An amusing as well as instructive ghost story is related by Horace
Walpole, the indolent, luxurious satirist of fashionable and political
contemporaries, whose twenty thousand a year enabled him to live at his
ease, "coquetting haughtily with literature and literary men, at his tasty
Gothic toy-house at Strawberry Hill."
[Illustration: THE BISHOP'S GHOSTLY VISITOR.]
He relates that the good old Bishop of Chichester was awakened in his
palace at an early hour in the morning by his chamber door opening, when a
female figure, clothed in white, softly entered the apartment, and quietly
took a seat near him. The prelate, who, with "his household, was a
disbeliever in ghosts" and spirits, said he was not at all frightened,
but, rising in his bed, said, in a tone of authority,--
"Who are you?"
"The presence in the room" made no reply. The bishop repeated the
question,--
"Who are you?"
The ghost only heaved a deep sigh, and, while the bishop rang the bell, to
call his slumbering servant, her ghostship quietly drew some old "papers
from its ghost of a pocket," and commenced reading them to herself.
After the bishop had kept on ringing for the stupid servant, the form
arose, thrust the papers out of sight, and left as noiselessly and
sedately as she had arrived.
"Well, what have you seen?" asked the bishop, when the servants were
aroused.
"Seen, my lord?"
"Ay, seen! or who--what was the woman who has been here?"
"Woman, my lord?"
(It is said one of the fellows smiled, that a woman should have been in
the aged bishop's bed-chamber in the night.)
When the bishop had related what he had seen, the domestics apprehended
that his lordship had been dreaming, against which the good man protested,
and only told what his eyes had beheld. The story that the bishop had been
visited by a ghost soon got well circulated, which greatly "diverted the
ungodly, at the good prelate's expense, till finally it reached the ears
of the keeper of a mad-house in the diocese, who came and deposed that a
female lunatic had escaped from his custody on that night" (in light
apparel), who, finding the gates and doors of the palace open, had marched
directly to his lordship's chamber. The deponent further stated that the
lunatic was _always reading a bundle of papers_.
"There are known," says Walpole, "stories of ghosts, solemnly
authenticated, less credible; and I hope you will believe this, attested
by the father of our own church."