Twenty-Five Ghost Stories
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
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.”
“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