IN the summer of 1896 Mr. William Holt, a wealthy manufacturer of
Chicago, was living temporarily in a little town of central New York, the
name of which the writer’s memory has not retained. Mr. Holt had had
“trouble with his wife,” from whom he had parted a year before. Whether
the trouble was anything more serious than “incompatibility of temper,”
he is probably the only living person that knows: he is not addicted to
the vice of confidences. Yet he has related the incident herein set down
to at least one person without exacting a pledge of secrecy. He is now
living in Europe.
One evening he had left the house of a brother whom he was visiting, for
a stroll in the country. It may be assumed—whatever the value of the
assumption in connection with what is said to have occurred—that his mind
was occupied with reflections on his domestic infelicities and the
distressing changes that they had wrought in his life.
Whatever may have been his thoughts, they so possessed him that he
observed neither the lapse of time nor whither his feet were carrying
him; he knew only that he had passed far beyond the town limits and was
traversing a lonely region by a road that bore no resemblance to the one
by which he had left the village. In brief, he was “lost.”
Realizing his mischance, he smiled; central New York is not a region of
perils, nor does one long remain lost in it. He turned about and went
back the way that he had come. Before he had gone far he observed that
the landscape was growing more distinct—was brightening. Everything was
suffused with a soft, red glow in which he saw his shadow projected in
the road before him. “The moon is rising,” he said to himself. Then he
remembered that it was about the time of the new moon, and if that
tricksy orb was in one of its stages of visibility it had set long
before. He stopped and faced about, seeking the source of the rapidly
broadening light. As he did so, his shadow turned and lay along the road
in front of him as before. The light still came from behind him. That
was surprising; he could not understand. Again he turned, and again,
facing successively to every point of the horizon. Always the shadow was
before—always the light behind, “a still and awful red.”
Holt was astonished—“dumfounded” is the word that he used in telling
it—yet seems to have retained a certain intelligent curiosity. To test
the intensity of the light whose nature and cause he could not determine,
he took out his watch to see if he could make out the figures on the
dial. They were plainly visible, and the hands indicated the hour of
eleven o’clock and twenty-five minutes. At that moment the mysterious
illumination suddenly flared to an intense, an almost blinding splendor,
flushing the entire sky, extinguishing the stars and throwing the
monstrous shadow of himself athwart the landscape. In that unearthly
illumination he saw near him, but apparently in the air at a considerable
elevation, the figure of his wife, clad in her night-clothing and holding
to her breast the figure of his child. Her eyes were fixed upon his with
an expression which he afterward professed himself unable to name or
describe, further than that it was “not of this life.”
The flare was momentary, followed by black darkness, in which, however,
the apparition still showed white and motionless; then by insensible
degrees it faded and vanished, like a bright image on the retina after
the closing of the eyes. A peculiarity of the apparition, hardly noted
at the time, but afterward recalled, was that it showed only the upper
half of the woman’s figure: nothing was seen below the waist.
The sudden darkness was comparative, not absolute, for gradually all
objects of his environment became again visible.
In the dawn of the morning Holt found himself entering the village at a
point opposite to that at which he had left it. He soon arrived at the
house of his brother, who hardly knew him. He was wild-eyed, haggard,
and gray as a rat. Almost incoherently, he related his night’s
experience.
“Go to bed, my poor fellow,” said his brother, “and—wait. We shall hear
more of this.”
An hour later came the predestined telegram. Holt’s dwelling in one of
the suburbs of Chicago had been destroyed by fire. Her escape cut off by
the flames, his wife had appeared at an upper window, her child in her
arms. There she had stood, motionless, apparently dazed. Just as the
firemen had arrived with a ladder, the floor had given way, and she was
seen no more.
The moment of this culminating horror was eleven o’clock and twenty-five
minutes, standard time.