which the amateurs of mystery in our age record as facts, a material
living agency is always required. On the continent you will find still
magicians who assert that they can raise spirits. Assume for the moment
that they assert truly, still the living material form of the magician
is present; and he is the material agency by which, from some
constitutional peculiarities, certain strange phenomena are represented
to your natural senses.
Accept, again, as truthful, the tales of spirit Manifestation in
America--musical or other sounds--writings on paper, produced by no
discernible hand--articles of furniture moved without apparent human
agency--or the actual sight and touch of hands, to which no bodies seem
to belong--still there must be found the MEDIUM or living being, with
constitutional peculiarities capable of obtaining these signs. In fine,
in all such marvels, supposing even that there is no imposture, there
must be a human being like ourselves by whom, or through whom, the
effects presented to human beings are produced. It is so with the now
familiar phenomena of mesmerism or electro-biology; the mind of the
person operated on is affected through a material living agent. Nor,
supposing it true that a mesmerized patient can respond to the will or
passes of a mesmerizer a hundred miles distant, is the response less
occasioned by a material fluid--call it Electric, call it Odic, call it
what you will--which has the power of traversing space and passing
obstacles, that the material effect is communicated from one to the
other. Hence all that I had hitherto witnessed, or expected to witness,
in this strange house, I believed to be occasioned through some agency
or medium as mortal as myself: and this idea necessarily prevented the
awe with which those who regard as supernatural, things that are not
within the ordinary operations of nature, might have been impressed by
the adventures of that memorable night.
As, then, it was my conjecture that all that was presented, or would be
presented to my senses, must originate in some human being gifted by
constitution with the power so to present them, and having some motive
so to do, I felt an interest in my theory which, in its way, was rather
philosophical than superstitious. And I can sincerely say that I was in
as tranquil a temper for observation as any practical experimentalist
could be in awaiting the effect of some rare, though perhaps perilous,
chemical combination. Of course, the more I kept my mind detached from
fancy, the more the temper fitted for observation would be obtained; and
I therefore riveted eye and thought on the strong daylight sense in the
page of my Macaulay.
I now became aware that something interposed between the page and the
light--the page was over-shadowed: I looked up, and I saw what I shall
find it very difficult, perhaps impossible, to describe.
It was a Darkness shaping itself forth from the air in very undefined
outline. I cannot say it was of a human form, and yet it had more
resemblance to a human form, or rather shadow, than to anything else. As
it stood, wholly apart and distinct from the air and the light around
it, its dimensions seemed gigantic, the summit nearly touching the
ceiling. While I gazed, a feeling of intense cold seized me. An iceberg
before me could not more have chilled me; nor could the cold of an
iceberg have been more purely physical. I feel convinced that it was not
the cold caused by fear. As I continued to gaze, I thought--but this I
cannot say with precision--that I distinguished two eyes looking down on
me from the height. One moment I fancied that I distinguished them
clearly, the next they seemed gone; but still two rays of a pale-blue
light frequently shot through the darkness, as from the height on which
I half believed, half doubted, that I had encountered the eyes.
I strove to speak--my voice utterly failed me; I could only think
to myself, "is this fear? it is _not_ fear!" I strove to rise--in
vain; I felt as if weighed down by an irresistible force. Indeed, my
impression was that of an immense and overwhelming Power opposed to any
volition;--that sense of utter inadequacy to cope with a force beyond
man's, which one may feel _physically_ in a storm at sea, in a
conflagration, or when confronting some terrible wild beast, or rather,
perhaps, the shark of the ocean, I felt _morally_. Opposed to my will
was another will, as far superior to its strength as storm, fire, and
shark are superior in material force to the force of man.
And now, as this impression grew on me--now came, at last,
horror--horror to a degree that no words can convey. Still I retained
pride, if not courage; and in my own mind I said, "This is horror, but
it is not fear; unless I fear I cannot be harmed; my reason rejects this
thing, it is an illusion--I do not fear." With a violent effort I
succeeded at last in stretching out my hand towards the weapon on the
table: as I did so, on the arm and shoulder I received a strange shock,
and my arm fell to my side powerless. And now, to add to my horror, the
light began slowly to wane from the candles, they were not, as it were,
extinguished, but their flame seemed very gradually withdrawn: it was
the same with the fire--the light was extracted from the fuel; in a few
minutes the room was in utter darkness.
The dread that came over me, to be thus in the dark with that dark
Thing, whose power was so intensely felt, brought a reaction of nerve.
In fact, terror had reached that climax, that either my senses must have
deserted me, or I must have burst through the spell. I did burst through
it. I found voice, though the voice was a shriek. I remember that I
broke forth with words like these--"I do not fear, my soul does not
fear"; and at the same time I found the strength to rise. Still in that
profound gloom I rushed to one of the windows--tore aside the
curtain--flung open the shutters; my first thought was--LIGHT.--And when
I saw the moon high, clear, and calm, I felt a joy that almost
compensated for the previous terror. There was the moon, there was also
the light from the gas-lamps in the deserted slumberous street. I turned
to look back into the room; the moon penetrated its shadow very palely
and partially--but still there was light. The dark Thing, whatever it
might be, was gone--except that I could yet see a dim shadow, which
seemed the shadow of that shade, against the opposite wall.
My eye now rested on the table, and from under the table (which was
without cloth or cover--an old mahogany round table) there rose a hand,
visible as far as the wrist. It was a hand, seemingly, as much of flesh
and blood as my own, but the hand of an aged person--lean, wrinkled,
small, too--a woman's hand. That hand very softly closed on the two
letters that lay on the table: hand and letters both vanished.
There then came the same three loud measured knocks I heard at the
bed-head before this extraordinary drama had commenced.
As those sounds slowly ceased, I felt the whole room vibrate sensibly;
and at the far end there rose, as from the floor, sparks or globules
like bubbles of light, many-colored--green, yellow, fire-red, azure. Up
and down, to and fro, hither, thither, as tiny Will-o'-the-Wisps the
sparks moved, slow or swift, each at his own caprice. A chair (as in the
drawing-room below) was now advanced from the wall without apparent
agency, and placed at the opposite side of the table. Suddenly as forth
from the chair, there grew a shape--a woman's shape. It was distinct as
a shape of life--ghastly as a shape of death. The face was that of
youth, with a strange mournful beauty: the throat and shoulders were
bare, the rest of the form in a loose robe of cloudy white. It began
sleeking its long yellow hair, which fell over its shoulders; its eyes
were not turned towards me, but to the door; it seemed listening,
watching, waiting. The shadow of the shade in the background grew
darker; and again I thought I beheld the eyes gleaming out from the
summit of the shadow--eyes fixed upon that shape.
As if from the door, though it did not open, there grew out another
shape, equally distinct, equally ghastly--a man's shape--a young man's.
It was in the dress of the last century, or rather in a likeness of such
dress (for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were
evidently unsubstantial, impalpable--simulacra--phantasms); and there
was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast
between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that
old-fashioned garb, with its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the
corpse-like aspect and ghost-like stillness of the flitting wearer. Just
as the male shape approached the female, the dark shadow started from
the wall, all three for a moment wrapped in darkness. When the pale
light returned, the two phantoms were as in the grasp of the shadow that
towered between them; and there was a blood-stain on the breast of the
female; and the phantom male was leaning on its phantom sword, and blood
seemed trickling fast from the ruffles, from the lace; and the darkness
of the intermediate Shadow swallowed them up--they were gone. And again
the bubbles of light shot, and sailed, and undulated, growing thicker
and thicker and more wildly confused in their movements.
The closet door to the right of the fireplace now opened, and from the
aperture there came the form of an aged woman. In her hand she held
letters,--the very letters over which I had seen _the_ Hand close; and
behind her I heard a footstep. She turned round as if to listen, and
then she opened the letters and seemed to read; and over her shoulder I
saw a livid face, the face as of a man long drowned--bloated, bleached,
seaweed tangled in its dripping hair; and at her feet lay a form as of a
corpse, and beside the corpse there cowered a child, a miserable squalid
child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes. And as I looked
in the old woman's face, the wrinkles and lines vanished and it became a
face of youth--hard-eyed, stony, but still youth; and the Shadow darted
forth, and darkened over these phantoms as it had darkened over the
last.
Nothing now was left but the Shadow, and on that my eyes were intently
fixed, till again eyes grew out of the Shadow--malignant, serpent eyes.
And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disorder,
irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from
these globules themselves, as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things
burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvæ so bloodless and so
hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader
of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes
in a drop of water--things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each
other, devouring each other--forms like nought ever beheld by the naked
eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were
without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came
round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my
head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary
command against all evil beings. Sometimes I felt myself touched, but
not by them; invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of
cold soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I
gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentrated all my
faculties in the single focus of resisting, stubborn will. And I turned
my sight from the Shadow--above all, from those strange serpent
eyes--eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in
nought else round me, I was aware that there was a WILL, and a will of
intense, creative, working evil, which might crush down my own.
The pale atmosphere in the room began now to redden as if in the air of
some near conflagration. The larvæ grew lurid as things that live in
fire. Again the room vibrated; again were heard the three measured
knocks; and again all things were swallowed up in the darkness of the
dark Shadow, as if out of that darkness all had come, into that darkness
all returned.
As the gloom receded, the Shadow was wholly gone. Slowly as it had been
withdrawn, the flame grew again into the candles on the table, again
into the fuel in the grate. The whole room came once more calmly,
healthfully into sight.
The two doors were still closed, the door communicating with the
servant's room still locked. In the corner of the wall into which he had
so convulsively niched himself, lay the dog. I called to him--no
movement; I approached--the animal was dead; his eyes protruded; his
tongue out of his mouth; the froth gathered round his jaws. I took him
in my arms; I brought him to the fire, I felt acute grief for the loss
of my poor favorite--acute self-reproach; I accused myself of his death;
I imagined he had died of fright. But what was my surprise on finding
that his neck was actually broken. Had this been done in the dark?--must
it not have been by a hand human as mine?--must there not have been
a human agency all the while in that room? Good cause to suspect it.
I cannot tell. I cannot do more than state the fact fairly; the reader
may draw his own inference.
Another surprising circumstance--my watch was restored to the table from
which it had been so mysteriously withdrawn; but it had stopped at the
very moment it was so withdrawn; nor, despite all the skill of the
watchmaker, has it ever gone since--that is, it will go in a strange
erratic way for a few hours, and then come to a dead stop--it is
worthless.
Nothing more chanced for the rest of the night. Nor, indeed, had I long
to wait before the dawn broke. Nor till it was broad daylight did I quit
the haunted house. Before I did so, I revisited the little blind room in
which my servant and myself had been for a time imprisoned. I had a
strong impression--for which I could not account--that from that room
had originated the mechanism of the phenomena--if I may use the
term--which had been experienced in my chamber. And though I entered it
now in the clear day, with the sun peering through the filmy window I
still felt, as I stood on its floor, the creep of the horror which I had
first there experienced the night before, and which had been so
aggravated by what had passed in my own chamber. I could not, indeed,
bear to stay more than half a minute within those walls. I descended the
stairs, and again I heard the footfall before me; and when I opened the
street door, I thought I could distinguish a very low laugh. I gained my
own home, expecting to find my runaway servant there. But he had not
presented himself; nor did I hear more of him for three days, when I
received a letter from him, dated from Liverpool to this effect:--
"HONORED SIR,--I humbly entreat your pardon,
though I can scarcely hope that you will think I
deserve it, unless--which Heaven forbid--you saw
what I did. I feel that it will be years before
I can recover myself: and as to being fit for
service, it is out of the question. I am therefore
going to my brother-in-law at Melbourne. The ship
sails to-morrow. Perhaps the long voyage may set
me up. I do nothing now but start and tremble, and
fancy IT is behind me. I humbly beg you, honored
sir, to order my clothes, and whatever wages are
due to me, to be sent to my mother's, at
Walworth.--John knows her address."
The letter ended with additional apologies, somewhat incoherent, and
explanatory details as to effects that had been under the writer's
charge.
This flight may perhaps warrant a suspicion that the man wished to go to
Australia, and had been somehow or other fraudulently mixed up with the
events of the night. I say nothing in refutation of that conjecture;
rather, I suggest it as one that would seem to many persons the most
probable solution of improbable occurrences. My belief in my own theory
remained unshaken. I returned in the evening to the house, to bring away
in a hack cab the things I had left there, with my poor dog's body. In
this task I was not disturbed, nor did any incident worth note befall
me, except that still, on ascending and descending the stairs, I heard
the same footfall in advance. On leaving the house, I went to Mr. J.'s.
He was at home. I returned him the keys, told him that my curiosity was
sufficiently gratified, and was about to relate quickly what had passed,
when he stopped me, and said, though with much politeness, that he had
no longer any interest in a mystery which none had ever solved.
I determined at least to tell him of the two letters I had read, as well
as of the extraordinary manner in which they had disappeared, and I then
inquired if he thought they had been addressed to the woman who had died
in the house, and if there were anything in her early history which
could possibly confirm the dark suspicions to which the letters gave
rise. Mr. J---- seemed startled, and, after musing a few moments,
answered, "I am but little acquainted with the woman's earlier history,
except, as I before told you, that her family were known to mine. But
you revive some vague reminiscences to her prejudice. I will make
inquiries, and inform you of their result. Still, even if we could admit
the popular superstition that a person who had been either the
perpetrator or the victim of dark crimes in life could revisit, as a
restless spirit, the scene in which those crimes had been committed, I
should observe that the house was infested by strange sights and sounds
before the old woman died--you smile--what would you say?"
"I would say this, that I am convinced, if we could get to the bottom of
these mysteries, we should find a living human agency."
"What! you believe it is all an imposture? for what object?"
"Not an imposture in the ordinary sense of the word. If suddenly I were
to sink into a deep sleep, from which you could not awake me, but in
that sleep could answer questions with an accuracy which I could not
pretend to when awake--tell you what money you had in your pocket--nay,
describe your very thoughts--it is not necessarily an imposture, any
more than it is necessarily supernatural. I should be, unconsciously to
myself, under a mesmeric influence, conveyed to me from a distance by a
human being who had acquired power over me by previous _rapport_."
"But if a mesmerizer could so affect another living being, can you
suppose that a mesmerizer could also affect inanimate objects: move
chairs--open and shut doors?"
"Or impress our senses with the belief in such effects--we never having
been _en rapport_ with the person acting on us? No. What is commonly
called mesmerism could not do this; but there may be a power akin to
mesmerism, and superior to it--the power that in the old days was called
Magic. That such a power may extend to all inanimate objects of matter I
do not say; but if so, it would not be against nature--it would be only
a rare power in nature which might be given to constitutions with
certain peculiarities, and cultivated by practice to an extraordinary
degree. That such a power might extend over the dead--that is, over
certain thoughts and memories that the dead may still retain--and
compel, not that which ought properly to be called the SOUL, and which
is far beyond human reach, but rather a phantom of what has been most
earth-stained on earth, to make itself apparent to our senses--is a very
ancient though obsolete theory, upon which I will hazard no opinion. But
I do not conceive the power would be supernatural. Let me illustrate
what I mean from an experiment which Paracelsus describes as not
difficult, and which the author of the _Curiosities of Literature_ cites
as credible:--A flower perishes; you burn it. Whatever were the elements
of that flower while it lived are gone, dispersed, you know not whither;
you can never discover nor recollect them. But you can, by chemistry,
out of the burnt dust of that flower, raise a spectrum of the flower,
just as it seemed in life. It may be the same with the human being. The
soul has as much escaped you as the essence or elements of the flower.
Still you may make a spectrum of it.
"And this phantom, though in the popular superstition it is held to be
the soul of the departed, must not be confounded with the true soul; it
is but eidolon of the dead form. Hence, like the best attested stories
of ghosts or spirits, the thing that most strikes us is the absence of
what we hold to be soul; that is, of superior emancipated intelligence.
These apparitions come for little or no object--they seldom speak when
they do come; if they speak, they utter no ideas above those of an
ordinary person on earth. American spirit-seers have published volumes
of communications in prose and verse, which they assert to be given in
the names of the most illustrious dead--Shakespeare, Bacon--heaven knows
whom. Those communications, taking the best, are certainly not a whit of
higher order than would be communications from living persons of fair
talent and education; they are wondrously inferior to what Bacon,
Shakespeare, and Plato said and wrote when on earth. Nor, what is more
noticeable, do they ever contain an idea that was not on the earth
before. Wonderful, therefore, as such phenomena may be (granting them to
be truthful), I see much that philosophy may question, nothing that it
is incumbent on philosophy to deny, viz., nothing supernatural. They are
but ideas conveyed somehow or other (we have not yet discovered the
means) from one mortal brain to another. Whether, in so doing, tables
walk of their own accord, or fiend-like shapes appear in a magic circle,
or bodyless hands rise and remove material objects, or a Thing of
Darkness, such as presented itself to me, freeze our blood--still am I
persuaded that these are but agencies conveyed, as if by electric wires,
to my own brain from the brain of another. In some constitutions there
is a natural chemistry, and these constitutions may produce chemic
wonders--in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and these may
produce electric wonders.
"But the wonders differ from Normal Science in this--they are alike
objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They lead on to no grand
results; and therefore the world does not heed, and true sages have not
cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or heard, a man,
human as myself, was the remote originator; and I believe unconsciously
to himself as to the exact effects produced, for this reason: no two
persons, you say, have ever told you that they experienced exactly the
same thing. Well, observe, no two persons ever experience exactly the
same dream. If this were an ordinary imposture, the machinery would be
arranged for results that would but little vary; if it were a
supernatural agency permitted by the Almighty, it would surely be for
some definite end. These phenomena belong to neither class; my
persuasion is, that they originate in some brain now far distant; that
that brain had no distinct volition in anything that occurred; that what
does occur reflects but its devious, motley, ever-shifting, half-formed
thoughts; in short, that it has been but the dreams of such a brain put
into action and invested with a semi-substance. That this brain is of
immense power, that it can set matter into movement, that it is
malignant and destructive, I believe; some material force must have
killed my dog; the same force might, for aught I know, have sufficed to
kill myself, had I been as subjugated by terror as the dog--had my
intellect or my spirit given me no countervailing resistance in my
will."
"It killed your dog! that is fearful! indeed it is strange that no
animal can be induced to stay in that house; not even a cat. Rats and
mice are never found in it."
"The instincts of the brute creation detect influences deadly to their
existence. Man's reason has a sense less subtle, because it has a
resisting power more supreme. But enough; do you comprehend my theory?"
"Yes, though imperfectly--and I accept any crotchet (pardon the word),
however odd, rather than embrace at once the notion of ghosts and
hob-goblins we imbibed in our nurseries. Still, to my unfortunate house
the evil is the same. What on earth can I do with the house?"