The Editor of the University Magazine submits the following very remarkable statement, with every detail of which he has been for some years acquainted, on the ground that it affords the most authentic and ample relation of a series of marvellous phenomena, in no way connected with what is technically termed “spiritualism,” which he has anywhere met with.
All the persons — and there are many of them still living — upon whose separate evidence some parts, and upon whose united testimony others, of this most singular recital depend, are, in their several walks of life, respectable, and such as would, in any matter of judicial investigation, be deemed wholly unexceptionable witnesses.
There is not an incident here recorded which would not have been distinctly deposed to on oath, had any necessity existed, by the persons who separately — and some of them in great fear — related their own experiences.
The Editor begs most pointedly to meet, in limine, the suspicion that he is elaborating a trick, or vouching for another ghost of Mrs Veal. As a mere story, the narrative is valueless: its sole claim to attention is its absolute truth. For the good faith of its relator he pledges his own and the character of this Magazine.
With the Editor’s concurrence, the name of the watering-place, and some special circumstances in no essential way bearing upon the peculiar character of the story, but which might have indicated the locality and possibly annoyed persons interested in house property there, have been suppressed by the narrator.
Not the slightest liberty has been taken with the narrative, which is presented precisely in the terms in which the writer of it, who employs throughout the first person, would, if need were, fix it in the form of an affidavit.
Within the last eight years — the precise date I purposely omit — I was ordered by my physician, my health being in an unsatisfactory state, to change my residence to one upon the seacoast. Accordingly, I took a house for a year in a fashionable watering-place, at a moderate distance from the city in which I had previously resided, and connected with it by railway.
Winter was setting in when my removal there was decided upon, but there was nothing whatever dismal or depressingbin the change.
The house I had taken was, to all appearance, and in point of convenience too, quite a modern one. It formed one in a cheerful row, with small gardens in front, facing the sea and commanding sea air and sea views in perfection.
At the rear it had a coach house and stable, and between them and the house a considerable grass plot, with some flower beds interposed.
Our family consisted of my wife and myself, with three children. The eldest was about nine years old; she and the next in age were girls, and the youngest, between six and seven, a boy.
To these were added six servants, whom, although for certain reasons I decline to give their real names, I shall indicate, for the sake of clearness, by arbitrary ones. There was a nurse, Mrs Southerland; a nursery maid, Ellen Page; the cook, Mrs Greenwood; and the housemaid, Ellen Faith; a butler, whom I shall call Smith, and his son James, about twenty-two.
We came to take possession at about seven o’clock in the evening. Everything was comfortable and cheerful; good fires were lighted, the rooms neat and airy, and there was a general air of preparation and comfort highly conducive to good spirits and pleasant anticipations.
The sitting rooms were large and cheerful, and they and the bedrooms more than ordinarily lofty. The kitchen and servants’ rooms, on the same level, were well and comfortably furnished and had, like the rest of the house, an air of recent painting and fitting up, and a completely modern character which imparted a very cheerful air of cleanliness and convenience.
There had been just enough of the fuss of settling in agreeably to occupy us and give a pleasant turn to our thoughts after we retired to our rooms.
Being an invalid, I had a small bed to myself, resigning the four-poster to my wife. The candle was extinguished, but a night-light was burning.
I was coming upstairs, and she, already in bed, had just dismissed her maid, when we were both startled by a wild scream from her room.
I found her in a state of extreme agitation and terror. She insisted that she had seen an unnaturally tall figure come beside her bed and stand there.
The light was too faint to enable her to define anything concerning the apparition beyond the fact that she had most distinctly seen such a shape, colourless from the insufficiency of the light to disclose more than its dark outline.
We both tried to reassure her. The room once more looked so cheerful in candlelight that we were quite uninfluenced by the contagion of her terrors. The movements and voices of the servants downstairs, still getting things into place and completing our comfortable arrangements, also helped to steel us against any such influence.
We set the whole thing down as a dream, or an imperfectly seen outline of the bed curtains.
When, however, we were alone, my wife reiterated, still in great agitation, her clear assertion that she had most positively seen — being at the time as completely awake as ever she was — precisely what she had described to us.
And in this conviction she continued perfectly firm.
A day or two later it came out that our servants were under the apprehension that, somehow or other, thieves had established a secret mode of access to the lower part of the house.
The butler, Smith, had seen an ill-looking woman in his room on the first night of our arrival; and he and other servants constantly saw, for many days afterwards, glimpses of a retreating figure corresponding with the one he had seen, passing through a passage that led to a back area in which there were some coal vaults.
The figure was always seen in the act of retreating, its back turned, generally disappearing around the corner of the passage into the area in a stealthy and hurried way. When closely followed, it was imperfectly seen again entering one of the coal vaults — and when pursued into it, was nowhere to be found.
The idea of anything supernatural in the matter had, strange to say, not yet entered the mind of any of the servants.
They had heard stories of smugglers having secret passages into houses and using their means of access for purposes of pillage, or to frighten superstitious people out of houses needed for their own purposes. A suspicion of similar practices here caused them extreme uneasiness.
The apparent anxiety shown by this retreating figure to escape observation, and her always appearing to make her exit at the same point, favoured this romantic hypothesis.
The men, however, made a most careful examination of the back area and the coal vaults in an attempt to discover some means of egress, but entirely without success.
On the contrary, the result, so far as it went, was subversive of the theory.
Solid masonry met them on every hand.
I called Smith up to hear from his own lips the particulars of what he had seen, and certainly his report was very curious. I give it as literally as my memory enables me.
His son slept in the same room and was sound asleep, but Smith lay awake, as men sometimes will on a change of bed and with many things on their minds.
He was lying with his face toward the wall when, noticing a light and some slight movement in the room, he turned around in bed and saw the figure of a woman.
She was squalid and ragged in dress, rather low and broad in figure, and, as well as he could recollect, wore either a cloak or shawl and a bonnet.
Her back was turned, and she appeared to be searching or rummaging for something on the floor. Without seeming to notice him, she turned as she searched.
The light, which Smith described as more like the intense glow of a coal than a candle, was a deep red colour and seemed to proceed from the hollow of her hand, which she held beside her head.
He saw her perfectly distinctly.
She appeared middle-aged, was deeply pitted with smallpox, and blind in one eye. Smith’s phrase in describing her general appearance was that she was “a miserable, poor-looking creature.”
He assumed that she must be the woman who had been left by the proprietor in charge of the house and who, after giving up the keys that evening, had remained for some little time with the female servants.
He coughed, therefore, to let her know that he was awake, and turned again toward the wall.
When he next looked around, both the woman and the light were gone.
Odd as her method of lighting herself had been, the circumstances caused him neither uneasiness nor curiosity until he discovered the following morning that the woman in question had left the house long before he had gone to bed.
I questioned Smith closely about the appearance of the person who had visited him, and the result was what I have described. It struck me as strange that even then, considering how prone to superstition persons in his rank of life were generally supposed to be, he did not appear to suspect anything supernatural in the occurrence.
On the contrary, he remained thoroughly persuaded that his visitor had been a living person who had entered the house by some hidden way.
On Sunday, after returning from his place of worship, Smith told me that, when the service had ended and the congregation was making its way slowly out, he had seen the very same woman in the crowd.
He kept his eye upon her for several minutes, but such was the crush that all his attempts to reach her were unsuccessful. When at last he reached the open street, she was gone.
He was completely certain that he had seen her distinctly and dismissed the possibility that he might have been mistaken. Still convinced of the substantial and living reality of his visitor, he was greatly annoyed that she had escaped him.
He made inquiries in the neighbourhood, but could obtain no information and could find no one else who had seen a woman matching her description.
The cook and the housemaid occupied a bedroom on the kitchen floor. It had whitewashed walls, and they became genuinely terrified by the appearance of the shadow of a woman passing and repassing across the wall opposite their beds.
They suspected that this had been going on much longer than they had realised, for its presence was discovered almost by accident, when its movements happened to take a direction distinctly contrary to their own.
The shadow always moved upon one particular wall, returning after short intervals and causing them extreme terror.
They placed the candle, as the most obvious remedy, so close to the haunted wall that the flame almost touched it, and for a time believed they had effectually got rid of the annoyance.
But one night, despite this arrangement, the shadow returned. It passed and repassed as before upon the same wall, although their only candle was burning within an inch of it. No object capable of casting such a shadow could possibly have intervened.
Indeed, as they described it, the shadow seemed to bear no relation whatever to the position of the light and appeared in manifest defiance of the laws of optics.
I ought to mention that the housemaid was a particularly fearless sort of person, as well as a very honest one. Her companion, the cook, was a scrupulously religious woman, and both agreed in every particular in their account of what occurred.
Meanwhile, the nursery was not without its disturbances, though as yet they were comparatively trivial.
Sometimes at night the handle of the door was turned hurriedly, as if by someone trying to come in. At other times there was a knocking at the door.
These sounds occurred after the children had settled to sleep and while the nurse still remained awake.
Whenever she called to know, “Who is there?” the sounds ceased.
Several times, particularly at first, she was convinced that the sounds had been made by her mistress coming to see the children. Believing this, she got up and opened the door, expecting to find her there.
But there was only darkness. No one answered her inquiries.
With respect to this nurse, I must mention that I believe no more perfectly trustworthy servant was ever employed in her capacity. In addition to her integrity, she was remarkably gifted with sound common sense.
One morning, I think about three or four weeks after our arrival, I was sitting at the parlour window looking out toward the front of the house—when I saw the little iron gate leading into the small garden pushed open by a woman who answered so exactly to Smith’s description of the visitor to his room that I was immediately convinced she must be the same person.
She was short and square in build, dressed in soiled and tattered clothes, her face scarred and pitted with smallpox, and blind in one eye.
She stepped hurriedly into the little enclosure and, from a distance of only a few yards, peered into the room where I was sitting.
I felt that now was the moment to clear the matter up.
There was, however, something so stealthy in the woman’s manner and appearance that I was convinced I must not seem to notice her until her retreat had been properly cut off.
Unfortunately, I was suffering from a lame foot and could not reach the bell as quickly as I wished.
I made all the haste I could and rang violently for Smith. During the brief interval before he appeared, I watched the woman from the window.
She looked leisurely along the front windows of the house with a kind of scrutiny, then passed quickly out again, closing the gate behind her.
A lady happened to be walking rapidly along the footpath, and the woman followed her as though intending to beg from her. The moment Smith entered I told him:
“The blind woman you described to me has this instant followed a lady in that direction. Try to overtake her.”
He was, if possible, even more eager than I was in the chase. But he returned a short time later, hot and utterly disappointed.
The pursuit had been useless.
And after that, we never saw her face again.
All this time, and until we left the house two or three months later, there occurred at intervals the only phenomenon in the entire series bearing any resemblance to what we hear described as “spiritualism.”
It was a knocking — a soft hammering, as though made with a wooden mallet — in the timbers between the bedroom ceilings and the roof.
It had one peculiar characteristic.
The knocking was always rhythmical, with the emphasis, I think invariably, falling upon the final stroke.
It would sound rapidly:
one, two, three, four — one, two, three, four; or:
one, two, three — one, two, three; and sometimes:
one, two — one, two.
With intervals and resumptions, it would continue monotonously for hours at a time.
At first this caused my wife, who was a good deal confined to her bed, considerable annoyance.
We sent to our neighbours to ask whether any hammering or carpentering was taking place in their houses, but were told that nothing of the kind was going on.
I heard it myself frequently, always in the same inaccessible part of the house and always with the same monotonous emphasis.
One odd thing about it was that whenever my wife called out, as she sometimes did when the noise became particularly troublesome, “Stop that noise!”
it invariably ceased for a longer or shorter time.
Of course, none of these occurrences was ever mentioned within hearing of the children.
They merely saw the figure of a very poor woman, soiled and ragged, near the stable wall.
She was always stooping over the ground, apparently grubbing in the loose earth in search of something.
She never disturbed the children and appeared not to notice them.They, in turn, left her in undisturbed possession of her little patch of ground.
Whenever they saw her, she was always in the same place and occupied in the same way. The description they gave of her general appearance — for they had never seen her face — corresponded with that of the one-eyed woman whom Smith, and subsequently I myself, had seen.
The other man, James, who looked after a mare I had purchased for riding exercise, had, like everyone else in the house, his own little trouble to report, though it did not amount to much.
The stall which, as the most comfortable, we had decided to give the mare, she absolutely refused to enter. Though ordinarily a very docile and gentle animal, there was no getting her into it. She would snort and rear and, in fact, do or suffer almost anything rather than set a hoof inside. James was therefore obliged to place her in another stall.
On several occasions he found her there exhibiting every sign of extreme fear. Like the rest of us, however, he was not troubled by any particular superstition. The mare had evidently been frightened.
What puzzled him was how, or by whom, for the stable was well secured and, as far as I can remember, had a locked yard outside.
One morning I was greeted with the news that robbers had certainly entered the house during the night — and that one of them had actually been seen in the nursery.
The witness was my eldest child, then about nine years old. She had awakened during the night and lain awake for some time when she heard the handle of the door turn.
A person whom she saw distinctly — for it was a bright night and the window shutters were open — stepped into the room on tiptoe and with an appearance of great caution.
He was a rather small man with a very red face.
He wore an oddly cut frock coat, its collar standing up, and rough, wide trousers rather like those of a sailor, turned up at the ankles. On his feet were either short boots or clumsy shoes, covered with mud.
The man paused beside the nurse’s bed, which stood next to the door, and listened for some seconds as if making certain that she was sound asleep. Then he began to move cautiously across the room toward the chimney piece. There he stood for a while before resuming his silent walk along the wall until he reached a chest of drawers.
Some of the drawers were open.
He looked inside them and began rummaging hurriedly, as the child supposed, in search of something worth stealing.
He then moved on to the window, where there was a dressing table. There too he stopped, turning over the things upon it, and stood for some time at the window as though looking outside. Then he resumed his journey, moving along the opposite wall and returning toward the nurse’s bed. My eldest child lay in a small bed against the end wall and had watched all these proceedings in extreme terror.
As the man drew near, she instinctively pressed herself back against the wall and drew up her feet beneath the bedclothes. But he passed her without appearing either to notice or to care about her presence. Immediately afterwards the nurse turned in her bed as though about to wake.
The child pulled the clothes over her head.
When she finally dared to look out again, the man was gone. The child had no idea that she had seen anything more formidable than a thief. The prowling, cautious and noiseless manner of the man corresponded perfectly with what she imagined such a visitor would do.
After hearing her clear and consistent account, I could myself arrive at no other conclusion than that a stranger had actually entered the house. I therefore had the windows and doors carefully examined for any sign that an entrance had been forced. The doors had been found barred and locked as usual, but no trace of intrusion could be discovered.
I then had the plate, clothing, books and other articles checked. Nothing whatever was missing.
Nor was there the slightest indication that anything had even been disturbed. I should add that this child was remarkably clear, intelligent and observant, and that her description of the man, and of everything that had occurred, was as exact and detailed as the imperfect light allowed. I remained convinced that someone had entered the house, though for what purpose I could not imagine.
Smith was equally certain. His theory was that the object was simply to frighten us out of the house by making us believe it haunted, and he became more determined than ever to discover the conspirators.
It has often seemed strange to me since — stranger with every passing year — that beneath all our sense of mystery and perplexity lay the quiet assumption that these occurrences must somehow be referable to natural causes.
I could not account for them myself. Yet throughout the whole period I lived in that house, although I was often alone and frequently awake very late at night, I never once experienced those tremors and thrills which most people have felt when the hour and situation are favourable to them.
With the exception of the cook and housemaid, who were troubled by the shadow crossing and recrossing their bedroom wall, we all experienced much the same strange sense of security.
We regarded the phenomena more with puzzled interest and curiosity than with fear. Meanwhile, the footsteps on the lobby and the knocking at the nursery door continued.
At that time my wife and I were both invalids, and two eminent physicians occasionally travelled out by rail to attend us.
At first the gentlemen were amused by our accounts. Eventually they became interested. Then puzzled.
One of them finally recommended that a candle should be kept burning on the lobby. It was, in effect, an old woman’s remedy against ghosts — though it might prove equally useful against impostors — and we tried it.
For three or four nights, we fancied it had succeeded. Then the footsteps returned. The knocking returned.
The door handle began to turn again. And all of it continued despite the candle burning on the table outside.
The mystery was only deepened.
The alarm about robbers and smugglers gradually subsided. But before long we heard again from the nursery.
Our second little girl, then between seven and eight years old, woke during the night while everyone else in the room remained asleep. Near the middle of the floor, opposite the hearthstone and facing the foot of her bed, stood a young woman. She had black, or very dark, hair hanging loose around her and wore a black cloak.
She appeared entirely unaware of the sleeping children and nurse. Her face was very pale.
The child said that she looked both sorry and frightened. There was also something peculiar and terrible about her eyes which made the child conclude that the woman was dead.
Across her throat ran a dark streak, like a scar with blood upon it. The young woman was not motionless.
Once or twice she turned slowly, though without appearing conscious of the child or of anyone else in the room. She moved like someone lost in vacancy or abstraction.
A night-light was burning, and the child believed she saw every detail with perfect distinctness. At last she drew the bedclothes over her head.
Many years have passed since then, yet she has never been able to recall the sight without a feeling of peculiar horror.
One day, while the children were playing in the back garden, I asked them to show me the place where they were accustomed to seeing the woman who appeared near the stable wall.
They agreed immediately upon the exact spot.
I suggested that perhaps something might be hidden there in the ground, and told them to dig with their little spades and see what they could find.
They set to work.
When I returned that evening, they had dug up part of a jawbone with several teeth still in it.
The bone was badly decayed and ready to crumble, but the teeth were quite sound.
I could not tell whether they were human.
I showed the remains to one of the physicians who visited us the following evening. He pronounced the teeth human.
A day or two later, the other physician reached the same conclusion.
Looking back now, it seems almost impossible to understand why, with such evidence before me, I did not bring in a labourer and have the ground thoroughly dug and searched. I can only say that I did not.
I was completely satisfied of the truth of everything that had been told to me and which I have recorded here as accurately as I can.
Yet I experienced an apathy for which, either then or afterwards, I could never quite account.
Some vague but immovable conviction remained in me that the whole affair must still be referable to natural causes.
And so the ground was left undisturbed.
It was not until some time after we had left the house — which, by the way, we afterwards learned had possessed a reputation for being haunted before we came to live there — that I began seriously to reconsider what had happened.
A great deal might arbitrarily be put down to imagination. But even then there remained the oddity, not to say improbability, of so many different people having, at almost the same time, experienced different spectral or other illusions during the short period in which we occupied the house.
None of them had been troubled by such fears or fancies before and, so far as we learned, none was afterwards.
There were other things, too, that could not so easily be explained.
I had frequently heard the strange knocking in the roof myself. There were also, as I have forgotten to mention, rappings during the daytime at the doors of the sitting rooms which repeatedly deceived us.
We would call, “Come in.” There would be no answer.
And when the hall or passage outside was examined, no one was there.
We gradually learned that whatever caused those knocks, human hands did not.
Every person who reported seeing the different figures or appearances I have described was as confident of having literally and distinctly seen them as I was of having seen the hard-featured woman with the blind eye who corresponded so remarkably with Smith’s description.
About a week after the discovery of the teeth — which had been found, I think, about two feet below the ground — an elderly friend who had known the town for many years happened to visit us.
He good-humouredly dismissed the whole affair, although he was plainly curious about it.
“We might construct a sort of story,” I said, “and assign to each of the three figures a part in some dreadful tragedy once enacted in this house.
“The male figure might represent the murderer.
“The ill-looking, one-eyed woman might be his accomplice
— the woman who buried the body where she is still so often seen grubbing in the earth, and where the human teeth and jawbone have now been found.
“And the young woman with the dishevelled hair, the black cloak and the bloody scar across her throat might have been their victim.
“But there is one difficulty I cannot get over.
“The house is cheerful, public, and evidently of very recent construction.”
“Why, as to that,” said my friend, “the house is not modern.
“It and the houses beside it once formed an old government store. They have merely been altered and fitted up as you see them now. I remember the place well in my younger days, fifty years ago, before the town had grown out in this direction.
And a more entirely lonely spot — or one better suited to the commission of a secret crime — could hardly have been imagined.”
I have nothing further to add.
Very soon afterwards my physician decided that a longer stay was unnecessary for my health, and we left for another place of residence.
Although I have since lived for considerable periods in many other houses, I have never experienced disturbances of a similar kind. Nor have I made — stupid dog! you will say — any inquiries concerning either the earlier or subsequent history of the house in which we made so disturbed a sojourn. I was content with what I knew.
I have related it here as clearly as I can.
And I think it a very pretty puzzle as it stands.