the largest sailing yacht afloat.
William T. Garner, her young millionaire owner, was very proud of his
new craft, and all the then leaders of New York society were invited to
participate in the good time afloat with which her launching was
celebrated. Commodore Garner, then but thirty-three years old, and his
young wife entertained charmingly, and the trim, speedy Mohawk was
christened with unusually merry festivities. Soon after that she was
capsized by a sudden squall off the landing at Stapleton, N. Y., and six
people were drowned like rats in her cabin and forecastle.
Then the Mohawk was raised at a cost of $25,000 and purchased by the
United States Government for the service of the coast survey. Her name
was changed to Eagre, for Jack Tar is proverbially superstitious, and
with the old name it would have been impossible to ship a crew.
Lieutenant Higby King describes his initial experience when he was
assigned to duty on the Eagre in this way:
“She had her full complement of officers minus one when I boarded her at
Newport to complete the list. Every cabin was occupied but the port
cabin by the companion way, and to that I was assigned.
“We had a jolly wardroom mess that night, and I retired from it early,
as I was tired by my journey to join the vessel. The others who were
still at the table regarded my retirement to the port cabin in absolute
silence, having bidden me good-night. Their silence did not lead me to
suspect anything, though I knew that the Eagre had once been the Mohawk.
My cabin door had the usual cabin lock of brass, and the porthole was
also securely fastened. There could have been no one under the bed or
sofa, as beneath each was a facing of solid oak paneling.
“I undressed lazily and left the light burning dimly in my bracket lamp.
I tried conscientiously to go to sleep for I don’t know how long with my
back turned to the light. The noise ceased in the wardroom after a time,
and I knew the others had turned in, but I felt unaccountably nervous
and restless. I turned over and faced the light, thoroughly wide awake,
and there in the single chair sat an elderly man, seemingly wrapt in
deep thought. He was dressed in a blue yachting reefer, and had a long,
gray beard. His hands were clasped in his lap, and his eyes were
downcast. His face was not pale and ghastly, as the faces of ghosts are
popularly supposed to be, but ruddy and weatherbeaten.
“I regarded him in scared silence for I don’t know how long, though it
seemed an hour when he, or it, or whatever it was, disappeared. During
that time the ghost, and such I now believe it to have been, made not a
motion, nor did it say anything. Presently I looked again, and it was
gone.
“At breakfast the others watched me critically as I took my seat. I had
not intended to say anything about my experience, for I thought then I
had seen some sort of hallucination and strongly suspected that I was
verging on insanity. Lieutenant Irving asked me if I had slept well. I
replied that I had. ‘Didn’t you see anything?’ he inquired. I then
frankly admitted that I had and described my experience. Then I learned
that each one of the seven others present had tried the port cabin at
one time or another, and each had seen the self-same apparition. It had
acted in exactly the same way in each case, except in the case of
Irving, who shot at it with his pistol, when it immediately disappeared.
Some of the others had been led by their curiosity to inquire if anyone
lost on the Mohawk resembled the figure, and found that none of the
unfortunate ones at all fitted the description. It had been dubbed by
them the ‘misfit ghost.’ That one experience was enough for me, and
after that I, by courtesy, shared the cabin of another fellow.”
Lieutenant Irving and others corroborate the story of Lieutenant King,
and as additional evidence that the Eagre is haunted, Lieutenant Irving
describes a New Year’s eve experience of the Eagre’s officers, that is,
to say the least, novel in the way of supernatural manifestations.
“It was at mess. The first toast, ‘Sweethearts and Wives,’ had been
drunk, as it always is by Yankee sailors the world over on occasions of
festivity. Everyone was feeling happy, or, as Thackeray has it,
‘pleasant,’ when suddenly the sliding-doors separating the wardroom from
the companion way closed slowly with a loud, squeaking noise. They had
seldom been closed, and it took the entire strength of a man to start
them from their rusty fastenings. Yet upon this occasion they started
easily and closed tightly, while the officers jumped to their feet in
breathless astonishment. Half a dozen men hauled them open in haste, but
not a soul was behind them or anywhere about. ‘It must be our old friend
of the port cabin,’ suggested one, and in awe-stricken silence the
health of the ‘misfit ghost’ was drunk.”
AN UNBIDDEN GUEST.
My cousins, Kate and Tom Howard, married at Trinity, at Easter time,
concluded to commence housekeeping by taking one of those delightfully
expensively furnished, unfurnished cottages, with which the fashionable
watering place of W---- abounds, from whose rear windows one might
almost take a plunge into the surf, the beach beginning at the back
door. They went down quite early in May, being in a great hurry to try
their domestic experiment; and, as the evenings were still cold, they
spent them about the open fire, “spooning.”
It was upon one of those nights, about eleven o’clock, that they were
startled by a noise, as of some small object falling, soon followed by
the sound of heavy footsteps, and then quiet again reigned supreme. At
once Tom, poker in hand, boldly started in search of the burglar,
followed by Kate, wildly clutching at his coat-tail, and in a state of
tremor. They looked upstairs, under the various beds, Kate suggesting
that in novels they were always to be found there.
The dining-room was next explored, where all seemed well, and, lastly
the kitchen, where they found what was evidently a solution of the
mystery. The burglar had entered by the back door, which was found to be
unlocked and slightly ajar. The first excitement subsiding, they
returned again to the dining-room, where Tom, upon closer inspection,
then discovered that one of a pair of quaint little pepper-pots, wedding
gifts, was missing, and other small articles on the sideboard had been
slightly disturbed.
The next morning, when Kate mildly remonstrated with the queen of the
kitchen for her carelessness, she received a shock by being told that it
was her usual custom to leave the door open, “so that it would be aisy,
convanient loike for the milkmaid.” They parted with her, and a new maid
was engaged, whose chief qualification for the place was that she was
most faithful in the discharge of her duties, especially in “locking
up.”
While they mourned the loss of the pepper-pot, still it seemed so
trifling when they thought of that lovely repousse salad bowl, sent by
Aunt Julia, which stood near by, that nothing was said of the loss
outside of the family, and the little household settled into its normal
state once more of “billing and cooing.”
About a fortnight later, Tom started out one night with an old
fisherman, one of the natives, and a local “character,” to indulge in
that delightful pastime, so dear to the heart of man, known as
“eeling,” and, as the night was dark, the eels were particularly
“sporty,” so that it was well on towards the “wee sma’ hours” when Tom
at last returned to the cottage.
He found all excitement within. Kate was in hysterics, and the new maid,
also weeping, was industriously applying the camphor bottle to her
mistress’ nose. The burglar, or ghost, as they had now decided, the
windows and doors being found to be securely locked this time, had been
abroad again, but had succeeded in purloining nothing. His royal
ghostship had amused himself, apparently, by simply walking about.
“Oh, Tom! he had on such heavy boots and was so dreadfully bold about
it,” said Kate, tearfully.
From that time Kate became nervous and refused to be left alone. Tom
started whenever a door creaked, and the “treasure” departed hurriedly,
saying, “Faith, the house is haunted, sure.”
After that Kate spent her days in “girl hunting,” and her nights in
answering shadowy advertisements that never materialized. They tried
Irish, English, Dutch, and a “heathen Chinee,” with a sprinkling of
“colored ladies” to vary the monotony. They seemed about to become
famous throughout the length and breadth of the land as “the family
that changes help once a week,” when they landed Treasure No. 2.
Shortly after her advent we were all asked down to W----, to help
celebrate their happiness, and incidentally to christen the new dinner
set. We were not a little surprised at finding Kate so pale and Tom
rather distrait. However, after a delightful dinner, that should have
filled with pleasure the most exacting bride, we adjourned to the
piazza, leaving the men to the contemplation of their cigars. We were
enthusiastic in our praise of the house, and congratulated Kate in
securing such a prize, when, to our horror, she burst into tears, and
said: “Oh, girls, it’s a dreadful place; it’s haunted!” and then
tearfully proceeded with the details, until we all felt creepy and
suggested the parlor and lights.
It was not until long afterwards that Kate discovered that Tom had also
related the “ghost story” to the men, that evening, to which Ned Harris
had said, laconically, “Rats,” and Bob Shaw laughingly remarked, “Tom,
old chap, you really shouldn’t take your nightcap so strong.”
About the first of July the climax came. The ghost walked again, this
time taking not only the remaining pepper-pot, but also a silver
salt-cellar. Evidently he had a penchant for small articles, but unlike
former times, everything on the sideboard was in the greatest disorder.
Aunt Julia’s salad bowl was found on the floor, and not far away the
cheese-dish, with its contents scattered about. This time one of the
windows was found half open. A week later a note came to me from Kate,
saying that she and Tom had gone to Saratoga to spend the remainder of
the season with her mother.
The following spring Tom received a note and parcel from Mr. B----, the
owner of the house at W----, which read as follows:
DEAR MR. HOWARD: I send you by express three articles of silver,
which my wife suggests may belong to you, as they are marked with
your initials, namely, two silver pepper-pots and a salt-cellar;
they were found, the other day, during the process of spring house
cleaning, in a rat hole, behind the sideboard. I forgot to have the
holes stopped up last spring, or to caution you against the water
rats; the great fellows will get in, you know. Kind regards to Mrs.
Howard.
Very truly,
JOHN B----.
The next season the “Ghost Club” was organized, the badge being a small
silver rat, bearing proudly aloft a tiny pepper-pot. We thoughtfully
offered Tom the presidency, but he declined, with offended dignity, from
the effects of which I think he will never fully recover.
THE DEAD WOMAN’S PHOTOGRAPH.
Virgil Hoyt is a photographer’s assistant up at St. Paul, and a man of a
good deal of taste. He has been in search of the picturesque all over
the West, and hundreds of miles to the north in Canada, and can speak
three or four Indian dialects, and put a canoe through the rapids. That
is to say, he is a man of an adventurous sort and no dreamer. He can
fight well and shoot well and swim well enough to put up a winning race
with the Indian boys, and he can sit all day in the saddle and not dream
about it at night.
Wherever he goes he uses his camera.
“The world,” Hoyt is in the habit of saying to those who sit with him
when he smokes his pipe, “was created in six days to be photographed.
Man--and especially woman--was made for the same purpose. Clouds are not
made to give moisture, nor trees to cast shade. They were created for
the photographer.”
In short, Virgil Hoyt’s view of the world is whimsical, and he doesn’t
like to be bothered with anything disagreeable. That is the reason that
he loathes and detests going to a house of mourning to photograph a
corpse. The horribly bad taste of it offends him partly, and partly he
is annoyed at having to shoulder, even for a few moments, a part of
someone’s burden of sorrow. He doesn’t like sorrow, and would willingly
canoe 500 miles up the cold Canadian rivers to get rid of it.
Nevertheless, as assistant photographer, it is often his duty to do this
very kind of thing.
Not long ago he was sent for by a rich Jewish family at St. Paul to
photograph the mother, who had just died. He was very much put out, but
he went. He was taken to the front parlor, where the dead woman lay in
her coffin. It was evident that there was some excitement in the
household and that a discussion was going on, but Hoyt wasn’t concerned,
and so he paid no attention to the matter.
The daughter wanted the coffin turned on end, in order that the corpse
might face the camera properly, but Hoyt said he could overcome the
recumbent attitude and make it appear that the face was taken in the
position it would naturally hold in life, and so they went out and left
him alone with the dead.
The face was a strong and positive one, such as may often be seen among
Jewish matrons. Hoyt regarded it with some admiration, thinking to
himself that she was a woman who had been used to having her own way.
There was a strand of hair out of place, and he pushed it back from her
brow. A bud lifted its head too high from among the roses on her breast
and spoiled the contour of the chin, so he broke it off. He remembered
these things later very distinctly and that his hand touched her bare
face two or three times.
Then he took the photographs and left the house.
He was very busy at the time and several days elapsed before he was able
to develop the plates. He took them from the bath, in which they had
lain with a number of others, and went to work upon them. There were
three plates, he having taken that number merely as a precaution against
any accident. They came up well, but as they developed he became aware
of the existence of something in the photograph which had not been
apparent to his eye. The mysterious always came under the head of the
disagreeable with him, and was therefore to be banished, so he made only
a few prints and put the things away out of sight. He hoped that
something would intervene to save him from attempting an explanation.
But it is a part of the general perplexity of life that things do not
intervene as they ought and when they ought, so one day his employer
asked him what had become of those photographs. He
[Illustration: “_They left him alone with the dead._”]
tried to evade him, but it was futile, and he got out the finished
photographs and showed them to him. The older man sat staring at them a
long time.
“Hoyt,” said he, at length, “you’re a young man, and I suppose you have
never seen anything like this before. But I have. Not exactly the same
thing, but similar phenomena have come my way a number of times since I
went into the business, and I want to tell you there are things in
heaven and earth not dreamt of----”
“Oh, I know all that tommy-rot,” cried Hoyt, angrily, “but when anything
happens I want to know the reason why, and how it is done.”
“All right,” said his employer, “then you might explain why and how the
sun rises.”
But he humored the younger man sufficiently to examine with him the bath
in which the plates were submerged and the plates themselves. All was as
it should be. But the mystery was there and could not be done away with.
Hoyt hoped against hope that the friends of the dead woman would somehow
forget about the photographs, but of course the wish was unreasonable,
and one day the daughter appeared and asked to see the photographs of
her mother.
“Well, to tell the truth,” stammered Hoyt, “those didn’t come out as
well as we could wish.”
“But let me see them,” persisted the lady. “I’d like to look at them,
anyway.”
[Illustration: “_He showed her the prints._”]
“Well, now,” said Hoyt, trying to be soothing, as he believed it was
always best to be with women--to tell the truth, he was an ignoramus
where women were concerned--“I think it would be better if you didn’t
see them. There are reasons why----” he ambled on like this, stupid man
that he was, and of course the Jewess said she would see those pictures
without any further delay.
So poor Hoyt brought them out and placed them in her hand, and then ran
for the water pitcher, and had to be at the bother of bathing her
forehead to keep her from fainting.
For what the lady saw was this: Over face and flowers and the head of
the coffin fell a thick veil, the edges of which touched the floor in
some places. It covered the features so well that not a hint of them was
visible.
“There was nothing over mother’s face,” cried the lady at length.
“Not a thing,” acquiesced Hoyt. “I know, because I had occasion to touch
her face just before I took the picture. I put some of her hair back
from her brow.”
“What does it mean, then?” asked the lady.
“You know better than I. There is no explanation in science. Perhaps
there is some in psychology.”
“Well,” said the lady, stammering a little and coloring, “mother was a
good woman, but she always wanted her own way, and she always had it,
too.”
“Yes?”
“And she never would have her picture taken. She didn’t admire herself.
She said no one should ever see a picture of hers.”
“So?” said Hoyt, meditatively. “Well, she’s kept her word, hasn’t she?”
The two stood looking at the pictures for a time. Then Hoyt pointed to
the open blaze in the grate.
“Throw them in,” he commanded. “Don’t let your father see them--don’t
keep them yourself. They wouldn’t be good things to keep.”
“That’s true enough,” said the lady, slowly. And she threw them in the
fire. Then Virgil Hoyt brought out the plates and broke them before her
eyes.
And that was the end of it--except that Hoyt sometimes tells the story
to those who sit beside him when his pipe is lighted.
THE GHOST OF A LIVE MAN.
We were in the South Atlantic Ocean, in the latitude of the island of
Fernando Norohna, about 40 degrees 12 minutes south, on board the barque
H. G. Johnson, homeward bound from Australia. I was the only passenger,
and we had safely rounded Cape Horn, with the barometer at 28 degrees 18
minutes, and yet had somehow miraculously escaped any extremely heavy
gale--had had light northerly and easterly winds till we reached 20
degrees, and thence the southeast trades were sending us fast on our way
to the equator. I sat on deck smoking my pipe, with a glorious full moon
shedding its bright pathway across the blue waters, and chatting with
the first mate, a man some fifty-eight years of age, who had followed
the sea since he was a boy. For twenty years or more he had been mate or
captain, and many and varied were the experiences he could relate. A
thorough sailor and skillful navigator, he was as honest as the day is
long--had a heart as big as an ox and was an all-round good fellow and
genial companion. Some of his yarns might be taken cum grano salis, yet
he always positively assured me that he “was telling me the truth.” An
account of a voyage that he made in a whaler from the Southern Ocean to
New Bedford seemed to me worthy to be repeated. He had rounded Cape Horn
six times and the Cape of Good Hope twenty-six times, besides making
many trips across the Western Ocean and to South American ports. I give
his account as near as possible in his own words:
“It was in ’71 that I commanded the whaler Mary Jane. We had been out
from home over three years, and had on board a full cargo of whale oil,
besides 2,000 pounds of whalebone, which was then worth $5 per pound. I
also had been fortunate enough to find in a dead whale which we came
across a large quantity of ambergris, and our hearts were all very light
as we began our homeward voyage, and our thoughts all tended to the
hearty welcome which we should receive from wives and sweethearts when
we reached our journey’s end. Many a night as I lay in my berth I had
thought with great pleasure of the amount of money that would be coming
to me from the proceeds of our voyage when we arrived in New Bedford.
“I calculated that I had made $12,000 as my share of the proceeds of the
whalebone and oil--to say nothing of the ambergris, which I well knew
would bring at least $20,000, and one-half of which belonged to me. You
can therefore imagine that I was well pleased with myself as we went
bounding along through the southeast trades. We crossed the equator in
longitude 36 and soon after took strong northeast trades, and all was
going as well as I could wish. We had put the ship in perfect order,
painted her inside and out, and you would never have recognized her as
the old whaling ship that had for three years been plying the Southern
Ocean for whales. Never shall I forget an old bull whale that we tackled
about two degrees to the south of Cape Horn--but that is another story,
which I will give you another time.
“We had just lost the northeast trades and were entering the Gulf
Stream. I sat in my cabin with my chart on the table before me rolled
up. I had just picked our location on it, and was thinking that in a
week more I should be at home, surrounded by those near and dear to me,
and relating to them the story of my great good fortune.
“It was always my custom to work up my latitude and longitude about four
o’clock in the afternoon, and then after supper pick off her position on
the chart, have a smoke and perhaps just before retiring a nip of grog,
and then at 8.30 o’clock, as regular as a clock, I would turn in.
“I am a great smoker, and this day I had been smoking all the afternoon,
besides having had two or three nips. We had a dog on board whom we
called ‘Bosun,’ who had been out with us all the voyage, and who was
afraid of nothing. He had endeared himself to every man on board, and
when Bosun ‘took water’ something very serious was in the wind. This
night as I sat in the cabin I heard a most dismal howl from Bosun, and
called out to the mate to know what was the matter with the dog. He
replied that he ‘reckoned some of the men had been teasing him,’ and the
occurrence soon passed from my mind.
“Suddenly I saw someone coming down the after companion way into the
cabin. I supposed at first it was the mate and wondered that he had not
first spoken to me, but then I noticed that he wore clothes I had never
seen on the mate, and as he advanced into the cabin I saw his face. It
was the face of a man I had never seen in my life. He was thin and pale
and haggard, and as he advanced he looked about the cabin and at the
rolled up chart on the table. There seemed to be an appeal in his eyes,
and then there swept over his face a look of intense disappointment, and
before I could move or speak, he had vanished from my sight.
“Now I am a very practical man, and I at once straightened myself in my
chair and said to myself: ‘Well, old man, you have smoked one too many
pipes to-day, or else you have had one drink too much, for you have been
asleep in your chair and seen a ghost.’ I was quite satisfied that I
had had a dream, especially as I called to the mate and asked him if he
had seen anyone come below. He said no; that he had not left the deck
for the last hour, and the man at the wheel, directly in front of the
door, was sure no one had entered the cabin, so I convinced myself that
I had had a very vivid dream--though I could not help thinking of the
matter all through the next day.