A GHOSTLY CO-TENANCY
Such was the first manifestation of a Possession which held the
house for more than nine months. That we endured it is to me now
sufficient cause for wonder, and the reasons why we did so (reasons
which presented themselves by degrees) may require some explanation.
It must be said that with the exception of a few visitations which I
shall duly describe, there were no occasions so terrifying as those
which happened on the day of the storm. Moreover, as my wife and I
had made acquaintance in former years with many inexplicable things
and had never seen any serious results come from them, our attitude
toward these new phenomena was one compact more of curiosity than
anything else. The experience could hardly be called agreeable, but it
was strange and unusual, and we wanted to find out what it all meant.
We never _did_ find out, by the way, but the anticipation (which was
constant) that we should, kept us interested.
The amiable reader may be disposed to credit us with unusual courage,
but we never looked at the matter in that light. Besides the influence
of national pride which I have mentioned as supporting both our friend
and ourselves, there was also the consideration that we had covenanted
for the house for a year, and had paid the first six-months' rent in
advance--and Yankee and Scottish thrift alike moved us to desire our
money's worth; and although we might hope to annul our bargain if we
could plead that the dwelling was infested with rats, we had doubts as
to our standing in court in case we should set up a defense that it
was overrun with ghosts. Moreover, we liked our quarters so well that
we could not make up our minds to leave them merely because an unseen
co-tenantry insisted on sharing them with us; therefore we remained,
and in time even managed to extract some entertainment from the quips
and cranks that were more or less constantly going on.
A saving feature of the situation was the fact that the manifestations
were not continuous, and rarely occurred--until near the end of
our term--at night. This, I think, must be set down as an unusual
circumstance, but it was one that brought us considerable relief. It
need not be pointed out, for example, how much less terrifying it is
to hear muffled footsteps and the rustle of women's garments up and
down the hall by daylight than in darkness, and to see, under the
same conditions, chairs and light tables shifted about in apparent
accordance with some invisible person's notion of their proper
arrangement. It is somewhat disquieting, to be sure, when walking
through the hall, to hear the bell above one's head break out in
rattling clangor, and, looking through the wide-open front door, to
perceive that no visible visitor was at the other end of the wire:--and
in spite of many former experiences, we could not restrain ourselves
from jumping in our seats when, at dinner, all the doors in the house
would slam in rapid succession with a violence that set the dishes
dancing on the board. And the singular thing about this performance
was that although the sound was unmistakably that of banging doors,
the doors themselves seemed to have no part in it. More than once
we arranged them in anticipation of this manifestation, leaving
some closed, some wide open, and some ajar at various angles which
we carefully noted. Presently would come the expected thunderous
reverberations--and running from the dining-room we would find every
door precisely as we had left it.
Occasionally, what seemed like a rushing wind would sweep through
the hall between the wire-screened doors at either end of the house,
although a glance out of the window showed that the leaves of the
trees in the yard were pendent and lifeless in an utter calm:--and
this circumstance reminds me of a curious thing that was several times
repeated.
We rarely used the parlor, which, as I have said, was on the right
of the hall as one entered the house, with windows giving upon the
veranda. To the decorations of this room which had been left by our
landlord, we had made some considerable additions--photographs of
New Zealand scenery, curios and wall hangings from Fiji, and other
such matters. Now and then would break out in that room a racket as
though a dozen devils were dancing the tarantelle, accompanied by a
sound as of a maëlstrom of wind whirling in it. We never had courage
to enter while the disturbance was in progress--in fact we had no
time to do so, as it always ended within a few minutes; but when we
opened the door after the noise had subsided, we invariably found the
same condition of affairs--every article in the room that belonged
to _us_ piled in a heap on the floor, and all the possessions of the
absent family standing or hanging undisturbed in their usual places.
We were disposed to regard this demonstration as a gentle hint that
our continuation in the house was not desired, and that the "spooks,"
as we came familiarly to call them, had in furtherance of this idea
gathered together such of our belongings as they could reach in order
to facilitate our packing up for departure. But we paid no heed to the
implied suggestion, restored the room to its former condition, and in a
short time this particular form of annoyance was discontinued.
These were minor occurrences, and I am not relating them with any
reference to the order in which they came. As they seem to belong
to the general run of phenomena that have been frequently noticed
in accounts of "haunted houses"--so called--I will not dwell upon
them; merely observing that the effort to produce them was entirely
misplaced if its purpose was to frighten us, and in any case unworthy
of any intelligent source. I more than once announced this opinion in
a loud tone of voice when the rustlings and footfalls, and their often
accompanying groans and sighs became too persistent, or wearisome in
their lack of variety--and it was curious to see how effective this
remonstrance always was. A dead silence would immediately ensue, and
for hours, and sometimes even for days, the house would be as orderly
and commonplace as possible.
It is my recollection that the mother of Deeming (if, indeed, she it
were) made no further appearance after her son's execution. She seems
to have expressed herself in one supreme and futile appeal for help,
and then to have gone to her place. Several others followed her, whom
I could hear from time to time as they moved about, and whom my wife,
whose clearness of sight in these matters I never shared, described
as an old woman, another much younger, and a girl-child some four
or five years of age. They never attempted any communication with
us; in fact, they seemed quite unaware of our presence; and were
evidently not concerned in any of the bizarre and seemingly meaningless
manifestations that were continually going on. We fancied that the
shade of the elder woman was that of the former mistress of the house,
whose death, as I have already noted, had occurred therein some three
months before we took possession:--but as she ignored us entirely, we
respected her seeming disinclination to a mutual introduction, and
left her to go to and fro in the way she preferred. This way was not
altogether a pleasant one. She wore a black gown, my wife said, with
a neckerchief of some white material--the rustle of her gown, which I
could plainly hear, indicated that it was of silk; she seemed unhappy
(we thought it might be that she did not understand the absence of her
husband and daughters) and was forever sighing softly and wringing her
hands. The younger woman (the two never seemed to be conscious of each
others' existence--if that is the right word) was in a state of evident
discomfort also, although she was always silent, and appeared to be
constantly in search of something she could not find.
Altogether we found these shadowy guests of ours a rather cheerless
company; but as we had had no voice in inviting them, and feared that
their departure (if they should accept any intimation from us that it
was desired) might make room for others even more objectionable, we
were fain to adapt ourselves to the situation that was forced upon us.
The child-ghost, however, was of quite different disposition. She had
something with her that seemed to take the place of a doll, and would
sit with it by the hour in a corner of the room where we all were,
at times crooning to it in a queer, faraway, but still quite audible
voice. It was a "creepy" thing to hear, but strangely sweet and
musical, for all that. On rarer occasions she would sing to herself
a song, but one in which no words could be distinguished; in all her
utterances, indeed, there was never anything that sounded like speech.
She was not quite sure of herself in this song. Now and then she would
strike a wrong note; then silence for a moment, and she would begin the
song again. As she reached the note at which she had before stumbled,
she would pause, then take the note correctly, give a pleased little
laugh, and go on successfully to the end.
This extraordinary performance was repeated on many occasions. One
bright Sunday afternoon I was sitting in talk with my wife in her
room, when this weird chant started up in the farthest corner. I
listened through the whole of the usual rendition--the beginning, the
false note, the return for a new trial, the note rightly struck, the
satisfied laugh, and so on to the conclusion. Then the thing began all
over again.
I said, rather impatiently: "Don't sing that again! Can't you see that
we want to talk?"
"Oh, you shouldn't have said that!" remonstrated my wife. "She has gone
away"--and in fact the song had stopped, and it was many days before we
heard it again.
I have not particularly mentioned our friend in this recital of minor
happenings, although he had his share in most of them, and carried
himself throughout in a plucky and admirable manner. We were very fond
of him, as he evidently was of us to endure adventures with us which
he must have found uncongenial, to say the least--he being a man of
quiet tastes, and one not prone to go out of his way in search for
excitement. An incident that happened one night, however, came very
near to ending his residence with us.
At about eight o'clock of an evening in June (the time of year when the
days are at their shortest in that latitude), he and I were smoking
and chatting in my "den," my wife being in her own room at the front
of the house. All at once the two dogs who were chained in the back
yard broke out in a terrific chorus of barking. They were ordinarily
very quiet animals, and whenever they gave tongue (which was only when
some tradesman or other person came upon the premises by the back gate)
it was merely by a yelp or two to inform us that they were attending
to their duty as guardians. On this occasion, however, one might have
thought there were a dozen dogs behind the house instead of two:--they
seemed fairly frantic, and there was a strange note in their voices
such as I had never heard before.
"What on earth is the matter with those dogs?" I exclaimed. "One might
think they were being murdered."
"They are certainly tremendously excited about something," my companion
rejoined:--"let's go out and see what the trouble is"--and he was out
of the room, and unlocking the back door, before I could leave my
easy-chair to accompany him. As I reached the hall I was just in time
to see the large pane of groundglass with which the upper half of the
outside door was fitted, fly inward--shattered into a thousand pieces
by a jagged fragment of rock as large as my fist, which whizzed by my
friend's head with such force that it went by me also, and brought up
against the front door at the other end of the hall. My companion, who
had escaped death or a serious injury by the smallest possible margin,
fell back against the wall with his hands over his face, which had been
cut in several places by the flying glass; but he quickly recovered
himself, and when I had hastened back to my room and provided myself
with a revolver, we rushed together into the open air. Nothing was to
be seen, nor could we hear a sound. We went into the street, which was
lighted by scattered gas lamps, and listened for retreating footsteps,
but the street was vacant as far as we could see in both directions,
and the silence of the night was like that of the grave. We dragged
the dogs out of the kennels to which they had retreated, and turned
them loose in the hope that their peculiar intelligence would enable
them to guide us to some lurking miscreant in the shrubbery about the
yard or amid the trees and vines in the obscurity of the orchard:--but
they were trembling as if in abject fear, we could get no help from
them, and when released they bolted into their kennels again and hid
themselves in the straw at the farthest corners. It was evident that
they had seen something that terrified them greatly, but what it was
we could only surmise. The Scotch terrier was a gentle creature, and
his evident alarm did not so much surprise me. The fox-terrier, on the
other hand, was full of "bounce" and confidence, and nothing in canine
or human shape had any terrors for him. When it came to devils, that
might be another matter--an idea that passed through my mind at the
time, but did not then find lodgment. It was strengthened in view of
another incident which occurred later, and which I shall describe in a
subsequent chapter.