Looking back now, it seems to me that the whole of my childhood was
pursued by one phantom or another. The smell of the woods through the
open nursery window on a hot summer’s night turned me sick with an
unspeakable apprehension. Believers in reincarnation would attribute
this peculiarity to some sylvan tragedy in a previous existence. No
doubt there must have been a physical explanation. I have come to the
conclusion that most things in life are capable of a double
interpretation; which is the same thing as saying that there are two
aspects to every question!
* * * * *
Is it usual for children, I wonder, to see such marvellous colours,
shapes, and appearances in the dark as both I and a sister did, between
the ages of five and eight? Kaleidoscopic colours running one into the
other, and an odd, very frequently recurrent vision of a cushion covered
with gold pieces which poured down on the bed.
My husband, as a small child, would behold complete scenes in the corner
of his nursery, and would pull his nurse on one side impatiently when
she impeded his view. And let me here note a curious incident connected
with his juvenile imaginings. All his life, as far back as he could
remember, he had a recurrent dream of terror—at fairly rare intervals—of
an immense wave rising up before him like a mountain and curling over at
the top, about to overwhelm the land. He told me of this dream after we
were married, adding that though it was so distinct that he could draw
it, he knew it for a purely fantastic nightmare; knew that no such tall
and steep wave as he beheld in his sleep could exist in nature. A few
years ago—we were at Brighton, I remember—he brought up to me from the
hotel room an illustrated paper, and, laying it on the table before me,
said: “Look—there is my dream!”
I looked. It was an illustration that held the whole page. I saw a huge
wall of water, rising sheer black, with a toppling crest of white—an
awful, threatening vision! I read underneath: “Photograph of the recent
tidal wave in Japan.”
Who can explain the mystery? He had had that dream first as a baby boy
in Paris, some forty-five years before. No such sight, no such picture
had ever come across his waking consciousness.
A tidal wave in Japan ... so far has my discursive mind led me from
garden ghosts!
* * * * *
We know a haunted garden belonging to an old Manor House in Dorsetshire
which was our abode one summer, five or six years ago. The house had
once been Catherine Parr’s. It was full of ghosts too, but I am none too
sure that they were mellow sixteenth-century spectres; rather I believe
were they the objectionable offspring of a table-rapping spiritualistic
owner.
[Sidenote: THE FORGOTTEN NUN]
The garden ghost was, to our thinking, neither Tudor nor modern, but
that of a sad little eighteenth-century nun. For, passing through many
hands, the place had for a time been a convent. A gentle community,
turned out by the French Revolution, had been offered a refuge in this
far corner of England by the then papist possessor of “The Court.” The
place had its previous story of faith and persecution: its parish
church, which had long clung to the old dispensation, and its priest
martyr still lying in the little churchyard. All this is forgotten now.
We knew nothing of it, nor of the nuns; but oddly enough, when we came
into the house, one of us said to the other: “I am sure there was a
chapel here.”
[Illustration: nun]
Well, when the nuns packed up their goods and returned to France, they
took away with them too ‹so tradition says› the coffins of some sisters
who had been buried in the garden. Surely they had forgotten one! What
else could account for the dreadful melancholy which fell upon us at a
particular turn of the walk that ran round that sunny, bowery enclosure?
There was nothing whatsoever suggestive about the spot. The high, warm
wall with the spreading fruit trees rose on one side; an Apple tree and
a clump of Hazels held the other—yet so sure as one came to this place
the heart was gripped, the spirit seized. We each of us felt it;
visitors felt it. That dear, departed cat, Tom, of venerable memory—he
was a great ghost-seer—he felt it—nay, he saw it! His tail would
bristle, his fur stare, he would stand and then flee as if pursued for
his life.
The poor little nun, lying in a foreign land, away from the rest of her
sisters, forgotten!—Ghosts have walked for much less. In fact, it is
curious to note that the restlessness of most authenticated ghosts seems
due to an objection to their place of burial. And on this score—if the
anecdote takes me away from gardens, it brings me back to them in the
end—I have in my mind another tale. It is a true story, as the children
say, connected with a house which we have often visited in Ireland: an
old monastery, full of that curious depression in its stateliness which
so many confiscated church properties retain. It was haunted in many
ways.
Personally, beyond unpleasant sensations in traversing some particular
corridor and landing, we never met any ghost in the Abbey. But then we
were not placed in _the_ ghost-room.
[Sidenote: A STRONG MIND CONVINCED]
An old friend of our hostess, an elderly lady, was not so kindly
treated. She was a spinster of robust constitution and strong mind; a
type of the particular generation which comes between the nervous
gentility of the Early Victorian sisterhood and the present day
“suffrage” community. No doubt the mistress of the Abbey believed her
ghost-proof. But she was mistaken. After the first night in the Lavender
Bedroom, the visitor’s appearance at breakfast pointed so conclusively
to the fatigue of sleeplessness that, with some misgiving, her friend
drew her on one side to question her in private:
“Were you disturbed, Lucy?”
“I was, Mary.” The maiden lady was not a person of many words.
“Did you—did you ... see any thing, Lucy?” exclaimed the hostess. The
family had but lately come into possession; and the idea of haunters and
haunted annoyed rather than frightened her.
“I did,” said the friend firmly.
Some persuasion was necessary before she would relate her experience. At
last it was extracted from her in some such shape as this:
* * * * *
“I couldn’t sleep. Towards two in the morning I heard a noise. I thought
it was rats. I sat up in bed to feel for the matches: couldn’t find
them. There came a light, on the opposite wall. I stared. I saw a monk
in it. He began to move. He didn’t look alive: he looked like a magic
lantern. He went out of the room through the closed door. I got up,
opened the door, looked out into the passage. Yes, Mary, the light was
there, and the figure in it, too. It moved along the wall. I followed
it. It disappeared before the cross doors. I went back to bed. No, I’m
not frightened, but I haven’t slept. I’d like another room, please. No,
I wasn’t asleep—it wasn’t a dream. I can’t explain it. Nor you either, I
suppose.”
* * * * *
The hostess pondered. It was true she couldn’t explain. She had heard of
that apparition before—perhaps had seen it. It was certainly very
annoying. She promised her friend to give instant orders for the
preparation of another room; and then made a request that the matter
should not be mentioned to her daughter—an impressionable, imaginative
girl of eighteen.
The maiden lady snorted. It wasn’t likely.
Rosamund, the daughter, had of course known all about it long ago;
while, after the fashion of her kind, keeping her counsel demurely
before her elders, she had discussed freely the thrilling appanage of
her new home with all the companions of her own age who came to stay at
the Abbey.
It was she who was destined to lay the ghost. One rainy afternoon later
in the same summer, the young members of the house-party found
themselves stranded together in the great hall, and Rosamund cheerfully
suggested table-turning and spirit-rapping to while away the time till
tea. It is a never-failing amusement.
Having produced a satisfactory condition of lurching, and elicited
several quite distinct raps from the round mahogany table, she cried
out:
“Let us call up the ghost.”
Responsive knocks came, loud and marked. A system of communication was
promptly established. Two raps for yes, one for no. Then the questioning
began.
With much laughter and some agreeable tremors, it was ascertained that
the monk-ghost belonged to the community which had dwelt so long at the
Abbey; that he was dissatisfied with his present place of burial, which
was outside the old monks’ burying-ground, now a part of the actual
garden.
It is always safe, as I have said, to question a ghost on this point.
Now, however, some difficulty ensued when, through the limited medium,
the rapping spirit endeavoured to specify the spot of its present abode,
and the field was too wide for exactness—until a young sailor cousin
intervened. He had been playing, in mere idleness and utter scepticism,
the rather gruesome game. But at this point he roused himself,
interested to put the matter to the proof. He fetched pencil and paper,
and drew up a scheme of latitude and longitude with reference to the
garden walls; and finally determined the position where the discontented
ghost announced that his bones were actually reposing.
With professional neatness he made a plan of the shrubbery, marked the
grave thereon, and the whole party resolved to sally forth with spades
“to see if the old ghost spoke the truth.” The sailor cousin was
particularly jocose in unbelief.
[Sidenote: LAID AT LAST]
Yet truly, the next day, in the very place designated, they came upon
bones—to be exact, upon a skeleton complete save for the skull. The
sailor was the first to rush back to the Abbey and collect a circle for
a fresh séance. And once more the phantom monk rapped out latitude and
longitude in connexion with his skull; once more he was found to be a
ghost of the most complete veracity. And the end of this true story is
that the skeleton, complete with its cranium, was laid duly and
reverently in the old consecrated ground in the garden. And the monk
appeared no more in the Lavender Room.
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