I TRAVEL ACROSS THE UNITED STATES, AND DO SOME GHOST HUNTING IN SAN
FRANCISCO
Upon leaving Scotland I seriously considered my future, and at length
decided to go to Oregon and fruit farm. Though the expedition, through
no fault of my own, proved a failure, and I had to return to England
within a comparatively short time, I managed, whilst in America, to
see and learn a good deal. Apart from visiting Crater Lake, which in
those days was one of the wildest spots imaginable, far out of the
beat of any but the most adventurous tourist, and seeing the Rogue
River Indians in their native element, I spent several weeks in the big
cities, and when in San Francisco obtained the services of a guide,
and did a nightly tour of China Town, and several of the lesser known
subterranean haunts of that city.
It was in San Francisco that I had my first experience with an American
ghost. I had been out tramping all day along the southern side of
the bay, and it was close on midnight before I got back to the city,
feeling thoroughly done up and very footsore. The last chime of twelve
o’clock sounded, as I swung wearily round 117th Street into a narrow
thoroughfare leading to the obscure quarter of the town in which my
finances forced me to live. As I came within sight of the end house
of a block of low old-fashioned buildings, I received something of a
shock. I had passed by it that morning and had noticed that it was to
let. I was quite sure of this, because there was something about the
house that had especially attracted my attention. I was struck with its
utter loneliness, its air of past grandeur—so oddly at variance with
the modern and mediocre buildings around it—and, peeping in at the
windows, I had taken stock of its big oak-panelled apartments devoid of
furniture and bestrewn with dust and cobwebs.
Now, to my astonishment, I perceived a bright glow—a kind of
phosphorescent light—emanating from one of the rooms on the ground
floor. I approached nearer, and, as I leaned against the verandah and
peered in, it suddenly seemed to me that the room was no longer empty,
but richly carpetted and full of ponderous, old-fashioned furniture.
I also seemed to see in the centre of the room a long table covered
with a snowy cloth, on which were arranged, in rich profusion, many
handsome silver dishes containing a selection of the choicest food. I
was dumbfounded. Twelve hours ago there was not a soul to be seen about
the house nor a particle of furniture in it, and now!—well, it looked
to me as if it never, never had been empty.
Whilst I was thus meditating, my face glued to the window, I thought
that a sudden blaze illuminated the room, and by degrees I became
conscious of the glare of countless candles, some of the candelabra
branching from the walls, and others—of chased silver—standing on
the table. I then saw the door at the far end of the apartment open,
and a young and charming girl, dressed à la mode de Marie Antoinette,
her gown high-waisted and her hair poudré, hurriedly enter. She gave
a quick glance at the table, and then, advancing to the fireplace,
where, for the first time, I perceived the cheery glow of a huge log of
wood, gazed at herself in a large, richly-framed mirror. The reflection
evidently pleased her, for she turned round all smiles; and then her
eyes fell on the window, and on me.
In an instance her countenance changed. Putting a finger to her lips
with a great air of mystery, she beckoned to me to come in. I started
back in confusion. Again she beckoned, and with such pretty pleading in
her eyes that, despite my travel-stained clothes, I yielded. I walked
to the front door; she opened it, and in hushed tones, in which I
detected a slight French accent, she bade me welcome.
“We are having a fancy-dress dance,” she said, “but none of the guests
have as yet arrived, and I want you to come into the ball-room while I
rehearse some of the dance music.”
She led the way across a big, deserted and strangely silent hall, up
a flight of thickly-carpeted stairs, along a dimly lighted corridor,
peopled with nothing but odd shadows, to which I could see no material
counterparts, and into a room obviously prepared for a ball.
“There is no one about but you and I,” she said laughingly. “Only we
two; but someone else will arrive soon. It’s not half-past twelve, is
it?”
“No,” I said; “twenty past.”
“Ten more minutes!” She sighed deeply, and her expression, which up
to now had been one of gay mischief, changed to one of immeasurable
sadness. Then she nodded, suddenly burst out laughing, and casting the
most bewitching look at me from out her long, thickly lashed blue-grey
eyes, sat down at the piano and began to play a Strauss waltz.
Fascinated though I was by her extreme archness and beauty, I could
not stifle the thousand and one uncomfortable thoughts that speedily
crowded into my mind.
Who was this strangely friendly and peculiarly solitary girl? Surely
someone must have helped her prepare the house and supper. Where were
they? Besides, she couldn’t possibly live in that house alone.
And yet, apart from the music—which seemed to reverberate through
every stick and stone of the building—there was no other sound. I
might have been alone with her on some desert island in the far Pacific.
A feeling of intense but wholly unaccountable fear gradually crept over
me.
“It is close on the half hour,” she suddenly whispered. “Listen!”
She paused for a moment, and I heard a door from somewhere in the
lower part of the house open and shut. Then came the sound of muffled
footsteps, stealthily feeling their way upstairs. Up and up they came,
till they arrived outside the door of the room we were in. There they
stopped, and I instinctively felt that their owner was listening.
Presently the girl recommenced playing, and I saw the door-handle
began to turn. Slowly, very slowly, the door then opened, and on the
floor of the room there appeared a black shadow—vague, indefinite and
grotesque. The girl looked over her shoulder at it, and I caught an
expression in her eyes that appalled me. Turning to the piano again,
she played frantically, and the faster her fingers flew, the nearer
crept that shadow.
Suddenly it seemed to shoot right forward, there was a wild scream of
terror, a terrific crash, and all was in absolute darkness.
I groped my way frantically towards the door. Something—I could not
define what—came into violent collision with me; I staggered back half
stunned; and, when my brain cleared, I found myself standing in the
street, weak with exhaustion, and—hatless.
I visited the house the next day, when the sun was shining brightly
and there were plenty of people about. It was as I had first seen it,
untenanted and unfurnished.
I must then have dreamed the whole thing. And what more likely! I was
excessively tired at the time, so tired that I felt I could hardly
crawl home—and without a doubt I had dropped off to sleep resting
against the verandah.
Just out of curiosity, however, I determined to find out if the
interior of the house in any way resembled the interior I had seen in
my dream, and, with that object in view, I applied to Mr. C.——, the
owner, for permission to look over it, frankly telling him why I was
doing so. As he appeared to be interested, I described my dream to him
in detail, and he afterwards told me the following story:—
“About fifty years ago, a very rich French family occupied the house;
and at the coming of age of their daughter they gave a fancy-dress
ball. Among the guests was an Italian, who, being a rejected suitor of
the daughter’s, had not been invited. He appeared in some grotesque
and alarming costume, and when the dance was at its height suddenly
overturned a large oil lamp.
“In a moment the whole floor was ablaze; and before anyone could stop
him, he had seized the daughter of the house and hurled her into the
midst of the flaming mass. Both he and the girl were burned to death,
and the house, although it was thoroughly restored, has never let
since.”
Having concluded his story, Mr. C.—— said he would like to go with me
to the house, and accordingly we set out together.
Though my experience had been only a dream, the coincidence connected
with it, which only needed my identification of the scene to be
complete, was startling enough, and I grew more and more excited as we
neared our destination. When we arrived, Mr. C.—— insisted upon my
going first; and once inside, recognising every feature in the house,
I led him first to the room in which I had seen the supper-table laid,
and then upstairs to the ball-room, where, to my unspeakable surprise,
lying in the middle of the floor, I found my hat.
* * * * *
What a strangely fascinating city was old San Francisco—that is
to say, San Francisco before the last great fire and earthquake!
Consisting of street upon street, terrace upon terrace of quaintly
irregular buildings, to me its atmosphere—as no other atmosphere ever
has been—was impregnated with the superphysical. I stayed for a few
days in a vast hotel in 117th Street, in which I was the only visitor.
I shrewdly suspect it was haunted, although I cannot truthfully say
that I ever saw a ghost there, and when I retired to bed up flight
after flight of stairs, and past dimly-lighted passages teeming with
doors—doors with nothing, nothing material at least, behind them—the
only sounds I heard were the hollow echoes of my own footsteps as I
went on ascending higher, higher, and higher.
Hearing, however, that I was interested in ghosts, the landlord of the
hotel introduced me one day to a Mr. Sweeney, who kept a drug store in
Market Street.
“The only experience I ever had with the Supernatural,” Mr. Sweeney
began, in answer to my interrogations, “took place in this very room.
Exactly twelve years ago I engaged the services of a young man called
Edward Marsdon. He was very amiable and capable, but highly-strung and
hypernormally sensitive. He had been with me about six months, when
he came into the parlour one evening with a face like a corpse. ‘I’ve
poisoned someone,’ he gasped. ‘Poisoned someone?’ I ejaculated. ‘Good
God, what do you mean?’ ‘What I say,’ he replied. ‘A young fellow
came into the store about an hour ago and handed me a prescription.
It was signed by Dr. Knelligan, of 111th Street. I made it up, as I
thought, all right, and gave it him. A few minutes ago, I found I
had put in salts of lemon instead of paregoric.’ ‘Are you sure?’ I
asked. ‘Certain!’ he said, ‘as the bottle of salts of lemon is on the
table in the laboratory with the stopper out. I must have used it in
mistake. The young man will die, if, indeed, he is not dead already,
and I am ruined for life.’ ‘We both are,’ I said tersely. ‘Ring up
Dr. Knelligan at once, and ask him for the young man’s address. When
you get it, drive round at once and see if you are in time.’ It was
of no use scolding him for carelessness—he was upset enough already,
and a ‘blowing up’ just then might, I thought, result in another
tragedy. The only thing to be done was to hope for the best. He rang
up Knelligan, got the address, drove round to it, and discovered that
the young man had just left. The landlady had no idea where he had
gone. To Marsdon this was the last straw. He came back in a state
of utter collapse, trembling all over as if he had ague, and, after
telling me what happened, he went upstairs and slammed his door. About
a quarter of an hour later, my wife, the servant, and I all heard
Marsdon, so we thought, come downstairs and go out. The servant then
went up to his room to make the bed, and hearing her scream out, I ran
upstairs, to find her standing in the middle of the floor, wringing her
hands, whilst Marsdon was sitting in a chair—dead! He had been dead
some minutes. That, Mr. O’Donnell, was the beginning of the strange
occurrences here. If it was not Marsdon whom we all heard go out, who
could it have been? There was no one in the house but we three, and the
body in the chair upstairs, so that it must have been Marsdon’s ghost.
Well, from that day on, we had no peace.
“Footsteps, which we all recognised as Marsdon’s, for he had a most
peculiar lumping kind of walk, trod up and down the stairs all hours
of the day and night, and frequently when I was in the laboratory
mixing medicines I was strongly conscious of some presence standing
close beside me and watching everything I did. One day my wife saw
him. She was going out, and wanting some money, she called to me. As
I did not answer, she went in search of me, and finding me, as she
thought, standing on the hearthrug of the parlour with my back to her,
she touched me on the shoulder. The next moment she discovered her
mistake. The person whom she had mistaken for me turned round, and she
found herself confronted with the white, scared countenance of Edward
Marsdon. She started back with a loud shriek, and Marsdon walked
out of the room, and apparently right through the servant who came
running in to see what was the matter. My wife asked the maid if she
had seen anything, and the latter said, ‘No, only a dark shadow seemed
to fall right across me, and just for a second or so I felt miserably
depressed.’ A week or so afterwards he was again seen; this time by my
wife and the maid. They met him on the stairs. He appeared to be under
the influence of some very painful emotion, and he passed them at a
great rate, and so near that they felt his clothes—apparently quite
material—brush against them. He disappeared in the laboratory, and
on their entering it immediately afterwards, there was no one there.
Something of this nature—either auditory or visual, or both—now
happened pretty well daily, until one morning a young man came to the
store to see me. ‘I am the young man,’ he said, ‘to whom your assistant
gave that unfortunate mixture. I have just returned to San Francisco,
and have heard all about it. The medicine was perfectly all right. I
drank it directly I left here, and it did me the world of good. There
was not even the suspicion of poison in it. Marsdon was labouring under
some extraordinary delusion. If only he had told my landlady about
it when he called and found I had gone, she could have given him the
glass I had drank out of, which doubtless contained some dregs of the
stuff—at any rate, a sufficient quantity for analysis. I am told there
are rumours afloat that his apparition has been seen several times
since he died; not that I believe in such things as ghosts.’
“‘Whether you believe in them or not,’ I said quietly, ‘it is a fact
Edward Marsdon has both been seen and heard.’ ‘Then I hope,’ he said,
‘my visit here to-day will put matters all right, and that his poor,
wandering spirit, learning that I am alive and well, will find rest,
and trouble you no more.’ He then bid me good-morning and walked
towards the door. ‘My God!’ he suddenly cried, coming to an abrupt
halt, ‘there he is!’ I looked, and as sure as I am sitting here, Mr.
O’Donnell, there was Edward Marsdon, just as I had known him in life,
standing on the pavement with his face glued to the window, peering
in at us. The expression in his eyes was one of infinite joy and
astonishment.
“I took a step or two towards him with the intention of speaking, when
he immediately vanished, and from that day to this the hauntings have
entirely ceased.”