Читать книгу Twenty Years' Experience as a Ghost Hunter - O'Donnell Elliott - Страница 4

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Before I left the west of Ireland, I set out one day to investigate a case of haunting by fairies, which was alleged to take place nightly at the junction of four cross roads on the southern slope of the Wicklow mountains.

I found a spot that seemed to correspond with the description of the scene of the haunting given me by my informant, and kept a vigil there for two consecutive nights without experiencing any of the anticipated results. However, I intended giving the place another trial, and accordingly set out; but when within half a mile or so of my destination, I began to feel very tired, and having a bad cold on me besides, I decided to put up at a cottage I espied a short distance off, instead of pursuing my way further.

The cottage stood a little back from the main road, perhaps a hundred yards or so, and was connected with it by a narrow lane. The situation was one of intense loneliness; the nearest village was a good two miles away, and few people, other than occasional cyclists, ever passed along the high road after nightfall. At the time I am speaking of, the cottage was tenanted by a couple named Mullins. The man was a drover, and his wife one of the tallest women I have ever seen; she possessed, moreover, a pair of green-grey eyes, and these were remarkable, not only for their curious colouring, but for the impression they gave one that they were perpetually trying not to see too much. Apart from these peculiarities, she seemed ordinary enough, and I felt I was in the house of very worthy and hard-working people.

I went to bed early and was given the only spare room in the cottage. It faced the front and was immediately over the tiny parlour. As the linen was spotless and felt thoroughly dry, I had no scruples about getting in between the sheets, and, stretching myself out, I was soon fast asleep.

I awoke with violent palpitations of the heart to find the room bathed with moonlight; and, as all was absolutely silent, I concluded it must be far on into the night. Suddenly I heard footsteps—footsteps in the distance, running at a well-regulated pace. They rang out sharp and clear in the still air, and gradually became more and more distinct. I was wondering who the person could be, out at such an hour, when a dog, apparently in the yard at the back of the house, set up the most unearthly howling. The next moment I heard Mrs. Mullins speak, and, inadvertently, I listened.

“John,” she said, “do you hear the dog?”

“I should be deaf and dumb if I didn’t,” Mullins replied sleepily. “What is it?”

“What is it, indeed! Why the dog never barks like that unless there is a spirit about. Do you remember those knocks on the door the night Uncle Mike died, and how the dog howled then? There’s something of the same sort about to-night. Listen!”

The steps very were near now. I listened intently. The runner, I thought, must be wearing very extraordinary boots, for every step, so it seemed to me, was accompanied by a peculiar and almost metallic click.

“John,” Mrs. Mullins suddenly resumed, “do you hear those steps? What are they? It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard anyone running along the high road like that at this time of night. Hark! They’ve got to the turning—they’re in the lane—they’re coming here! Get up at once; go and bolt the front door. The thing’s evil—evil, I’m sure, and it’s someone of us here it’s after.”

The steps grew rapidly nearer, and Mullins, stumbling hastily down the stairs, bolted both the doors and swung to the little wooden shutters. A moment later, and I heard the steps come right up to the door. There was a momentary pause, then a series of terrific knocks.

“Cross yourself, John; for God’s sake cross yourself!” Mrs. Mullins cried. “And may the Holy Virgin protect us.” She then started praying loudly and vehemently, and, whether it was the effect of her prayers or not, the knocking gradually diminished in violence, and then ceased altogether.

“Come on up, John,” Mrs. Mullins called out; “the thing, whatever it is, has ceased troubling us, and we may go to sleep in peace.”

Mullins, needing no second bidding, joined his wife, and once again the whole place was wrapped in silence.

I must confess that, whilst the knocking continued, I had no desire whatever to look out of the window, but the moment it was over I got up and peered out. I could see right down the lane and for some distance along the high road.

There was no sign of anyone or anything that could in any way account for the disturbance—the landscape was brilliantly illuminated with moonlight, every stick and stone being plainly visible, and all nature seemed to be sleeping undisturbedly, as if no interruption in its ordinary routine had occurred. I got back into bed, and, falling into a gentle doze, slept soundly till the morning. After breakfast, Mrs. Mullins said, “You’re not thinking of spending another night here, sir, are you?”

“Why, no,” I replied. “I must be back in Dublin at my work by this afternoon.”

“I’m glad of that, sir,” she went on; “because I couldn’t let you stay. I suppose you heard the rapping, sir?”

“I did,” I replied; “and the footsteps—how do you account for them?”

“Only in one way,” she said; “they came after you. At least, that was my impression, and my impressions are seldom wrong. I seemed to see some terrible form—half animal and half human—something indescribably grotesque and unnatural—something, my instinct tells me, was wanting to get at you.”

Her description of the figure reminded me so strongly of the queer thing that tried to strangle me in the house near the Waterloo Road, that I narrated my experience to her.

“You may depend upon it, sir,” she said when I had finished, “that the ghost you have just told me about and the one that came to the cottage last night are the same. I have heard that spirits will sometimes attach themselves to persons who have been staying in the house they haunt, and that they will leave the house with them and follow them wherever they go. I only hope and trust that this one will never do you any harm, and that you will succeed in ridding yourself of it, but my husband and I feel, asking your pardon, that we should not like to have you sleep here again.”

I did not tell her that even had she been willing, nothing on earth would have induced me to stay, for whether she was right in her theory about the steps or not, the neighbourhood had lost all its charms for me. Indeed, when next I had a ghostly visitation, I hoped I should be quartered in a less isolated spot.

My aunt, Mrs. Meta O’Donnell, tells me that a relative of hers once had a remarkable encounter with fairies on the road between Ballinanty and the village of Hospital in County Limerick.

He was driving home one evening in his jaunting car, unaccompanied save by his servant, Dunkley, who was sitting with his back to him, when a number of little people—fairies—sprang on the car, and clambering up, tried to pull him off.

Finding that, owing to the vigour with which they pulled, he was actually slipping from his seat, he appealed to his servant for assistance; and the latter, doing as he was told, held on to him with all his strength, and thus prevented the little people from dragging him to the ground. Mrs. Meta O’Donnell is absolutely sure that her relative never took stimulants of any sort, and that he was in a perfectly normal state of mind when this event happened.

Nor is this road haunted only by fairies, for Mrs. Meta O’Donnell again tells me that this same relative of hers, when driving home on another occasion—this time with several friends—saw a man on horseback, in a hunting coat, suddenly leap the hedge, and, after riding for some distance by the side of the car, abruptly vanish. Two of the men who were with him, she believes, also witnessed this phenomenon.

It is a long step, seemingly, from the fairy to the banshee, but these two types of spirit have at least one trait in common, namely, exclusiveness; and the banshee, even more emphatically than the fairy, will have nought to do with the alien. It will attach itself only to the family of bona-fide Irish origin, only to the clan that has been associated with Irish soil for many generations.

With the kind permission of Mr. Ralph Shirley, I will here introduce, making only slight alterations, a few extracts from an article of mine on the banshee, which appeared in the “Occult Review” for September, 1913:

“Contemporary with fairies and the Feni, phantoms typical of the great lone hills of Wicklow and Connemara, and of the bare and wind-bitten cliffs of Galway, may well have been the banshees, which, attaching themselves for divers reasons to various chieftains and sons of chieftains, eventually became recognised as family ghosts or familiars.

“Many people have fallen in the error of imagining all banshees are moulded after one pattern. Nothing could be more fallacious. The banshee of the O’Rourkes, for example, does not resemble that of the O’Donnells; there are many forms of the banshee, each clan having a distinct one—or more than one—of its own. Some of the banshees are fair to look at, and some old, and foul, and terrifying; but their mission is invariably the same, i.e., to announce a death or some great family catastrophe.

“The banshee is never joyous; it is always either sad or malevolent. Sometimes it wails once, sometimes three times—the wail in some degree, but not altogether, resembling that of a woman in great trouble or agony; sometimes, again, it groans; and sometimes it sighs, or sings. In some clans the demonstrations are both visual and auditory, in others only visual; and in others, again, only auditory. There is no really old clan but has its banshee, and few members of that clan who are not, at some time or other of their lives, made aware of it.

“How well I recollect as a child being told by those who had experienced it, that a dreadful groaning and wailing had been heard the night prior to the death of a very near relative of mine in Africa. I enquired what made the wailing, and was informed ‘the banshee,’ or the ghost woman, who never fails to announce the death of an O’Donnell.

“Years later, when in the extreme West of England, my wife and I were awakened one night by a terrible wail, which sounded just outside our door. Beginning in a low key, it rose and rose, until it ended in a shrill scream, that in time died away in a horrible groan. The idea of the banshee at once flashed through my mind, for I felt none other but a banshee could have made such a sound.

“Still, to satisfy my wife, I jumped out of bed and went on to the landing; all was dark and silent, and outside their bedrooms were assembled the rest of the household, terrified, and eager to have an explanation of what had happened. We searched the whole house and the waste land outside, but there was nothing which could in any way account for the noise, and in the morning I received news of the death of someone very closely related to me.... Whilst some writers are inclined to treat the subject jocularly, and attribute the banshee either to obviously absurd physical causes, or to the abnormally imaginative powers they insist are the birthright of all Irishmen, others dive into the pseudo-profound compilations of modern Theosophy, and reappear with the pronouncement that banshees are not spirits at all—not entities hailing from the superphysical world—but mere thought germs, created by some remote ancestor of a clan, and wafted down from one generation to another of his descendants, an idea as nonsensical as it is extravagant, and which will not for an instant hold water when looked into by those who have had a bona-fide experience of the banshee or any other ghostly phenomenon. Indeed, it is only the latter who are capable of making observations of any value on such a subject, and all effort to describe or account for the superphysical by those who have never experienced it, no matter whether those efforts are made by theosophical savants, professional mediums or scientific experts, are, in my opinion, weightless, colourless and futile.

“A geologist may describe the hydrosphere, and an astronomer the moon, and their descriptions may be swallowed with tolerable composure and assurance, because we know that the laws of similarity and analogy, when applied to the physical, generally hold good; but no scientist can teach us anything about spiritual phenomena, because such things are actually without the realm of science, just as the game of marbles is entirely without the province of theology. It is our sensations, and our sensations only, that can guide and instruct us when dealing with the superphysical. I have heard the dying screams of a woman murdered beneath my window; I have heard on hill and plain the cries of coyottes, panthers, jackals and hyenas; and I have many times listened to the dismal hooting of night birds, when riding alone through the seclusion of giant forests; but there is something in the banshee’s cry that differs from all these, that fills one with a fear and awe, far—immeasurably far—beyond that produced by a sound which is merely physical. Imagine then what it is to be haunted all one’s life by such a grim harbinger of woe, to have it ever trailing in one’s wake, always ready and, maybe, eager to make itself heard the moment it detects, by its extraordinary and unhuman powers, the advent of death. One curious idiosyncrasy of the banshee is that it never manifests itself to the person whose death it is prognosticating. Other people may see or hear it, but the doomed one never, so that when every one present is aware of it but one, the fate of that one may be regarded as pretty well certain.

“And now once again, whence comes the banshee? From heaven or from hell? What is it? It is impossible to say; at the most one can only speculate. Some banshees appear to be mournful only; others unquestionably malevolent; and whereas some very closely resemble a woman, even though of a type long passed away, others, again, differ so much from our conception of any human being, that we can only imagine them to be spirits that never have been human, that belong to a genus wholly separate and distinct from the human genus, and that have only been brought into contact with this material plane through the medium of certain magical or spiritual rites practised by the Milesians, but for some unknown reason discontinued by their descendants. This appears to me quite a possible explanation of the origin of the banshee.

“One realizes, when dabbling in spiritualism to-day, one of the greatest dangers incurred is that of attracting to one certain undesirable, mischievous, and malignant spirits—call them elementals if you will—which, when so attracted, stick to one like the proverbial leech. And what happens to-day may very well have happened thousands of years ago; in all probability, the Unknown never changes; its ways and habits may be as constant as those of Nature, guided by laws and principles which may at times vary, but which, nevertheless, undergo no material alteration. The superphysical, attracted to the ancients as it is attracted to us to-day, would adhere to them as it now adheres to us. I cannot surmise more.

“Supposing then that this theory accounts for the one class of banshee, what accounts for the other—the other that so nearly tallies with the physical? Are the latter actual phantoms of the dead; of those that died some unnatural death, and have been earth-bound and clan-bound ever since? Maybe they are. Maybe they are the spirits of women, prehistoric or otherwise, who were either suicides or were murdered, or who themselves committed some very heinous offence; and they haunt the clan to which they owed their unhappy ending; or, in the event of themselves being the malefactors, the clan to which they belonged. From all this we can conclude that, whilst the origin and constitution of banshees vary, their mission is always the same—they are solely the prognosticators of misfortune. A sorry possession for anyone; and yet, how truly in accord with the nature of the country—with its general air of discontent and barrenness, with its rain-sodden soil and gloomy atmosphere—as an unkind critic might say, could anyone imagine the presence of cheerful spirits under such conditions?

“But the banshee has the one admirable trait which the average Englishman obstinately refuses to recognize in the material Irish—the trait of loyalty and constancy. It never forsakes the object of its attachment, but clings to it in all its vicissitudes and peregrinations with a loyalty and persistency that is unmatchable. It is thoroughly Irish, essentially Irish; the one thing, apart from disposition and character, that has remained exclusively Irish through long centuries of robbery and oppression; and which, in spite of assertions to the contrary, never has been, nor ever will be shared by other than the genuine clansman.

“The banshee is most fastidious in its tastes—it will have none of the pseudo-celt; none of the individual who, possessing an absolutely English name, and coming entirely of English forefathers, terms himself Irish merely because his ancestors happen to have settled in Ireland. That is nothing like exact enough for the banshee. Others may talk of it and write of it, but they can never honestly claim it; for the banshee belongs wholly and exclusively to the bona-fide O’s and Macs—and them, and them only, will it never cease to haunt so long as there is one of them left.”

My last experience with a ghost in Dublin took place just after I had been medically examined for the R.I.C., and to my intense grief had been rejected, owing to varicose veins, which the examining doctor told me were of a far too complicated nature to permit of an operation; consequently, although I had been “cramming” for two years, and my prospects of getting through the literary examination were deemed extremely fair, it was futile to go up for it, as all chance of my ever being in the R.I.C. was now at an end.

On the night of my failure to pass the medical I had gone to bed early, as I had a splitting headache, and, after vain efforts, had at length succeeded in falling asleep. I awoke just in time to hear a clock from somewhere in the downstairs premises of the house—I was then lodging in Lower Merrion Street—strike two, and almost immediately afterwards there came a loud laugh, just over my face, and so near to me that I seemed to feel the breath of the laughter fan my nostrils. Nothing I have ever heard before, or have ever heard since, was so repulsive as that laugh—it was the very incarnation of jeering, jibing mockery; of undying, inveterate hate. I felt that nothing but a spirit of unadulterated evil could have made such a noise, and that it had come to gloat over my misfortunes—to let me know how greatly it rejoiced at the cruel blow I had suffered. I naturally associated it with the ghost that had tried to strangle me, and my heart turned sick within me at the thought that such a horrible species of phantasm was still hovering near me. Should I ever be free from it? I was not quite so frightened, however, as I had been on the occasion of its visit to me in the house near the Waterloo Road, and determining to prevent myself from falling into that kind of paralytic condition again, in which all my muscles and faculties had remained alike spell-bound and useless, I sat up. The room was in pitch darkness, and everything was breathlessly still. I waited in this posture for some seconds, my heart beating like a sledge-hammer, and then, deriving assurance from the fact that nothing happened, I got out of bed and struck a light. The door was locked on the inside, and there was nothing in hiding that could in any way account for the noise. I went to the window, and, lifting it gently, peered out into the street. There was no moon, but many stars and lamp-lights enabled me to see that the street was absolutely empty—not even a policeman was in sight. I leaned far out, and from immediately beneath me, although no one was visible, there suddenly commenced the sound of running footsteps. Ringing out loud and clear, and accompanied by a queer familiar clicking, they seemed to follow the direction of the street towards Ely Place. I wanted to get back to bed, for I was lightly clad, and the air was cool and penetrating, but something compelled me to keep on listening, and so I remained with my neck craned over the window-sill, till the steps gradually grew fainter and fainter, and suddenly ceased altogether. And with their termination this early period of my ghostly experiences in Dublin terminated, too.