TWENTY YEARS’ EXPERIENCE AS A
GHOST HUNTER
Twenty Years’ Experience
as a Ghost Hunter
BY
ELLIOT O’DONNELL
AUTHOR OF “THE SORCERY CLUB,” “WERWOLVES,”
“SOME HAUNTED HOUSES OF ENGLAND AND WALES,”
“HAUNTED HIGHWAYS,” ETC., ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
PHYLLIS VERE CAMPBELL
AND
H. C. BEVAN-PETMAN
[Illustration]
HEATH, CRANTON, LTD.
FLEET LANE, LONDON
_First Published, November, 1916._
_Second Edition, February, 1917._
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In presenting this volume of ghostly reminiscences to the Public
I would lay stress on the fact that, in order to avoid the danger
of incurring an action for slander or libel, I have—save where
expressedly stated to the contrary—resorted to the use of fictitious
names for all persons and houses. For the reproduction of one or two
articles I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. Ralph Shirley.
ELLIOT O’DONNELL.
1916.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. I COMMENCE MY GHOSTLY INVESTIGATIONS IN DUBLIN 11
II. I AM PURSUED BY PHANTOM FOOTSTEPS 23
III. SOME STRANGE CASES IN SCOTLAND 34
IV. I TRAVEL ACROSS THE UNITED STATES AND DO SOME GHOST
HUNTING IN SAN FRANCISCO 49
V. A HAUNTED OFFICE IN DENVER 58
VI. CASES OF HAUNTINGS IN ST. LOUIS, NEW YORK, AND CHICAGO 69
VII. A HAUNTED WOOD, AND A HAUNTED QUARRY IN CANADA 86
VIII. HAUNTINGS IN THE EAST END 105
IX. NIGHT RAMBLINGS ON WIMBLEDON COMMON AND HOUNSLOW HEATH 122
X. MY VIEWS ON A FUTURE LIFE FOR THE ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE
WORLDS 136
XI. A HAUNTING IN REGENT’S PARK, AND MY FURTHER VIEWS WITH
REGARD TO SPIRITUALISM 148
XII. A HAUNTED MINE IN WALES 159
XIII. THE POOL IN WALES THAT LURES PEOPLE TO DEATH 169
XIV. I GO ON WITH THE HISTORY OF MY LIFE, AND NARRATE A
GHOSTLY HAPPENING IN LIVERPOOL 183
XV. SOME STRANGE CASES IN BIRMINGHAM, HARROGATE, SUSSEX AND
NEWCASTLE 194
XVI. WAR GHOSTS 206
XVII. A CASE FROM JAPAN 223
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
1 “WE BOTH LOOKED IN THE DIRECTION HE INDICATED” 39
2 “WHO IS THAT TALL, GOOD-LOOKING GIRL, STELLA, THAT I’VE
SEEN FOLLOWING YOU INTO THE BUILDING....” 63
3 “BUT THERE ARE OTHER GHOSTS—IF YOU LIKE TO TERM THEM
SO—THAT ARE MORE TROUBLESOME” 82
4 “I LOOKED UP, JUST IN TIME TO SEE THE GIRL FLASH ME A LOOK
OF SUBTLE WARNING” 94
5 “THE THING CAME RIGHT UP TO THE WINDOW, AND THEN RAISED ITS
FACE” 101
6 “WHAT GIVES ME THE WORST FRIGHT IS A TREE....” 141
7 “MY GOD! THERE’S DICK! HE’S JUST BEHIND YOU” 167
8 “I SUDDENLY CAUGHT SIGHT OF A LARGE EYE” 205
Twenty Years’ Experience
as a Ghost Hunter
CHAPTER I
I COMMENCE MY GHOSTLY INVESTIGATIONS IN DUBLIN
In starting a book of this sort, I believe it is usual to say something
about one’s self.
I was born in the ’seventies. My father came from County Limerick, and
belonged to the Truagh Castle O’Donnells, who, tracing their descent
from Shane Luirg, the elder brother of Niall Garbh, the ancestor of
Red Hugh, rightly claim to be the oldest branch of the great clan. He
graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, was for some time vicar of a
parish near Worcester, and died in Egypt, under mysterious and much
discussed circumstances,[1] soon after I came into the world.
[1] See “The Oriental Zig-zag,” by C. Hamilton.
My mother was English; she belonged to an old Midland family, and only
survived my father a few years.
Although I am generally known as a ghost hunter, needless to say it
was not for such a career that I was educated, first of all at Clifton
College, then at an Army crammer’s, and finally at Chedwode Crawley’s
well-known coaching establishment in Ely Place, Dublin. There I read
for the Royal Irish Constabulary, and, attending regularly, remained
for a little over two years. I can safely say these two years were two
of the happiest I have ever known, for my companions at that time were
the nicest set of fellows I have ever met, and amongst them I formed
many lifelong friendships.
When I was not working, I usually spent my time playing football
or cricket, to both of which sports I was devoted, and, when I was
not thus engaged, I used to tramp across hill and dale continually
exploring the country in search of adventure.
But in those days I did not look for ghosts—they came to me; they came
to me then, as they had come to me before, and as they have come to me
ever since.
With my early experiences of the Unknown—which experiences, by the
way, extend over the whole period of my youth—I have dealt fully
in former works; so that in this volume I propose to confine myself
to later experiences, commencing approximately with my début as an
investigator of haunted houses and superphysical occurrences in general.
To begin with, however, let me state plainly that I lay no claims to
being what is termed a scientific psychical researcher. I am not a
member of any august society that conducts its investigations of the
other world, or worlds, with test tube and weighing apparatus; neither
do I pretend to be a medium or consistent clairvoyant.
I am merely a ghost hunter; merely one who honestly believes that he
inherits in some degree the faculty of psychic perceptiveness from a
long line of Celtic ancestry; and who is, and always has been, deeply
and genuinely interested in all questions relative to phantasms and a
continuance of individual life after physical dissolution. Moreover, in
addition to this psychic faculty, I possess, as I have already hinted,
a spirit of adventure; and since this spirit is irresistible, had I not
decided to become a ghost hunter, I should doubtless have embarked upon
some other and hardly less exciting pursuit.
The actual cause of my decision to adopt ghost-hunting as a profession
was an experience which befel me in the summer of ’92. I was at that
time a student in Ely Place, Dublin, and being in search of rooms, was
recommended to try a house within a stone’s throw of the Waterloo Road.
A widow named Davis, with two leviathan daughters, Mona and Bridget,
ran the establishment, and as the vacant apartments were large,
apparently well ventilated and exceedingly moderate in price, I
decided to take them. Consequently, I arrived there with my luggage
one afternoon, and was speedily engaged in the tiring and somewhat
irritating task of unpacking.
When I retired to rest that first night, I certainly had no thought of
ghosts or anything in connection with them; on the contrary, my mind
was wholly occupied with speculations as to how I should fare in the
coming weekly examination at Crawley’s, whether the extra attention I
had recently bestowed on mathematics would be of any service to me,
or whether, in spite of it, I should again occupy my place at the
bottom of the class. I remember thinking, however, as I blew out the
light and turned into bed, that there was something about the room
now—though I could not tell what—that I had not noticed by daylight;
but I soon went to sleep, and although I awoke several times before
morning—a phenomenon in itself—I cannot say that I thought then of
any superphysical element in the atmosphere. It was not until I had
been there several nights that the event occurred which effectually
shaped my future career.
One evening the two girls, Mona and Bridget, were making so much
racket in the room beneath me, that I found work impossible, and being
somewhat tired, for I had stuck very close to it all day, I resolved
to go to bed. On my way thither I encountered two young men, T.C.
students, who were also lodging in the house, hotly engaged in an
argument; and they appealed to me to express an opinion. I told them
what I thought, as they followed me upstairs; then, when I reached my
room, I abruptly bade them good-night, and, entering, locked the door
behind me.
Sitting down on the edge of the bed, I quietly slipped off my clothes
and put out the light. The two men were still haranguing one another
for all they were worth when I got in between the sheets and prepared
to lie down. The room was not entirely dark; from between the folds of
the thick plush curtains that enveloped the windows stray beams from
the powerful moonlight filtered through and battled their way to the
foot of the bed. I was looking at them with some degree of curiosity,
when I saw something move. I glanced at it in astonishment, and, to
my unmitigated horror, the shape of something dark and sinister rose
noiselessly from the floor and came swiftly towards me. I tried to
shout, but could not make a sound. I was completely paralysed, and as I
sat there, sick with fear and apprehension, the thing leaped on to me,
and, gripping me mercilessly by the throat, bore me backwards.
I gasped, and choked, and suffered the most excruciating pain. But
there was no relaxation—the pressure of those bony fingers only
tightened and the torture went on. At last, after what seemed to me
an eternity, there was a loud buzzing in my ears, my head seemed to
spin round violently, and my brain to burst. I lost consciousness. On
coming to, I found that my assailant had left me. I struck a light. My
fellow-lodgers were still going at one another hammer and tongs—and
the door was, as I had left it, locked on the inside. I searched the
room thoroughly; the window was bolted; there was nothing in the
cupboard; nothing under the bed; nothing anywhere. I got into bed
again, full of the worst anticipations, and, if sleep came to me, it
was only in the briefest snatches.
At dawn the room became suffused with a cold, grey glow, and the
suggestion of something horribly evil standing close beside the bed
and sardonically watching me impressed me so strongly that, yielding
to a sudden impulse of terror, I hid my head under the bed-clothes,
and remained in that undignified position till the morning was well
advanced and I was “called.”
I got up, feeling downright ill, and although the sunlight
metamorphosing everything now made the mere thought of a ghost simply
ludicrous, I hurried out of the room as speedily as possible. Nor did I
venture to pass another night there.
My landlady did not demur when I asked her to transfer me to another
apartment, and later, before I took my final departure from her house,
she confessed to me that it was haunted. She believed that it had been
used as a private home for mentally afflicted people, and that someone,
either one of the patients or a nurse—she did not know which—had
died, under extremely painful circumstances, in the room I had first
occupied.
The Davises left the house soon after I did, and who lives there now,
and whether the hauntings still continue, I cannot say. When I last
made enquiries, about two years ago, I learned that the then occupants
had never admitted experiencing anything unusual, but that they always
kept the room in which I had undergone the sensations of strangulation
carefully locked.
This adventure of mine, intensely unpleasant as it had been at the
time, profoundly interested me. Hitherto I had placidly accepted as
truth all the dogmas of religion hurled at me from the pulpit and
drilled into me at school, for the simple reason that I had always been
taught to regard as infinitely correct and absolutely above criticism
all that the clergy told me: God made the world, they said, and all
the laws and principles appertaining to it—that was sufficient—I
need not ask any questions. When I looked about me and saw men, and
women, dogs, horses, and other animals suffering indescribable agonies
from all kinds of foul and malignant diseases; when I encountered
cripples, the maimed and blind, idiots and lunatics; or read in the
papers of swindles, murders and suicides; or noted how, throughout
nature, the strong animals prey upon the weak; how, for example, the
tiger, the lion and the leopard terrorize the jungle, just as the shark
and octopus terrorize the sea, and the wasp and spider, centipede and
scorpion terrorize insect life (being furnished respectively with
weapons for tearing and rending, and sucking the flesh, and entailing
the most excruciating tortures on the nerve centres); when, I say, I
noted all this, I was given to understand that I must on no account
comment upon it—to do so was impious and wicked—I must abide by the
precept of my pastor and pedagogue, namely, that “God is almighty and
merciful, loving and wise.”
But now it was different—I was no longer in the schoolroom, no longer
under the immediate influence of the Church. I met people in Dublin
imbued with the broader instincts of a big, cosmopolitan community;
I listened to their reasoning—reasoning which at first immeasurably
shocked me, and afterwards struck me as horribly sane. Then, at this
crisis, came the incident of the strangling. I tried to attribute it to
a dream, but I was prevented by the fact that I had only just got into
bed, and had not even lain down, when the figure seized me. Hence, I
could only conclude that some spirit—the nature of my suffering and
the horror it inspired leading me to suppose that it was a particularly
evil one—had been my aggressor.
But why was it not in Hell? Had it escaped in spite of the strict
supervision of the Almighty? Or could it be possible that the orthodox
Paradise and Purgatory did not exist, and that the spirits of the dead
were allowed to wander about at will? I became interested—deeply so;
all sorts of wild speculations floated through my mind; I resolved to
enquire further.
I would not be guided by any creed; I would set out on my work of
investigation wholly unbiassed; I would gain whatever knowledge there
was to be gained of another world without the aid either of priest or
occultist, medium or scientist.
Several of my friends in Dublin were greatly interested in ghosts, and
I learned from them of two houses that had long borne the reputation of
being haunted. One was close to St. Stephen’s Green, within sight of
the Queen’s Service Academy, and the other, a big, ugly edifice of a
dingy grey, was in Blackrock. I had stayed in the former when a child,
and had vivid recollections of the holes in the stone stairs, through
which boiling oil was poured on the heads of the English soldiers at
the time of the ’98.
There were many large and stately rooms in the house, oak-panelled
and beautified throughout with much carving. I remember looking with
awe and perplexity at the number of odd shadows that used to put in
an appearance on the stairs and in the passages, just when it was my
bed-time, but I did not then attribute them to ghosts. I simply did
not know what they were. I heard sounds, too—clangs and clashes, and
footsteps tramping up and down the stairs; sounds I did not attempt to
analyse, possibly because I dared not. That was in 1886; I was then
a small boy, and now—now only—after I had long left the house, and
was back in Dublin, with the experience of the strangling ghost still
fresh in my mind, I began to wonder whether these strange sounds and
shadows might not have been due to the presence of the Superphysical.
I mentioned the matter to my friends, and they expressed astonishment
that I had not heard the house was haunted. One of them, a lady, told
me that she had once stayed there and had been awakened every night by
the sounds I had described—the sounds of heavy footsteps rushing up
the stairs, of cries and groans, shrieks and oaths, coupled with the
clashing of scabbards and sword blades, and the sound as of falling
bodies.
Yet nothing was ever to be seen, saving the moonlight and
shadows—plenty of shadows—shadows strangely suggestive of grotesque
and fancifully clad people. I tried to obtain permission to sleep in
the house, and in my innocence of the ways of landlords, I stated with
the most pathetic candour my true intention—I wanted to investigate.
The reply I got was certainly not courteous, neither did it permit of
argument. Hence, feeling considerably crestfallen and humiliated, I
found myself forced to give up my first attempt at ghost-hunting.
Then I turned my attention to the house in Blackrock, and fared no
better. The landlord had been bothered to death with requests to spend
nights there, and was endeavouring to discover the originator of the
report that the place was haunted, in order that he might bring an
action for Slander of Title. Consequently I could only examine the
house from the outside, hoping that its ghostly inhabitants would one
night take pity on me and exhibit themselves at one of the windows. But
in this, too, I was disappointed; although, as the place invariably
inspired me with the greatest dread, I have no doubt whatever but that
it was genuinely and badly haunted.
There were several stories in circulation in Dublin about that time
concerning the nature of the haunting, and the following—one of the
most reliable—was told me by a Mrs. Blake. I will give it as nearly as
I can in her own words:
“When I was a child of about twelve,” she began, “which was a good
many years ago, my father, who was then stationed in Dublin, took the
house on a three years’ lease, at a very low rental, due, so the owner
stated, to the fact that there were far too many stairs, a feature to
which most people, on account of their servants, strongly objected.
Nothing was said about ghosts, and nothing was further from my parents’
minds when they took possession. We moved in towards the end of July,
but it was not until the middle of September that we first became aware
that the house was haunted. It happened in this way: My father and the
maids were out one evening, and only my mother, my small brother and I
were in the house. It was about eight o’clock. I was upstairs in the
nursery reading to Teddy, and my mother was in the drawing-room, two
storeys beneath. I was just in the middle of a sentence, when Teddy
interrupted me. ‘Did you hear that?’ he exclaimed; ‘it’s someone on
the stairs. I believe they are listening.’ I paused, and heard a loud
creak. ‘Who can it be?’ I said; ‘there’s only mother in the house!’
Much mystified, I closed the book and went out on to the landing. No
one was there; but when I got to the head of the stairs, I heard a loud
scream, and then a dull thud, just as if someone had fallen. In an
agony of mind I ran downstairs to see what had happened. As I arrived
in the hall, the door of the drawing-room was slowly opened, and I
saw, peeping cautiously out, a white face with two dark, gleaming,
obliquely-set eyes, that filled with an expression of the most
diabolical hatred as they met mine. I was so terrified that I started
back some paces, and, as I did so, the door opened a little wider, and
the figure of a short, elderly woman, clad in an old-fashioned black
dress, and white cap crumpled closely round her lean, haggard face,
glided out, and, passing by, ascended the stairs. As she came to the
first bend, she turned, and looking down at me with an evil leer,
shook her hand menacingly at me. She then passed out of sight, and I
heard her climb the stairs, step by step, till she came to the nursery
landing. A moment later, and Teddy gave a violent shriek.
“My terror was now so great that I think I should have gone mad had I
been left there any longer by myself; but, by a merciful providence, a
key turned in the lock of the front door, and my father entered. The
sight of his well-known figure on the threshold at once loosened the
spell that had bound me, and with a cry of delight I clutched him by
the arms, imploring him to see at once what had happened to mother and
Teddy.
“He ran into the drawing-room first and found my mother on the floor,
just reviving from a faint. Lighting the gas, he fetched her some
brandy, and then, bidding me stay with her, he hastened upstairs to
Teddy. The latter was very badly frightened, and it was some days
before he was well enough to give anything like a coherent account
of what had happened. Of course, mother and father told Teddy that
the queer figure they had seen was some friend of the servants, who
had called while they were out, but I suppose they deemed me old
enough to know the truth, for they discussed the incident openly in
my presence. It appears that my mother had been quietly knitting in
the drawing-room, when she suddenly felt very cold, and rising from
her chair, with the intention of closing the door, found herself
confronted by a hideous form. Subsequently, my father made a thorough
search of the house, but he found no one, and as all the windows were
fastened and the doors locked on the inside, we could only come to the
conclusion that the figure my mother and Teddy and I had all seen was a
ghost. A few days later it appeared to my father. He was coming out of
his bedroom, when he saw a woman steal stealthily out of a room on the
same landing and creep downstairs in front of him. There was something
about her so intensely sinister that he felt chilled; but, determining
to find out who she was, he followed her, and catching her up,
demanded her name. There was a chuckling answer, the figure instantly
disappeared, and a number of invisible somethings clattered down the
stairs past him.
“I think my father was very scared; at all events he came into the
breakfast-room with a very white face and ate hardly anything. Some
time after this, when the autumn was well advanced, my uncle came to
stay with us. He was a jolly, rollicking sailor, who had fought the
Turks at Navarino, and had had many exciting adventures with Chinese
pirates.
“No one told him the house was haunted; it was decided he should find
that out for himself. One afternoon, several days after his arrival,
he was taking off his boots in a room in the basement, when a current
of icy air blew in on him, and, on raising his eyes to see whence
the draught came, he perceived an extraordinarily pretty girl, clad
in a dark green riding-habit, such as he believed were worn in the
days of his great grand-parents, standing in the doorway, watching
him intently. ‘This is one of Jack’s surprises’ (Jack was my father),
he said to himself, ‘and a deuced pleasant one, too! The rogue, he
knows nothing pleases me so much as the sight of a pretty girl, and,
by Jove, she is pretty!’ Springing to his feet—for my uncle was never
bashful in the presence of the fair sex—he advanced to shake hands.
To his chagrin, however, she promptly turned round, and, walking
swiftly away, began to ascend the stairs. My uncle followed her. On and
on she led him till she came to the drawing-room; there she paused,
and with the forefinger of her left hand on her lips, glanced coyly
round at him. She then quietly turned the door handle, and signalling
to him to follow, stole into the room on tiptoe. Charmed with this
piece of acting, the naïvety of it appealing very strongly to his
susceptible nature, my uncle hastened after her. The moment he crossed
the threshold, however, he recoiled. Standing in the middle of the
room was an old woman with a hideous, white face and black, leering
eyes. There were no signs anywhere of the young and beautiful lady.
She had completely vanished. My uncle was so shocked by the spectacle
before him that he retreated on to the landing, and, as he did so, the
drawing-room door swung to with a loud crash. He called my father, and
they entered the room together; but it was quite empty, the old hag had
disappeared as inexplicably as the girl. That evening there was to be
a party, and the table in the dining-room groaned beneath the weight
of one of those inimitable ‘spreads,’ in vogue some fifty or sixty
years ago. With somewhat pardonable pride my mother took us all—my
father, uncle and myself—to have a peep at it, before the guests
arrived. As we drew near the room, we heard, to our astonishment,
the plaintive sound of a spinet. My mother instantly drew back,
trembling, whereupon my uncle, forcing a laugh, said, ‘This is one of
the occasions upon which a gentleman should go first.’ He threw open
the door as he spoke, and we all peered in. What I saw will never be
effaced from my memory. The room exhibited a complete wreckage—the
cloth was half off the table, the massive silver candlesticks were
overturned, and the floor was strewn with piles of broken glass, china
and eatables—everything was smashed and ruined. In the midst of the
debris, her face turned towards us, lay a very beautiful girl. There
were unmistakable evidences of a ghastly wound, but her eyes were
partly open, and the strange light which gleamed from their blue depths
revealed an expression which could only have been hatched in hell—a
hell, peopled not with passive torture-torn sufferers, but with wholly
abandoned beings actively engaged in licentiousness and everything that
is destructive and antagonistic to man’s moral and mental progress.
Standing over the woman, and holding a kind of stiletto in his hand,
was a tall, fair man, in whose agonised and remorseful features we
recognised at once a most startling likeness to my uncle. No detail
was wanting—there was the deep scar on the temple, the curiously deep
dimple in the chin; indeed, saving for the old-fashioned clothes, no
likeness could have been more exact. Standing by his side, her hideous,
scowling face thrust forward, her evil eyes glaring at us with the same
vindictive insolence, was the old woman I had seen that night in the
hall. Then, my father, uttering some exclamation, crossed himself, and,
as he did so, the figures abruptly vanished, whilst the whole house
echoed and re-echoed with loud peals of mocking, diabolical laughter.
That was the finale; we left immediately afterwards, and from that day
to this the house, I believe, has stood almost uninterruptedly empty.”
This is the gist of Mrs. Blake’s account of the happenings, and as I
never found her anything but strictly truthful, I believe them to have
been given me without any conscious exaggeration.