The Book of Dreams and Ghosts - Andrew Lang (best ebook reader ubuntu .TXT) 📗

the sounds are at their loudest.  Thus Lord St. Vincent, the great admiral, heard nothing during his stay at the house of his sister, Mrs. Ricketts, while that lady endured terrible things.  After his departure she was obliged to recall him.  He arrived, and slept peacefully.  Next day his sister told him about the disturbances, after which he heard them as much as his neighbours, and was as unsuccessful in discovering their cause. {189}

Of course this looks as if these noises were unreal, children of the imagination.  Noises being the staple of haunted houses, a few words may be devoted to them.  They are usually the frou-frou or rustling sweep of a gown, footsteps, raps, thumps, groans, a sound as if all the heavy furniture was being knocked about, crashing of crockery and jingling of money.  Of course, as to footsteps, people may be walking about, and most of the other noises are either easily imitated, or easily produced by rats, water pipes, cracks in furniture (which the Aztecs thought ominous of death), and other natural causes.  The explanation is rather more difficult when the steps pace a gallery, passing and repassing among curious inquirers, or in this instance.

THE CREAKING STAIR

A lady very well known to myself, and in literary society, lived as a girl with an antiquarian father in an old house dear to an antiquary.  It was haunted, among other things, by footsteps.  The old oak staircase had two creaking steps, numbers seventeen and eighteen from the top.  The girl would sit on the stair, stretching out her arms, and count the steps as they passed her, one, two, three, and so on to seventeen and eighteen, which always creaked. {190}   In this case rats and similar causes were excluded, though we may allow for “expectant attention”.  But this does not generally work.  When people sit up on purpose to look out for the ghost, he rarely comes; in the case of the “Lady in Black,” which we give later, when purposely waited for, she was never seen at all.

Discounting imposture, which is sometimes found, and sometimes merely fabled (as in the Tedworth story), there remains one curious circumstance.  Specially ghostly noises are attributed to the living but absent.

THE GROCER’S COUGH

A man of letters was born in a small Scotch town, where his father was the intimate friend of a tradesman whom we shall call the grocer.  Almost every day the grocer would come to have a chat with Mr. Mackay, and the visitor, alone of the natives, had the habit of knocking at the door before entering.  One day Mr. Mackay said to his daughter, “There’s Mr. Macwilliam’s knock.  Open the door.”  But there was no Mr. Macwilliam!  He was just leaving his house at the other end of the street.  From that day Mr. Mackay always heard the grocer’s knock “a little previous,” accompanied by the grocer’s cough, which was peculiar.  Then all the family heard it, including the son who later became learned.  He, when he had left his village for Glasgow, reasoned himself out of the opinion that the grocer’s knock did herald and precede the grocer.  But when he went home for a visit he found that he heard it just as of old.  Possibly some local Sentimental Tommy watched for the grocer, played the trick and ran away.  This explanation presents no difficulty, but the boy was never detected. {191}

Such anecdotes somehow do not commend themselves to the belief even of people who can believe a good deal.

But “the spirits of the living,” as the Highlanders say, have surely as good a chance to knock, or appear at a distance, as the spirits of the dead.  To be sure, the living do not know (unless they are making a scientific experiment) what trouble they are giving on these occasions, but one can only infer, like St. Augustine, that probably the dead don’t know it either.

Thus,

MY GILLIE’S FATHER’S STORY

Fishing in Sutherland, I had a charming companion in the gillie.  He was well educated, a great reader, the best of salmon fishers, and I never heard a man curse William, Duke of Cumberland, with more enthusiasm.  His father, still alive, was second-sighted, and so, to a moderate extent and without theory, was my friend.  Among other anecdotes (confirmed in writing by the old gentleman) was this:—

The father had a friend who died in the house which they both occupied.  The clothes of the deceased hung on pegs in the bedroom.  One night the father awoke, and saw a stranger examining and handling the clothes of the defunct.  Then came a letter from the dead man’s brother, inquiring about the effects.  He followed later, and was the stranger seen by my gillie’s father.

Thus the living but absent may haunt a house both noisily and by actual appearance.  The learned even think, for very exquisite reasons, that “Silverton Abbey” {192} is haunted noisily by a “spirit of the living”.  Here is a case:—

THE DREAM THAT KNOCKED AT THE DOOR

The following is an old but good story.  The Rev. Joseph Wilkins died, an aged man, in 1800.  He left this narrative, often printed; the date of the adventure is 1754, when Mr. Wilkins, aged twenty-three, was a schoolmaster in Devonshire.  The dream was an ordinary dream, and did not announce death, or anything but a journey.  Mr. Wilkins dreamed, in Devonshire, that he was going to London.  He thought he would go by Gloucestershire and see his people.  So he started, arrived at his father’s house, found the front door locked, went in by the back door, went to his parents’ room, saw his father asleep in bed and his mother awake.  He said: “Mother, I am going a long journey, and have come to bid you good-bye”.  She answered in a fright, “Oh dear son, thou art dead!”  Mr. Wilkins wakened, and thought nothing of it.  As early as a letter could come, one arrived from his father, addressing him as if he were dead, and desiring him, if by accident alive, or any one into whose hands the letter might fall, to write at once.  The father then gave his reasons for alarm.  Mrs. Wilkins, being awake one night, heard some one try the front door, enter by the back, then saw her son come into her room and say he was going on a long journey, with the rest of the dialogue.  She then woke her husband, who said she had been dreaming, but who was alarmed enough to write the letter.  No harm came of it to anybody.

The story would be better if Mr. Wilkins, junior, like Laud, had kept a nocturnal of his dreams, and published his father’s letter, with post-marks.

The story of the lady who often dreamed of a house, and when by chance she found and rented it was recognised as the ghost who had recently haunted it, is good, but is an invention!

A somewhat similar instance is that of the uproar of moving heavy objects, heard by Scott in Abbotsford on the night preceding and the night of the death of his furnisher, Mr. Bullock, in London.  The story is given in Lockhart’s Life of Scott, and is too familiar for repetition.

On the whole, accepting one kind of story on the same level as the other kind, the living and absent may unconsciously produce the phenomena of haunted houses just as well as the dead, to whose alleged performances we now advance.  Actual appearances, as we have said, are not common, and just as all persons do not hear the sounds, so many do not see the appearance, even when it is visible to others in the same room.  As an example, take a very mild and lady-like case of haunting.

THE GIRL IN PINK

The following anecdote was told to myself, a few months after the curious event, by the three witnesses in the case.  They were connections of my own, the father was a clergyman of the Anglican Church; he, his wife and their daughter, a girl of twenty, were the “percipients”.  All are cheerful, sagacious people, and all, though they absolutely agreed as to the facts in their experience, professed an utter disbelief in “ghosts,” which the occurrence has not affected in any way.  They usually reside in a foreign city, where there is a good deal of English society.  One day they left the town to lunch with a young fellow-countryman who lived in a villa in the neighbourhood.  There he was attempting to farm a small estate, with what measure of success the story does not say.  His house was kept by his sister, who was present, of course, at the little luncheon party.  During the meal some question was asked, or some remark was made, to which the clerical guest replied in English by a reference to “the maid-servant in pink”.

“There is no maid in pink,” said the host, and he asked both his other guests to corroborate him.

Both ladies, mother and daughter, were obliged to say that unless their eyes deceived them, they certainly had seen a girl in pink attending on them, or, at least, moving about in the room.  To this their entertainers earnestly replied that no such person was in their establishment, that they had no woman servant but the elderly cook and housekeeper, then present, who was neither a girl nor in pink.  After luncheon the guests were taken all over the house, to convince them of the absence of the young woman whom they had seen, and assuredly there was no trace of her.

On returning to the town where they reside, they casually mentioned the circumstance as a curious illusion.  The person to whom they spoke said, with some interest, “Don’t you know that a girl is said to have been murdered in that house before your friends took it, and that she is reported to be occasionally seen, dressed in pink?”

They had heard of no such matter, but the story seemed to be pretty generally known, though naturally disliked by the occupant of the house.  As for the percipients, they each and all remain firm in the belief that, till convinced of the impossibility of her presence, they were certain they had seen a girl in pink, and rather a pretty girl, whose appearance suggested nothing out of the common.  An obvious hypothesis is discounted, of course, by the presence of the sister of the young gentleman who farmed the estate and occupied the house.

Here is another case, mild but pertinacious.

THE DOG IN THE HAUNTED ROOM

The author’s friend, Mr. Rokeby, lives, and has lived for some twenty years, in an old house at Hammersmith.  It is surrounded by a large garden, the drawing-room and dining-room are on the right and left of the entrance from the garden, on the ground floor.  My friends had never been troubled by any phenomena before, and never expected to be.  However, they found the house “noisy,” the windows were apt to be violently shaken at night and steps used to be heard where no steps should be.  Deep long sighs were audible at all times of day.  As Mrs. Rokeby approached a door, the handle would turn and the door fly open. {196}  Sounds of stitching a hard material, and of dragging a heavy weight occurred in Mrs. Rokeby’s room, and her hair used to be pulled in a manner for which she could not account.  “These sorts of things went on for about five years, when in October, 1875, about three o’clock in the afternoon, I was sitting” (says Mrs. Rokeby) “with three of my children in the dining-room, reading to them.  I rang the bell for the parlour-maid, when the door opened, and on looking up I saw the figure of a woman come in and walk up to the side of the table,