Three Ghost Stories
would have chilled my blood if I had not warmed it by dashing out to make
discoveries. Try this in bed, in the dead of the night: try this at your
own comfortable fire-side, in the life of the night. You can fill any
house with noises, if you will, until you have a noise for every nerve in
your nervous system.
I repeat; the contagion of suspicion and fear was among us, and there is
no such contagion under the sky. The women (their noses in a chronic
state of excoriation from smelling-salts) were always primed and loaded
for a swoon, and ready to go off with hair-triggers. The two elder
detached the Odd Girl on all expeditions that were considered doubly
hazardous, and she always established the reputation of such adventures
by coming back cataleptic. If Cook or Streaker went overhead after dark,
we knew we should presently hear a bump on the ceiling; and this took
place so constantly, that it was as if a fighting man were engaged to go
about the house, administering a touch of his art which I believe is
called The Auctioneer, to every domestic he met with.
It was in vain to do anything. It was in vain to be frightened, for the
moment in one’s own person, by a real owl, and then to show the owl. It
was in vain to discover, by striking an accidental discord on the piano,
that Turk always howled at particular notes and combinations. It was in
vain to be a Rhadamanthus with the bells, and if an unfortunate bell rang
without leave, to have it down inexorably and silence it. It was in vain
to fire up chimneys, let torches down the well, charge furiously into
suspected rooms and recesses. We changed servants, and it was no better.
The new set ran away, and a third set came, and it was no better. At
last, our comfortable housekeeping got to be so disorganised and
wretched, that I one night dejectedly said to my sister: “Patty, I begin
to despair of our getting people to go on with us here, and I think we
must give this up.”
My sister, who is a woman of immense spirit, replied, “No, John, don’t
give it up. Don’t be beaten, John. There is another way.”
“And what is that?” said I.
“John,” returned my sister, “if we are not to be driven out of this
house, and that for no reason whatever, that is apparent to you or me, we
must help ourselves and take the house wholly and solely into our own
hands.”
“But, the servants,” said I.
“Have no servants,” said my sister, boldly.
Like most people in my grade of life, I had never thought of the
possibility of going on without those faithful obstructions. The notion
was so new to me when suggested, that I looked very doubtful. “We know
they come here to be frightened and infect one another, and we know they
are frightened and do infect one another,” said my sister.
“With the exception of Bottles,” I observed, in a meditative tone.
(The deaf stable-man. I kept him in my service, and still keep him, as a
phenomenon of moroseness not to be matched in England.)
“To be sure, John,” assented my sister; “except Bottles. And what does
that go to prove? Bottles talks to nobody, and hears nobody unless he is
absolutely roared at, and what alarm has Bottles ever given, or taken!
None.”
This was perfectly true; the individual in question having retired, every
night at ten o’clock, to his bed over the coach-house, with no other
company than a pitchfork and a pail of water. That the pail of water
would have been over me, and the pitchfork through me, if I had put
myself without announcement in Bottles’s way after that minute, I had
deposited in my own mind as a fact worth remembering. Neither had
Bottles ever taken the least notice of any of our many uproars. An
imperturbable and speechless man, he had sat at his supper, with Streaker
present in a swoon, and the Odd Girl marble, and had only put another
potato in his cheek, or profited by the general misery to help himself to
beefsteak pie.
“And so,” continued my sister, “I exempt Bottles. And considering, John,
that the house is too large, and perhaps too lonely, to be kept well in
hand by Bottles, you, and me, I propose that we cast about among our
friends for a certain selected number of the most reliable and
willing—form a Society here for three months—wait upon ourselves and one
another—live cheerfully and socially—and see what happens.”
I was so charmed with my sister, that I embraced her on the spot, and
went into her plan with the greatest ardour.
We were then in the third week of November; but, we took our measures so
vigorously, and were so well seconded by the friends in whom we confided,
that there was still a week of the month unexpired, when our party all
came down together merrily, and mustered in the haunted house.
I will mention, in this place, two small changes that I made while my
sister and I were yet alone. It occurring to me as not improbable that
Turk howled in the house at night, partly because he wanted to get out of
it, I stationed him in his kennel outside, but unchained; and I seriously
warned the village that any man who came in his way must not expect to
leave him without a rip in his own throat. I then casually asked Ikey if
he were a judge of a gun? On his saying, “Yes, sir, I knows a good gun
when I sees her,” I begged the favour of his stepping up to the house and
looking at mine.
“_She’s_ a true one, sir,” said Ikey, after inspecting a double-barrelled
rifle that I bought in New York a few years ago. “No mistake about
_her_, sir.”
“Ikey,” said I, “don’t mention it; I have seen something in this house.”
“No, sir?” he whispered, greedily opening his eyes. “’Ooded lady, sir?”
“Don’t be frightened,” said I. “It was a figure rather like you.”
“Lord, sir?”
“Ikey!” said I, shaking hands with him warmly: I may say affectionately;
“if there is any truth in these ghost-stories, the greatest service I can
do you, is, to fire at that figure. And I promise you, by Heaven and
earth, I will do it with this gun if I see it again!”
The young man thanked me, and took his leave with some little
precipitation, after declining a glass of liquor. I imparted my secret
to him, because I had never quite forgotten his throwing his cap at the
bell; because I had, on another occasion, noticed something very like a
fur cap, lying not far from the bell, one night when it had burst out
ringing; and because I had remarked that we were at our ghostliest
whenever he came up in the evening to comfort the servants. Let me do
Ikey no injustice. He was afraid of the house, and believed in its being
haunted; and yet he would play false on the haunting side, so surely as
he got an opportunity. The Odd Girl’s case was exactly similar. She
went about the house in a state of real terror, and yet lied monstrously
and wilfully, and invented many of the alarms she spread, and made many
of the sounds we heard. I had had my eye on the two, and I know it. It
is not necessary for me, here, to account for this preposterous state of
mind; I content myself with remarking that it is familiarly known to
every intelligent man who has had fair medical, legal, or other watchful
experience; that it is as well established and as common a state of mind
as any with which observers are acquainted; and that it is one of the
first elements, above all others, rationally to be suspected in, and
strictly looked for, and separated from, any question of this kind.
To return to our party. The first thing we did when we were all
assembled, was, to draw lots for bedrooms. That done, and every bedroom,
and, indeed, the whole house, having been minutely examined by the whole
body, we allotted the various household duties, as if we had been on a
gipsy party, or a yachting party, or a hunting party, or were
shipwrecked. I then recounted the floating rumours concerning the hooded
lady, the owl, and Master B.: with others, still more filmy, which had
floated about during our occupation, relative to some ridiculous old
ghost of the female gender who went up and down, carrying the ghost of a
round table; and also to an impalpable Jackass, whom nobody was ever able
to catch. Some of these ideas I really believe our people below had
communicated to one another in some diseased way, without conveying them
in words. We then gravely called one another to witness, that we were
not there to be deceived, or to deceive—which we considered pretty much
the same thing—and that, with a serious sense of responsibility, we would
be strictly true to one another, and would strictly follow out the truth.
The understanding was established, that any one who heard unusual noises
in the night, and who wished to trace them, should knock at my door;
lastly, that on Twelfth Night, the last night of holy Christmas, all our
individual experiences since that then present hour of our coming
together in the haunted house, should be brought to light for the good of
all; and that we would hold our peace on the subject till then, unless on
some remarkable provocation to break silence.
We were, in number and in character, as follows:
First—to get my sister and myself out of the way—there were we two. In
the drawing of lots, my sister drew her own room, and I drew Master B.’s.
Next, there was our first cousin John Herschel, so called after the great
astronomer: than whom I suppose a better man at a telescope does not
breathe. With him, was his wife: a charming creature to whom he had been
married in the previous spring. I thought it (under the circumstances)
rather imprudent to bring her, because there is no knowing what even a
false alarm may do at such a time; but I suppose he knew his own business
best, and I must say that if she had been _my_ wife, I never could have
left her endearing and bright face behind. They drew the Clock Room.
Alfred Starling, an uncommonly agreeable young fellow of eight-and-twenty
for whom I have the greatest liking, was in the Double Room; mine,
usually, and designated by that name from having a dressing-room within
it, with two large and cumbersome windows, which no wedges _I_ was ever
able to make, would keep from shaking, in any weather, wind or no wind.
Alfred is a young fellow who pretends to be “fast” (another word for
loose, as I understand the term), but who is much too good and sensible
for that nonsense, and who would have distinguished himself before now,
if his father had not unfortunately left him a small independence of two
hundred a year, on the strength of which his only occupation in life has
been to spend six. I am in hopes, however, that his Banker may break, or
that he may enter into some speculation guaranteed to pay twenty per
cent.; for, I am convinced that if he could only be ruined, his fortune
is made. Belinda Bates, bosom friend of my sister, and a most
intellectual, amiable, and delightful girl, got the Picture Room. She
has a fine genius for poetry, combined with real business earnestness,
and “goes in”—to use an expression of Alfred’s—for Woman’s mission,
Woman’s rights, Woman’s wrongs, and everything that is woman’s with a
capital W, or is not and ought to be, or is and ought not to be. “Most
praiseworthy, my dear, and Heaven prosper you!” I whispered to her on the
first night of my taking leave of her at the Picture-Room door, “but
don’t overdo it. And in respect of the great necessity there is, my
darling, for more employments being within the reach of Woman than our
civilisation has as yet assigned to her, don’t fly at the unfortunate
men, even those men who are at first sight in your way, as if they were
the natural oppressors of your sex; for, trust me, Belinda, they do
sometimes spend their wages among wives and daughters, sisters, mothers,
aunts, and grandmothers; and the play is, really, not _all_ Wolf and Red