ONE evening of the winter following the events recorded in the last
chapter, “Ned” Rhodes and I had spent a cosey two hours together. My
parents never did chaperon duty, in the modern acceptation of the
word. They made a habit, without hinting at it as a duty, of knowing
personally every man who called upon us. When, as in the present case,
and it was a common one, the visitor was well known to them, and they
liked him, both of them came into the drawing-room, sat for a half-hour
or longer, as the spirit moved them, then slipped out, separately, to
their own sitting-room and books.
I have drawn Ned Rhodes’s picture at length as “Charley” in _Alone_. I
will only say here that he was my firm and leal friend from the time I
was twelve years old to the time of his death, in the early eighties.
He had a piece of new music for me to-night, and we fell to work with
piano and flute soon after my father’s exit. It was not difficult. The
songs and duets that followed were familiar to us both. We chatted
by the glowing grate when we left the piano—gayly and lightly, of
nothing in particular—the inconsequent gossip of two old and intimate
acquaintances that called for no effort from either.
I mention this to show that I carried a careless spirit and a light
heart with me, as I went off in the direction of my bedroom, having
extinguished the hanging lamp in the hall, and taking one of the lamps
from the parlor to light myself bedward.
It was a big, square Colonial house, with much waste of space in the
matter of halls and passages. The entrance-hall on the first floor was
virtually a reception-room, and nearly as large as any apartment on
that level. It was cut across the left side by an archway, filled with
Venetian blinds and door. Beyond these was a broad, easy stairway,
dropping, by a succession of landings, to the lower from the upper
story. Directly opposite the front door was a second and narrower arch,
the door in which was, likewise, of Venetian slats. This led to the
rooms at the back of the house. The plan of the second floor was the
same. On this eventful night I passed through the smaller archway,
closing the door behind me. It had a spring latch that clicked into
place as I swung it to. The bedroom I shared with my sister, who was
not at home that night, was directly across the passage from that
occupied by our parents. A line of light under their door proved that
they were still up, and I knocked.
“Come in!” called both, in unison.
My mother, wrapped in her dressing-gown, lay back in her rocking-chair,
her book closed upon her finger. My father had laid aside his coat, and
stood on the rug, winding his watch.
“I was hoping that you would look in,” he said. “I wanted to ask what
that new piano-and-flute piece is. I like it!”
We exchanged a few sentences on the subject; I kissed both good-night,
and went out into the hall, humming, as I went, the air that had caught
his fancy.
The lamp in my hand had two strong burners. Gas had not then been
introduced into private dwellings in Richmond. We used what was sold as
“burning fluid,” in illuminating our houses—something less gross than
camphene or oil, and giving more light than either. I carried the lamp
in front of me, so that it threw a bright light upon the door across
the passage, here a little over six feet wide. As I shut the door of my
mother’s room, I saw, as distinctly as if by daylight, a small woman in
gray start out of the opposite door, glide noiselessly along the wall,
and disappear at the Venetian blinds giving upon the big front hall.
I have reviewed that moment and its incident a thousand times, in the
effort to persuade myself that the apparition was an optical illusion
or a trick of fancy.
The thousandth-and-first attempt results as did the first. I shut
my eyes to see—always the one figure, the same motion, the same
disappearance.
She was dressed in gray; she was small and lithe; her head was bowed
upon her hands, and she slipped away, hugging the wall, as in flight,
vanishing at the closed door. The door I had heard latch itself five
minutes ago! Which did not open to let her through! I recall, as
clearly as I see the apparition, what I thought in the few seconds that
flew by as I stood to watch her. I was not in the least frightened
at first. My young maid, Paulina, a bright mulatto of fifteen, had
more than once that winter fallen asleep upon the rug before my fire,
when she went into the room to see that all was in readiness for my
retiring. The servants slept in buildings detached from the main
residence, a custom to which I have referred before.
“The house” was locked up by my father’s own hands at ten o’clock,
unless there were some function to keep one or more of the servants
up and on duty. Therefore, when I had twice awakened Paulina from
her unlawful slumber, I had sent her off to the “offices”—in English
parlance—with a sharp reproof and warning against a repetition of the
offence. My instant thought now was:
“The little minx has been at it again!” The next, “She went like a
cat!” The third, in a lightning flash, “She did not open the door to go
through!” Finally—“Nor did she open the door when she came out of my
room!”
I had never, up to that instant, known one thrill of supernatural dread
since I was old enough to give full credence to my father’s assurances
that there were no such things as ghosts, and to laugh at the tales
told by ignorant negroes to frighten one another, and to awe white
children. I had never been afraid of the darkness or of solitude. I
would take my doll and book to the graveyard and spend whole happy
afternoons there, because it was quiet and shady, and nobody would
interrupt study or dream.
It was, then, the stress of extraordinary emotion which swept me back
into the room I had just quitted, and bore me up to the table by which
my mother sat, there to set down the lamp I could scarcely hold,
enunciating hoarsely:
“I have seen a ghost!”
My father wheeled sharply about.
“_What!_”
At that supreme moment, the influence of his scornful dislike to every
species of superstition made me “hedge,” and falter, in articulating,
“If there is such a thing as a ghost, I have seen one!”
Before I could utter another sound he had caught up the lamp and was
gone. Excited, and almost blind and dumb as I was, I experienced a new
sinking of heart as I heard him draw back the bolt of the door through
which the Thing had passed, without unclosing it. He explored the whole
house, my mother and I sitting, silent, and listening to his swift
tramp upon floor and stairs. In a few minutes the search was over.
He was perfectly calm in returning to us.
“There is nobody in the house who has not a right to be here. And
nobody awake except ourselves.”
Setting down the lamp, he put his hand on my head—his own, and almost
only, form of caress.
“Now, daughter, try and tell us what you think you saw?”
Grateful for the unlooked-for gentleness, I rallied to tell the
story simply and without excitement. When I had finished, he made no
immediate reply, and I looked up timidly.
“I really saw it, father, just as I have said! At least, I believe I
did!”
“I know it, my child. But we will talk no more of it to-night. I will
go to your room with you.”
He preceded me with the lamp. When we were in my chamber, he looked
under the bed (how did he guess that I should do it as soon as his
back was turned, if he had not?). Then he carried the light into the
small dressing-room behind the chamber. I heard him open the doors of a
wardrobe that stood there, and try the fastenings of a window.
“There is nothing to harm you here,” he said, coming back, and speaking
as gently as before. “Now, try not to think of what you believe you
saw. Say your prayers and go to bed, like a good, brave girl!”
He kissed me again, putting his arm around me and, holding me to him
tenderly, said “Good-night,” and went out.
I was ashamed of my fright—heartily ashamed! Yet I was afraid to look
in the mirror while I undid and combed my hair and put on my night-cap.
When, at last, I dared put out the light, I scurried across the floor,
plunged into bed, and drew the blankets tightly over my head.
My father looked sympathizingly at my heavy eyes next morning when I
came down to prayers. After breakfast he took me aside and told me to
keep what I had seen to myself.
“Neither your mother nor I will speak of it in the hearing of the
children and servants. You may, of course, take your sister into your
confidence. She may be trusted. But my opinion is that the fewer who
know of a thing that seems unaccountable, the better. And your sister
is more nervous than you.”
Thus it came about that nothing was said to Mea, and that we three who
knew of the visitation did not discuss it, and tried honestly not to
think of it.
Until, perhaps a month after my fright, about nine o’clock, one wet
night, my mother entered the chamber where my father and I were talking
over political news, as we still had a habit of doing, and said,
hurriedly, glancing nervously behind her:
“I have seen Virginia’s ghost!”
She saw it, just as I had described, issuing from the closed door and
gliding away close to the wall, then vanishing at the Venetian door.
“It was all in gray,” she reported, “but with something white wrapped
about the head. It is very strange!”
Still we held our peace. My father’s will was law, and he counselled
discretion.
“We will await further developments,” he said, oracularly.
Looking back, I think it strange that the example of his cool
fearlessness so far wrought upon me that I would not allow the
mystery to prey upon my spirits, or to make me afraid to go about the
house as I had been wont to do. Once my father broke the reserve we
maintained, even to each other, by asking if I would like to exchange
my sleeping-room for another.
“Why should I?” I interrogated, trying to laugh. “We are not sure where
_she_ goes after she leaves it. It is something to know that she is no
longer there.”
Mea had to be taken into confidence after she burst into the
drawing-room at twilight, one evening, and shut the door, setting her
back against it and trembling from head to foot. She was as white as a
sheet, and when she spoke, it was in a whisper. Something had chased
her down-stairs, she declared. The hall-lamp was burning, and she
could see, by looking over her shoulder, that the halls and stairs
were empty but for her terrified self. But Something—_Somebody_—in
high-heeled shoes, that went “Tap! tap! tap!” on the oaken floor and
staircase, was behind her from the time she left the upper chamber
where she had been dressing, until she reached the parlor door. Her
nerves were not as stout as mine, perhaps, but she was no coward, and
she was not given to foolish imaginations. When we told her what had
been seen, she took a more philosophical view of the situation than I
was able to do.
“Bodiless things can’t hurt bodies!” she opined, and readily joined our
secret circle.
Were we, as a family, as I heard a woman say when we were not
panic-stricken at the rumored approach of yellow-fever, “a queer lot,
taken altogether”? I think so, sometimes.
The crisis came in February of that same winter.
My sister Alice and a young cousin who was near her age—fourteen—were
sent off to bed a little after nine one evening, that they might get
plenty of “beauty sleep.” Passing the drawing-room door, which was
ajar, they were tempted to enter by the red gleam of the blazing
fire of soft coal. Nobody else was there to enjoy it, and they sat
them down for a school-girlish talk, prolonged until the far-off cry
“All’s well!” of the sentinel at the “Barrack” on Capitol Square told
the conscience-smitten pair that it was ten o’clock. Going into the
hall, they were surprised to find it dark. We found afterward that the
servant whose duty it was to fill the lamp had neglected it, and it had
burned out. It was a brilliant moonlight night, and the great window
on the lower landing of the staircase was unshuttered. The arched door
dividing the two halls was open, and from the doorway of the parlor
they had a full view of the stairs. The moonbeams flooded it half-way
up to the upper landing; and from the dark hall they saw a white figure
moving slowly down the steps. The mischievous pair instantly jumped to
the conclusion that one of “the boys”—my brothers—was on his way, _en
déshabillé_, to get a drink of water from the pitcher that always stood
on a table in the reception-room, or main hall. To get it, he must pass
within a few feet of them, and they shrank back into the embrasure of
the door behind them, pinching each other in wicked glee to think how
they would tease the boy about the prank next morning. Down the stairs
it moved, without sound, and slowly, the concealed watchers imagined,
listening for any movement that might make retreat expedient. They
said, afterward, that his nightgown trailed on the stairs, also that he
might have had something white cast over his head. These things did not
strike them as singular while they watched his progress, so full were
they of the fun of the adventure.
It crossed the moonlit landing—an unbroken sheet of light—and stepped,
yet more slowly, from stair to stair of the four that composed the
lowermost flight. It was on the floor and almost within the archway
when the front door opened suddenly and in walked the boys, who had
been out for a stroll.
In a quarter-second the apparition was gone. As Alice phrased it:
“It did not go backward or forward. It did not sink into the floor. It
just was _not_!”
With wild screams the girls threw themselves upon the astonished boys,
and sobbed out the story. In the full persuasion that a trick had been
played upon the frightened children, the brothers rushed up-stairs and
made a search of the premises. The hubbub called every grown member of
the household to the spot except our deaf grandmother, who was fast
asleep in her bed up-stairs.
Assuming the command which was his right, my father ordered all hands
to bed so authoritatively that none ventured to gainsay the edict. In
the morning he made light to the girls and boys of the whole affair,
fairly laughing it out of court, and, breakfast over, sent them off to
school and academy. Then he summoned our mother, my sister, and myself
to a private conference in “the chamber.”
He began business without preliminaries. Standing on the rug, his back
to the fire, his hands behind him, in genuine English-squirely style,
he said, as nearly as I can recall his words:
“It is useless to try to hide from ourselves any longer that there is
something wrong with this house. I have known it for a year and more.
In fact, we had not lived here three months before I was made aware
that some mystery hung about it.
“One windy November night I had gone to bed as usual, before your
mother finished her book.”
He glanced smilingly at her. Her proclivity for reading into the small
hours was a family joke.
“It was a stormy night, as I said, and I lay with closed eyes,
listening to the wind and rain, and thinking over next day’s business,
when somebody touched my feet. Somebody—not something! Hands were
laid lightly upon them, were lifted and laid in the same way upon my
knees, and so on until they rested more heavily on my chest, and I felt
that some one was looking into my face. Up to that moment I had not a
doubt that it was your mother. Like the careful wife she is, she was
arranging the covers over me to keep out stray draughts. So, when she
bent to look into my face, I opened my eyes to thank her.
“She was not there! I was gazing into the empty air. The pressure was
removed as soon as I lifted my eyelids. I raised myself on my elbow
and looked toward the fireplace. Your mother was deep in her book, her
back toward me. I turned over without sound, and looked under the bed
from the side next the wall. The firelight and lamplight shone through,
unobstructed.
“I speak of this now for the first time. I have never opened my lips
about it, even to your mother, until this moment. But it has happened
to me, not once, nor twice, nor twenty—but fifty times—maybe more. It
is always the same thing. The hands—I have settled in my mind that
they are those of a small woman or of a child, they are so little and
light—are laid on my feet, then on my knees, and travel upward to
my chest. There they rest for a few seconds, sometimes for a whole
minute—I have timed them—and _something_ looks into my face and is gone!
“How do I account for it? I don’t account for it at all! I know that
it _is_! That is all. Shakespeare said, long before I was born, that
‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our
philosophy.’ This is one of them. You can see, now, daughter”—turning
to me—“why I was not incredulous when you brought your ghost upon the
scene. I have been on the lookout for what our spiritualistic friends
call ‘further manifestations.’”
“You believe, then,” Mea broke in, “that the girls really saw something
supernatural on the stairs last night? That it was not a trick of
moonlight and imagination?”
“If we can make them think so, it will be better for them than to fill
their little brains with ghostly fears. That was the reason I took
a jesting tone at breakfast-time. I charged them, on the penalty of
being the laughing-stock of all of us, not to speak of it to any one
except ourselves. I wish you all to take the cue. Moreover, and above
everything else, don’t let the servants get hold of it. There would be
no living in the house with them, if they were to catch the idea that
it is ‘haunted.’”
He drew his brows into the horseshoe frown that meant annoyance
and perplexity. “How I hate the word! You girls are old enough to
understand that the value of this property would be destroyed were this
story to creep abroad. I would better burn the house down at once than
to attempt to sell it at any time within the next fifty years with a
ghost-tale tagged to it.
“Now, here lies the case! We can talk to outsiders of what we have
seen and felt and heard in this, our home, where your grandmother,
your mother and father have hoped to live comfortably and to die in
peace, or we can keep our own counsel like sensible, brave Christians.
‘Bodiless spirits cannot hurt bodies,’ and”—the frown passing before a
humorous gleam—“the little gray lady seems to be amiable enough. I can
testify that her hands are light, and that they pet, not strike. She is
timid, too. What do you say—all of you? Can we hold our tongues?”
We promised in one voice. We kept the pledge so well that both the
girls and the boys were convinced of our incredulity. Our father
forbade them positively to drop a hint of their foolish fancies in the
hearing of the servants. Young as they were, they knew what stigma
would attach to a haunted house in the community. As time passed,
the incident faded from their minds. It was never mentioned in their
hearing.
A year went by without further demonstration on the part of the little
gray lady, except for two nocturnal visitations of the small, caressing
hands. My father admitted this when we questioned him on the subject;
but he would not talk of it.
The one comic element connected with the bodiless visitant was
introduced, oddly enough, by our sanctimonious clerical uncle-in-law,
who now and then paid us visits of varying lengths. As he came
unannounced, it was not invariably convenient to receive him. On one
occasion his appearance caused dismay akin to consternation. We were
expecting a houseful of younger friends within two days, and needed the
guest-room he must occupy. He was good for a week at the shortest.
True to the Arab-like traditions of hospitality that pervaded all
ranks of Old Dominion society, we suffered nothing of this to appear
in our behavior. Nor could he have heard the anguished discussion of
ways and means that went on between Mea and myself late that night. It
was, therefore, a delightful surprise when he announced, next morning,
his intention of going out to Olney that day, and to remain there
for—perhaps a week. He “had let too long a time elapse since he had
paid the good people there a visit. He didn’t want them to think he had
forgotten them.”
One of the “good people,” the wife of my mother’s brother, drove into
town to spend the day with us, a week after the close of his stay at
Olney. “Aunt Sue” was a prime favorite with us all, and she was in fine
feather to-day, full of fun and anecdote. She interrupted a spicy bit
of family news to say, by-and-by:
“Did any of you ever suspect that your house is haunted?”
“How ridiculous!” laughed my mother. “Why do you ask?”
The narrator laughed yet more merrily.
“The funniest thing you ever heard! The old gentleman had an awful
scare the last night he was here. I asked him what he had eaten—and
drunk—for supper that evening. But he stuck to it that he was standing
at his window, looking out into the moonlight in the garden, when
somebody came up behind him, and took him by the elbows and turned
him clear around! He felt the two hands that grabbed hold of him so
plainly that he made sure Horace had hidden under the bed and jumped
out to scare him. So he looked under the bed and in the wardrobe and
the closet, and, for all I know, in the bureau drawers and under the
washstand, for the boy. There was nobody in the room but himself, and
the door was locked. He says he wouldn’t sleep in that room another
night for a thousand dollars.”
“Nobody is likely to offer it!” retorted Mea, dryly. “I have slept
there nearly a thousand nights, and nothing ever caught hold of me.”
Passing over what might or might not have been a link in the true,
weird history of our bodiless tenant, I leap a chasm of a dozen
years to wind up the tale of the “little gray lady,” so far as it
bears directly upon our family. After the death of her husband and
the marriages of sons and daughters left my mother alone in the old
colonial homestead, she decided to sell it and to live with my youngest
sister.
The property was bought as a “Church Home”—a sort of orphanage,
conducted under the patronage of a prominent Episcopal parish renowned
for good works. In altering the premises to adapt buildings to their
new uses, the workmen came upon the skeleton of a small woman about
four feet below the surface of the front yard. She lay less than
six feet away from the wall of the house, and directly under the
drawing-room window. There was no sign of coffin or coffin-plate. Under
her head was a high, richly carved tortoise-shell comb, mute evidence
that she had not been buried in cap and shroud, as was the custom a
hundred years agone. The oldest inhabitant of a city that is tenacious
of domestic legends, had never heard of an interment in that quarter
of a residential and aristocratic district. The street, named for the
eminent lawyer, must have been laid out since the house was built,
and may have been cut right through grounds, then far more spacious
than when we bought the place. Even so, the grave was dug in the front
garden, and so close to the house as to render untenable the theory
that the plot was ever part of a family burying-ground.
The papers took inquisitive note of all these circumstances, and let
the matter drop as an unexplained mystery. Within the present occupancy
of the house, I have heard that the gray lady still walks on moonlight
nights, and, in gusty midnights, visits the bedside of terrified
inmates to press small, light hands upon the feet, and so passing
upward, to rest upon the chest of the awakened sleeper. I was asked by
one who had felt them, if I had “ever heard the legend that a bride,
dressed for her wedding, fell dead in that upper chamber ages ago.”
My informant could not tell me from whom she had the grewsome tale, or
the date thereof. “Somebody had told her that it happened once upon a
time.” She knew that the unquiet creature still “walked the halls and
stairs.”
She should have been “laid” by the decent ceremony of burial in
consecrated ground, awarded to the exhumed bones.
I have talked with a grandson of our former next-door neighbor, and had
from him a circumstantial account of the disinterment of the nameless
remains. They must have lain nearer the turf above them, a century
back, than when they were found. The young man was a boy when he ran
to the hole made by the workmen’s spades, and watched the men bring to
light the entire skeleton. He verified the story of the high, carved
comb. He told me, too, of a midnight alarm of screaming children at the
vision of a little gray lady, walking between the double row of beds in
the dormitory, adding:
“I told those who asked if any story was attached to the house, that I
had lived next door ever since I was born, and played every day with
your sisters and brothers, and never heard a whisper that the house was
haunted.”
So said all our neighbors. We kept our own counsel. It was our father’s
wise decree.
I have told my ghost-story with no attempt at explanation of psychical
phenomena. After all these years I fall back, when questioned as to
hypotheses, upon my father’s terse dicta:
“How do I account for it? I don’t account for it at all!”