As a relief from the general lack of events of interest that marked his return progress, it may be noted that the train on which he traveled from Freemantle to Albany, was stormed at York by an indignant populace, who voiced the sentiment universally pervading all the Colonies against his atrocities by a determined effort to visit a rude, if original, form of justice upon him by tearing him to pieces between two bullock-teams, and were dissuaded with difficulty from this intention by a display of revolvers by his guards. His feelings were outraged also on the steamer, where he expressed himself as much distressed by the light and profane conversation of certain unregenerate marines who were on their way to the Australian station, and strongly rebuked them therefor:—thus illustrating anew the strange contradiction in his nature which was before shown in his reproach of Miss Rounsfell's fondness for dancing. In fact, all who at various times came in contact with him—including and ending with his guardians in the Melbourne jail—remarked upon his scrupulousness of language and nicety of conduct.

I have gone thus at some length into a description of this monster and his crimes for two reasons:—in the first place because it seemed essential to show the causes of the repulsion and horror which his very name inspired, and thus to place the reader in a position to appreciate the effect upon the popular mind of later incidents which I am about to record; and, in the second place, because the close study which I was able to give alike to the man and his deeds convinced me that his case was one possessing far more interest for the psychologist than even the criminologist.

The ingenious Sir William S. Gilbert, in the song of the sentimental police sergeant in "The Pirates of Penzance," wherein it is recited that

"When the enterprizing burglar isn't burgling,
When the cutthroat isn't occupied with crime,
He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling,
And listens to the merry village chime"—

voiced a truth which has been marked in the cases of many malefactors. It has been observed of Deeming that, in the intervals of swindling, lying and homicide by which his career is chiefly remembered, he bristled like a copybook with virtuous and noble sentiments—nor is his sincerity to be doubted in their utterance. It is unquestionable that he was a man of singular address and subtlety—not only among men skilled in business affairs and experienced in reading character. He was a clever mechanic, and able to adapt himself quickly and efficiently to any occupation:—as is shown by the fact that although there is nothing in his history to indicate that he had had any previous experience in mine-management, he more than fulfilled all the requirements laid upon him at Southern Cross, increased the output of gold by ingenious inventions, and was esteemed by the company as the most capable manager it had ever had. He had a marked, if imperfectly developed, fondness for music and literature, and although his conversation included many grammatical solecisms, it was effective and often eloquent. His taste in dress, although rather flamboyant in the matter of jewelry, of which he always wore a profusion, was noticeably correct—the frock-coat, light trousers and perfectly-fitting patent-leather shoes which he wore at his trial were evidently from the hands of the best London outfitters, and would have graced (as they doubtless had done) the fashionable afternoon parade which is a feature of Melbourne's Collins Street.

The anomaly that is suggested by these established facts regarding him is of minor interest, however, in comparison with more striking contradictions that were remarked after his capture. It was my fortune to have a place near him at the inquest which resulted in his commitment for trial, as well as at the trial itself that duly followed. Popular feeling against him was so intense and violent that the authorities did not dare to land him at the steamboat pier, but smuggled him aboard a tug when the "Ballaarat" entered the harbor, and brought him ashore at the suburb of St. Kilda, whence he was hurried in a closed cab to the Melbourne jail. Brought into the court where the inquest was held, his appearance was so brutal and revolting that a murmur of horror and disgust arose at his entrance which the judge and officers with difficulty quelled.

There was in his deeply-lined and saturnine face no indication of an understanding of his position. His lips were drawn in a sardonic sneer, and his eyes—steely, evil and magnetic—glistened like those of the basilisk as he looked boldly and with a sort of savage bravado at the faces about him. He disdained to pay any attention to the proceedings, and was seemingly deaf to the testimony that was advanced against him by more than thirty witnesses. Yet he evinced a lively, if contemptuous, interest in minor details, and audibly expressed his views regarding them. When the canary that had played so singular a part in his Australian experiences was produced, still in its ornate gilded cage, he cried out: "Hullo! here comes the menagerie! Why don't the band play?" Of a reporter taking notes at a table near him he remarked that "he wrote like a hen," commented upon the weak utterance of a certain witness that "he had no more voice than a consumptive shrimp," and interjected ribald criticisms on the words of the judge that were fairly shocking under the circumstances.

When, at the termination of the proceedings, the judge ordered his commitment for trial, and stated that a rescript would be issued against him for the wilful murder of his wife, Emily Williams, he shouted, in a shrill, cackling, strident sort of voice: "And when you have got it, you can put it in your pipe and smoke it!"—looking about with a demoniac grin as if expecting applause for an effective bit of repartee. As the constables seized him and dragged him to the door, his eyes fell upon a comely young woman standing on the edge of the crowd, who regarded him with horrified amazement. Breaking away from the officers, he danced up to her, chucked her under the chin, and with his leering face close to hers ejaculated: "O, you ducky, ducky!" and disappeared amid the cries of the scandalized lookers-on.

I do not know what the emotions of other attendants on the trial may have been, but I remember my own mental attitude as one of distaste that my duties as a correspondent required my presence. To see one weak human being contending for his life against the organized and tremendous forces of the Law is always a pitiful and moving spectacle; in this case, with recollections of the repulsive incidents of the inquest in mind, one nerved oneself for some scene of desperation and horror. The dock, surrounded by a spiked railing and already guarded by a posse of white-helmeted constables, stood in the centre of the courtroom, its platform, elevated some three feet from the floor, being furnished with a trap-door that communicated with the cells below by a spiral iron staircase, which the prisoner must ascend. The audience watched this trap-door in somewhat that state of hesitating eagerness with which a child awaits the spring of a jack-in-the-box, not knowing what grotesque or terrifying thing may appear:—and when it lifted, and the murderer stepped to his place beneath the thousand-eyed gaze that was fastened upon him, a murmur in which amazement was the dominant note ran through the room.

My own first feeling was that my eyesight was playing me a trick; my second, that by some change of program of which I had not been informed, the trial of Deeming had been postponed. In this frock-coated, well-groomed and gentlemanly person in the dock there was no trace whatever of the ruffian who had been the central figure of the inquest. In age he seemed to have dropped some twenty years; his manner was perfect, showing no trace either of apprehension or bravado:—in short, the impression he conveyed (as I described it in my correspondence at the time) was of a young clergyman of advanced views presenting himself to trial for heresy, rather than of one of the most brutal murderers of his generation. This impression prevailed during the four days his trial lasted; only once or twice could one detect in his eye the former flash of implacableness and ferocity. It was not as if he made an effort to keep himself in control, but rather as if he were a man with two strongly opposed and antagonistic sides to his nature, of which one or the other might manifest itself without any conscious exercise of will.

It was also evident to anyone who could observe him dispassionately that the details of the murder, as they were brought out in the testimony, were all as news to him:—and when, in the address he made to the jury before it retired to consider its verdict, he admitted knowledge of the subsidiary facts brought out (as to his acquaintance with Miss Rounsfell, for example), but swore he was as innocent as he was incapable of the murder of his wife, I, for one, believed him sincere, although I could perceive in the faces about me that I was alone in that opinion. A suggestion that this man might illustrate the phenomenon of "dual personality" and should be subjected to hypnotic suggestion at the hands of qualified experts, rather than have swift condemnation measured out to him, would doubtless have been received with derision by the hard-headed audience that was the real jury in the case; but I felt at the time, and feel now even more strongly, that if Frederick Bailey Deeming had been tried in a country where psychological aberrations have been the subject of study, he would have been committed, not to the hangman, but to a lifelong restraint wherein science might have gained from his extraordinary personality much valuable knowledge.

The man whose life was choked out of him on the gallows three weeks later was the man of the inquest, not the man of the trial—and in this fact is some occasion for satisfaction. He was more subdued, as though he appreciated—as any other animal might do—what the sinister preparations for his ending meant:—but when, as he hung beneath the open trap, the death-cap was lifted from his face, there were plainly to be seen the hard and brutal lines about his mouth, and the wolfish sneer upon his lips, which one could not but feel, with something like a shudder, had distinguished his features in the commission of the atrocities for which at last he had paid such insufficient price as society could exact.

The scaffold of the Melbourne jail is a permanent structure with several traps; and across and above it runs a heavy beam, its ends fixed in the solid masonry of the walls, and the greater part of its length scarred and grooved by the chafing of the ropes which, from time to time, have given despatch to the souls of several hundred murderers. As I looked up at this fearsome tally-stick, I turned to the oldest warder of the jail, a man of nearly seventy years, who had been present at my interview with Deeming a few days before, and who now stood beside me.

"I want to ask you a question," I said, "unless your official position may prevent your answering it."

"What is it, sir?" he inquired.

"You have been for many years a warder here, and must have seen many men under sentence of death."

"Yes," he replied. "I was first here in the bushranging days, and have been here ever since. I fancy I have seen two hundred men depart this life by the route of that gallows."

"Then," said I, "you should be a good judge of the character and mental state of a man who is awaiting a death of that sort. Here is my question:—What is your opinion of Deeming?"

"Mad, sir," replied the warder. "Mad as a March hare."

This verdict might be qualified, but I believe it to be essentially just.

CHAPTER V

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

In beginning this chapter I find myself facing a dilemma—one not so puzzling as that which gave Hamlet pause, and evoked his famous soliloquy, and yet like it, too, in that it forces me to hesitate before the mystery of the Unseen. Thus far my story has the support of incontrovertible facts and permanent and referable legal and criminal records; I must now cut loose from these, and trust my weight upon the assertion that the last half of my narrative, which I now launch upon, is in every detail and particular as true as the first. In the stress of the responsibility thus assumed it might seem natural to marshall about me such facts and persons as I might invoke as corroborative witnesses. Of these there are not a few:—but although there is (sometimes) "wisdom in a multitude of counsellors," conviction in the actuality of truth in narrations of so-called "supernatural" phenomena is as likely as otherwise to be befogged in exact proportion to the size of their "cloud of witnesses." Therefore I have, after reflection, decided to "take the stand" myself and unsupported, and to throw myself upon the mercy of the court—my readers—in so doing.

Thus, then, I shall not reveal the exact location of The House on the Hill, nor the name of the owner, from whom, for a year, I rented it. It is doubtful that he be now living, for he was a man of advanced age when he left his house in my hands, and departed with his two unmarried daughters (themselves of mature years) for a twelve-months' tour in Europe. On his return I handed him the keys without any reference to the strange occurrences that had come to me from my bargaining with him:—nor do I know to this day whether he had similar experiences after my departure, or even whether they may have enlivened him and his family prior to my tenancy. His evident anxiety to lease the house for a time (I took it furnished, and at a rental absurdly low—in fact, just one-half his original demand) may have had no special significance, although I often fancied afterwards that I had found a reason for it:—but on consideration I decided not to refer to certain features of the house that he had failed to enumerate as among its attractions, and to restore him without remark to their renewal—if he knew of them—or to discover them for himself—if he did not.

It is probable that few of my readers have spent a year in a "haunted house"—I use this expression, although it defines nothing, for want of a better:—but those who cherish such an experience will understand why, on the one hand, I did not wish to alarm an elderly gentleman and his amiable daughters, or "give a bad name," as the saying is, to his property; and why, on the other, I did not care to run the risk of living in his recollection, and in the minds of his neighbors to whom he might relate my story, as a person of feeble intellect, if not a lunatic outright. But I would give a good deal to know what he knew about that house.

A circumstance that I took no note of at the time, but which afterwards seemed to have a possible significance, occurred at the house one evening when I had called to complete negotiations by signing the lease and going through other formalities precedent to taking possession. The owner had told me that one of his reasons for desiring a change of scene for a time was that his wife had died three months before after a lingering illness that had completely worn out his daughters as well as himself:—and when the business of his final evening was completed, the younger woman uttered this strange remark:—"Well, it will be a relief not to see mother about all the time!"—and was immediately checked by her sister. I had before noted her as a nervous-mannered, somewhat anæmic-looking person, and her observation touched my mind too lightly to leave any impression upon it.

There was nothing at all peculiar in the appearance of the house. It stood upon a breezy hill-top in the outskirts of one of Melbourne's most attractive suburbs; the train from town landed me, every evening, at the village station, and a ten-minute walk up a rather steep road brought me comfortably to home and dinner. The house was a delightful one when you got to it. It occupied a corner lot, and had extensive grounds around it; there was a large orchard at the rear, filled with grape-vines, and pear, lemon, and fig trees—although none of them did much in the matter of bearing. There were two trees in the front yard that gave profusely of pomegranates (a decorative fruit, but one whose edible qualities always seemed to me greatly overrated); there were spacious flower beds on both sides of the building, and the nearest neighbors were at least two hundred yards away. On the other side of the street which ran in front of the house was a large, unimproved lot which gave a touch of the country by the presence in it of several ancient gum trees, in which the "laughing jackasses" cackled and vociferated both morning and evening:—and when my wife and I, and the gentleman of Scottish ancestry and of advanced middle-age, whom, as our best of friends, we had induced to share the enterprise with us, looked about upon these things on the first afternoon of our occupancy, we pronounced them all "very good."

The house was not a large one, comprising six living-rooms and a kitchen, besides a bath and a commodious storeroom and pantry. It was of the bungalow pattern, a type which is a favorite one in Australia, where the high average temperature of the year makes coolness and airiness prime essentials in a dwelling. It had no cellar, but was raised above the ground upon brickwork, thus forming a dry air-chamber below, and above its single story was a low, unfinished attic, which afforded another air-space, and stretched without partitions from front to back of the house. There was no floor to this attic, and on the only occasion when I explored it, I had to crawl from beam to beam, the pointed roof being so low that I could barely stand upright even under its ridgepole. The only means of access to this part of the house was a ladder, which could be brought into the bathroom, and from which could be raised a light trap-door in the ceiling. A veranda ran along the front of the house, and a wide hall extended, without turn or obstruction, from front to back. On one side of this hall—beginning from the veranda—were the parlor, dining-room, bedroom, and pantry; on the other, my wife's bedroom, the bathroom, our friend's room, a "spare-room," and the kitchen:—while a few yards behind the house stood a one-story structure, fitted up as a laundry. The "spare-room" here mentioned I furnished as a smoking-room; and further equipped it by building a bench across the space before the single window, whereat I employed myself now and then in preparing the skins of birds of which I was making a collection, and which I either shot myself in frequent excursions into the country, or which were sent to me by agents, both whites and "blackfellows," whom I employed in various parts of the Colonies.

One, and perhaps the most peculiar, feature of the bungalow remains to be described. This was a small apartment, about five feet square, between the bathroom and our friend's room (but without any means of direct communication with either), and entered only by a narrow door which swung outward into the hall. It was unlighted, and was provided with air by a ventilator at the end of a shaft which was carried through the ceiling into the attic and ended in the roof. Its floor was of thickly-laid concrete, and in its centre, and occupying nearly the whole ground space, was a sunken portion about two feet deep, and equipped with wooden racks upon which boxes of butter, pans of milk, and various receptacles containing similar perishable articles of food were accommodated. This chamber was of real use in a country where—at the time at least—ice was scarce and expensive, and where summer temperatures of a hundred and ten degrees in the shade might be expected; since, being placed in a part of the house which was wholly removed from the direct rays of the sun, the air in it was always cool and dry. I am particular in describing this room because of a strange incident that later occurred in it.

The house was well, almost luxuriously, furnished. The parlor contained a fine piano, and several pictures of merit adorned the walls; heat (seldom necessary in that mild climate except on rainy days in autumn and winter) was furnished to this and other rooms by open fireplaces, and vases and other bric-a-brac stood upon the mantels; the bed and table linen was all of excellent quality, there was a sufficiency of crockery and glass and silverware and culinary utensils:—and as we sat down to our inauguratory dinner, and contrasted our condition with the three years' previous experience of travel and steamer and hotel life in all parts of Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania and the Fiji Islands, we congratulated each other that we had found a "home" indeed.

We set about forthwith to improve our temporary property. On one side of the house, and separated from it by a fence that inclosed the lawn and flower gardens, was a grassy "paddock" that might formerly have pastured a horse or a cow. As we had no use for either of these animals, we turned this space into a poultry yard, and populated it with chickens, ducks and geese—which thrived amazingly, and in due time furnished us all the eggs and poultry required for our table. Our friend (by nature and early training an ardent horticulturist, but whose energies in that science had for many years enjoyed no opportunity for exercise in the soil of the Melbourne Stock Exchange, of which he was a member) joyously took the flower gardens under his control, and achieved miracles therein. It was delightful, as I sat in the shady veranda on the hot Saturday afternoons, with a steamer chair to loll in, and a pipe and cooling drink at hand, to contemplate his enthusiasm as he delved and sweated to prepare new ground for the gorgeous blooms which he coaxed from the willing soil—at the same time extolling my own sagacity in asking him to share the place with us; to which he would respond in appropriate language. Our household was so small that we were not exposed to the annoyances of the "servant-girl" problem:—our friend and I lunched in town, and a capable woman who lived nearby assisted my wife in cooking and serving our dinners, and attended to the duties of house-cleaning—returning to her own home when her work was accomplished, and leaving us to ourselves in the evenings. We were near enough to town to run in for theatres and concerts whenever we were so minded, and on Sundays did some modest entertaining:—in short, we settled into a phase of existence as nearly Arcadian as is often possible under modern conditions of civilization, and although it seemed likely to be commonplace and uneventful, we were in mood to find it all the more desirable and pleasant on that account. That the most startling experiences of our lives were soon to come upon us never entered our heads, and for some six weeks we lived in serenity and happiness amid surroundings that day by day grew more attractive.

CHAPTER VI

ON THE WINGS OF THE STORM

My interview with the murderer, as described in the first chapter, took place upon a Thursday. The next day was one of the general holidays that are so profusely celebrated in Australia:—I do not remember the occasion, but it is safe to assume that some important horse race was to be run at Flemington—the Epsom of the Antipodes. At all events, I took advantage of the opportunity to go into the country with my gun on a collecting trip, and returned at night with a fine assortment of cockatoos, parrots and other brilliantly plumaged or curious birds which make the Colonies a paradise for the ornithologist.

The day following—Saturday—opened with a heavy rain, and a strong wind off the sea. I had no particular business to call me to town, and, anyhow, all activities and occupations would cease at noon in deference to the usual weekly half-holiday. Moreover, I had several hours' work before me in removing and preserving the skins of the birds I had shot; so I suppressed the faint voice of duty that suggested that I might find something of importance awaiting me in Melbourne, and after breakfast sat down to the congenial labor of my taxidermist's bench. Our friend departed for the Stock Exchange, and my wife and I were left alone in the house.

I had no more than made the preliminary incision in the breast of a purple lorrikeet when the doorbell rang. Answering the summons I found in the veranda a black-haired, sallow-faced individual, his garments sodden with rain, who offered for my purchase and perusal "The History and Last Confession of Frederick Bailey Deeming," for "the small price of sixpence." More in commiseration for the wretched and bedraggled appearance of the vendor than from any other motive (for I was already acquainted with the "History," and gave no credence to any announcement that a "Confession" had been made) I bought the pamphlet and returned to my room. Finding, as I had suspected, that this piece of literature contained no new facts whatever, and was totally lacking in anything even the most remotely suggesting confession, I threw it into the fire that blazed on the hearth and took up my interrupted work.[6]

The incident of the water-soaked vendor and his pamphlet had had the effect, however, of turning my reflections into a very unpleasant channel. In spite of all efforts to apply myself to the task in hand, the thought of the despairing man in the condemned cell, my visit to him two days before, and my anticipated presence at his execution within forty-eight hours, pressed upon my spirit with a weight which I found it impossible to lift. An incident which had occurred on the previous day had also added a certain element of pathos to the situation.

During my absence a letter had come to my wife through the morning mail, which, to her astonishment and disquiet, proved to have been written by the murderer. It ran as follows: