Three Ghost Stories
“A hooded woman with an owl. Dear me! Did you ever see her?”
“I seen the howl.”
“Never the woman?”
“Not so plain as the howl, but they always keeps together.”
“Has anybody ever seen the woman as plainly as the owl?”
“Lord bless you, sir! Lots.”
“Who?”
“Lord bless you, sir! Lots.”
“The general-dealer opposite, for instance, who is opening his shop?”
“Perkins? Bless you, Perkins wouldn’t go a-nigh the place. No!”
observed the young man, with considerable feeling; “he an’t overwise,
an’t Perkins, but he an’t such a fool as _that_.”
(Here, the landlord murmured his confidence in Perkins’s knowing better.)
“Who is—or who was—the hooded woman with the owl? Do you know?”
“Well!” said Ikey, holding up his cap with one hand while he scratched
his head with the other, “they say, in general, that she was murdered,
and the howl he ’ooted the while.”
This very concise summary of the facts was all I could learn, except that
a young man, as hearty and likely a young man as ever I see, had been
took with fits and held down in ’em, after seeing the hooded woman.
Also, that a personage, dimly described as “a hold chap, a sort of
one-eyed tramp, answering to the name of Joby, unless you challenged him
as Greenwood, and then he said, ‘Why not? and even if so, mind your own
business,’” had encountered the hooded woman, a matter of five or six
times. But, I was not materially assisted by these witnesses: inasmuch
as the first was in California, and the last was, as Ikey said (and he
was confirmed by the landlord), Anywheres.
Now, although I regard with a hushed and solemn fear, the mysteries,
between which and this state of existence is interposed the barrier of
the great trial and change that fall on all the things that live; and
although I have not the audacity to pretend that I know anything of them;
I can no more reconcile the mere banging of doors, ringing of bells,
creaking of boards, and such-like insignificances, with the majestic
beauty and pervading analogy of all the Divine rules that I am permitted
to understand, than I had been able, a little while before, to yoke the
spiritual intercourse of my fellow-traveller to the chariot of the rising
sun. Moreover, I had lived in two haunted houses—both abroad. In one of
these, an old Italian palace, which bore the reputation of being very
badly haunted indeed, and which had recently been twice abandoned on that
account, I lived eight months, most tranquilly and pleasantly:
notwithstanding that the house had a score of mysterious bedrooms, which
were never used, and possessed, in one large room in which I sat reading,
times out of number at all hours, and next to which I slept, a haunted
chamber of the first pretensions. I gently hinted these considerations
to the landlord. And as to this particular house having a bad name, I
reasoned with him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and
how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I
were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking, old
drunken tinker of the neighbourhood had sold himself to the Devil, he
would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this
wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to
confess, and was as dead a failure as ever I made in my life.
To cut this part of the story short, I was piqued about the haunted
house, and was already half resolved to take it. So, after breakfast, I
got the keys from Perkins’s brother-in-law (a whip and harness maker, who
keeps the Post Office, and is under submission to a most rigorous wife of
the Doubly Seceding Little Emmanuel persuasion), and went up to the
house, attended by my landlord and by Ikey.
Within, I found it, as I had expected, transcendently dismal. The slowly
changing shadows waved on it from the heavy trees, were doleful in the
last degree; the house was ill-placed, ill-built, ill-planned, and
ill-fitted. It was damp, it was not free from dry rot, there was a
flavour of rats in it, and it was the gloomy victim of that indescribable
decay which settles on all the work of man’s hands whenever it’s not
turned to man’s account. The kitchens and offices were too large, and
too remote from each other. Above stairs and below, waste tracts of
passage intervened between patches of fertility represented by rooms; and
there was a mouldy old well with a green growth upon it, hiding like a
murderous trap, near the bottom of the back-stairs, under the double row
of bells. One of these bells was labelled, on a black ground in faded
white letters, MASTER B. This, they told me, was the bell that rang the
most.
“Who was Master B.?” I asked. “Is it known what he did while the owl
hooted?”
“Rang the bell,” said Ikey.
I was rather struck by the prompt dexterity with which this young man
pitched his fur cap at the bell, and rang it himself. It was a loud,
unpleasant bell, and made a very disagreeable sound. The other bells
were inscribed according to the names of the rooms to which their wires
were conducted: as “Picture Room,” “Double Room,” “Clock Room,” and the
like. Following Master B.’s bell to its source I found that young
gentleman to have had but indifferent third-class accommodation in a
triangular cabin under the cock-loft, with a corner fireplace which
Master B. must have been exceedingly small if he were ever able to warm
himself at, and a corner chimney-piece like a pyramidal staircase to the
ceiling for Tom Thumb. The papering of one side of the room had dropped
down bodily, with fragments of plaster adhering to it, and almost blocked
up the door. It appeared that Master B., in his spiritual condition,
always made a point of pulling the paper down. Neither the landlord nor
Ikey could suggest why he made such a fool of himself.
Except that the house had an immensely large rambling loft at top, I made
no other discoveries. It was moderately well furnished, but sparely.
Some of the furniture—say, a third—was as old as the house; the rest was
of various periods within the last half-century. I was referred to a
corn-chandler in the market-place of the county town to treat for the
house. I went that day, and I took it for six months.
It was just the middle of October when I moved in with my maiden sister
(I venture to call her eight-and-thirty, she is so very handsome,
sensible, and engaging). We took with us, a deaf stable-man, my
bloodhound Turk, two women servants, and a young person called an Odd
Girl. I have reason to record of the attendant last enumerated, who was
one of the Saint Lawrence’s Union Female Orphans, that she was a fatal
mistake and a disastrous engagement.
The year was dying early, the leaves were falling fast, it was a raw cold
day when we took possession, and the gloom of the house was most
depressing. The cook (an amiable woman, but of a weak turn of intellect)
burst into tears on beholding the kitchen, and requested that her silver
watch might be delivered over to her sister (2 Tuppintock’s Gardens,
Liggs’s Walk, Clapham Rise), in the event of anything happening to her
from the damp. Streaker, the housemaid, feigned cheerfulness, but was
the greater martyr. The Odd Girl, who had never been in the country,
alone was pleased, and made arrangements for sowing an acorn in the
garden outside the scullery window, and rearing an oak.
We went, before dark, through all the natural—as opposed to
supernatural—miseries incidental to our state. Dispiriting reports
ascended (like the smoke) from the basement in volumes, and descended
from the upper rooms. There was no rolling-pin, there was no salamander
(which failed to surprise me, for I don’t know what it is), there was
nothing in the house, what there was, was broken, the last people must
have lived like pigs, what could the meaning of the landlord be? Through
these distresses, the Odd Girl was cheerful and exemplary. But within
four hours after dark we had got into a supernatural groove, and the Odd
Girl had seen “Eyes,” and was in hysterics.
My sister and I had agreed to keep the haunting strictly to ourselves,
and my impression was, and still is, that I had not left Ikey, when he
helped to unload the cart, alone with the women, or any one of them, for
one minute. Nevertheless, as I say, the Odd Girl had “seen Eyes” (no
other explanation could ever be drawn from her), before nine, and by ten
o’clock had had as much vinegar applied to her as would pickle a handsome
salmon.
I leave a discerning public to judge of my feelings, when, under these
untoward circumstances, at about half-past ten o’clock Master B.’s bell
began to ring in a most infuriated manner, and Turk howled until the
house resounded with his lamentations!
I hope I may never again be in a state of mind so unchristian as the
mental frame in which I lived for some weeks, respecting the memory of
Master B. Whether his bell was rung by rats, or mice, or bats, or wind,
or what other accidental vibration, or sometimes by one cause, sometimes
another, and sometimes by collusion, I don’t know; but, certain it is,
that it did ring two nights out of three, until I conceived the happy
idea of twisting Master B.’s neck—in other words, breaking his bell short
off—and silencing that young gentleman, as to my experience and belief,
for ever.
But, by that time, the Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of
catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very
inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with
unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants
in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.’s
room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.’s bell away and balked the
ringing, and if they could suppose that that confounded boy had lived and
died, to clothe himself with no better behaviour than would most
unquestionably have brought him and the sharpest particles of a
birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of
existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I
was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and limiting
the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?—I
say I would become emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in
such an address, when it would all go for nothing by reason of the Odd
Girl’s suddenly stiffening from the toes upward, and glaring among us
like a parochial petrifaction.
Streaker, the housemaid, too, had an attribute of a most discomfiting
nature. I am unable to say whether she was of an unusually lymphatic
temperament, or what else was the matter with her, but this young woman
became a mere Distillery for the production of the largest and most
transparent tears I ever met with. Combined with these characteristics,
was a peculiar tenacity of hold in those specimens, so that they didn’t
fall, but hung upon her face and nose. In this condition, and mildly and
deplorably shaking her head, her silence would throw me more heavily than
the Admirable Crichton could have done in a verbal disputation for a
purse of money. Cook, likewise, always covered me with confusion as with
a garment, by neatly winding up the session with the protest that the
Ouse was wearing her out, and by meekly repeating her last wishes
regarding her silver watch.
As to our nightly life, the contagion of suspicion and fear was among us,
and there is no such contagion under the sky. Hooded woman? According
to the accounts, we were in a perfect Convent of hooded women. Noises?
With that contagion downstairs, I myself have sat in the dismal parlour,
listening, until I have heard so many and such strange noises, that they