Читать книгу Twenty Years' Experience as a Ghost Hunter - O'Donnell Elliott - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Upon leaving Scotland I seriously considered my future, and at length decided to go to Oregon and fruit farm. Though the expedition, through no fault of my own, proved a failure, and I had to return to England within a comparatively short time, I managed, whilst in America, to see and learn a good deal. Apart from visiting Crater Lake, which in those days was one of the wildest spots imaginable, far out of the beat of any but the most adventurous tourist, and seeing the Rogue River Indians in their native element, I spent several weeks in the big cities, and when in San Francisco obtained the services of a guide, and did a nightly tour of China Town, and several of the lesser known subterranean haunts of that city.

It was in San Francisco that I had my first experience with an American ghost. I had been out tramping all day along the southern side of the bay, and it was close on midnight before I got back to the city, feeling thoroughly done up and very footsore. The last chime of twelve o’clock sounded, as I swung wearily round 117th Street into a narrow thoroughfare leading to the obscure quarter of the town in which my finances forced me to live. As I came within sight of the end house of a block of low old-fashioned buildings, I received something of a shock. I had passed by it that morning and had noticed that it was to let. I was quite sure of this, because there was something about the house that had especially attracted my attention. I was struck with its utter loneliness, its air of past grandeur—so oddly at variance with the modern and mediocre buildings around it—and, peeping in at the windows, I had taken stock of its big oak-panelled apartments devoid of furniture and bestrewn with dust and cobwebs.

Now, to my astonishment, I perceived a bright glow—a kind of phosphorescent light—emanating from one of the rooms on the ground floor. I approached nearer, and, as I leaned against the verandah and peered in, it suddenly seemed to me that the room was no longer empty, but richly carpetted and full of ponderous, old-fashioned furniture. I also seemed to see in the centre of the room a long table covered with a snowy cloth, on which were arranged, in rich profusion, many handsome silver dishes containing a selection of the choicest food. I was dumbfounded. Twelve hours ago there was not a soul to be seen about the house nor a particle of furniture in it, and now!—well, it looked to me as if it never, never had been empty.

Whilst I was thus meditating, my face glued to the window, I thought that a sudden blaze illuminated the room, and by degrees I became conscious of the glare of countless candles, some of the candelabra branching from the walls, and others—of chased silver—standing on the table. I then saw the door at the far end of the apartment open, and a young and charming girl, dressed à la mode de Marie Antoinette, her gown high-waisted and her hair poudré, hurriedly enter. She gave a quick glance at the table, and then, advancing to the fireplace, where, for the first time, I perceived the cheery glow of a huge log of wood, gazed at herself in a large, richly-framed mirror. The reflection evidently pleased her, for she turned round all smiles; and then her eyes fell on the window, and on me.

In an instance her countenance changed. Putting a finger to her lips with a great air of mystery, she beckoned to me to come in. I started back in confusion. Again she beckoned, and with such pretty pleading in her eyes that, despite my travel-stained clothes, I yielded. I walked to the front door; she opened it, and in hushed tones, in which I detected a slight French accent, she bade me welcome.

“We are having a fancy-dress dance,” she said, “but none of the guests have as yet arrived, and I want you to come into the ball-room while I rehearse some of the dance music.”

She led the way across a big, deserted and strangely silent hall, up a flight of thickly-carpeted stairs, along a dimly lighted corridor, peopled with nothing but odd shadows, to which I could see no material counterparts, and into a room obviously prepared for a ball.

“There is no one about but you and I,” she said laughingly. “Only we two; but someone else will arrive soon. It’s not half-past twelve, is it?”

“No,” I said; “twenty past.”

“Ten more minutes!” She sighed deeply, and her expression, which up to now had been one of gay mischief, changed to one of immeasurable sadness. Then she nodded, suddenly burst out laughing, and casting the most bewitching look at me from out her long, thickly lashed blue-grey eyes, sat down at the piano and began to play a Strauss waltz.

Fascinated though I was by her extreme archness and beauty, I could not stifle the thousand and one uncomfortable thoughts that speedily crowded into my mind.

Who was this strangely friendly and peculiarly solitary girl? Surely someone must have helped her prepare the house and supper. Where were they? Besides, she couldn’t possibly live in that house alone.

And yet, apart from the music—which seemed to reverberate through every stick and stone of the building—there was no other sound. I might have been alone with her on some desert island in the far Pacific.

A feeling of intense but wholly unaccountable fear gradually crept over me.

“It is close on the half hour,” she suddenly whispered. “Listen!”

She paused for a moment, and I heard a door from somewhere in the lower part of the house open and shut. Then came the sound of muffled footsteps, stealthily feeling their way upstairs. Up and up they came, till they arrived outside the door of the room we were in. There they stopped, and I instinctively felt that their owner was listening.

Presently the girl recommenced playing, and I saw the door-handle began to turn. Slowly, very slowly, the door then opened, and on the floor of the room there appeared a black shadow—vague, indefinite and grotesque. The girl looked over her shoulder at it, and I caught an expression in her eyes that appalled me. Turning to the piano again, she played frantically, and the faster her fingers flew, the nearer crept that shadow.

Suddenly it seemed to shoot right forward, there was a wild scream of terror, a terrific crash, and all was in absolute darkness.

I groped my way frantically towards the door. Something—I could not define what—came into violent collision with me; I staggered back half stunned; and, when my brain cleared, I found myself standing in the street, weak with exhaustion, and—hatless.

I visited the house the next day, when the sun was shining brightly and there were plenty of people about. It was as I had first seen it, untenanted and unfurnished.

I must then have dreamed the whole thing. And what more likely! I was excessively tired at the time, so tired that I felt I could hardly crawl home—and without a doubt I had dropped off to sleep resting against the verandah.

Just out of curiosity, however, I determined to find out if the interior of the house in any way resembled the interior I had seen in my dream, and, with that object in view, I applied to Mr. C.——, the owner, for permission to look over it, frankly telling him why I was doing so. As he appeared to be interested, I described my dream to him in detail, and he afterwards told me the following story:—

“About fifty years ago, a very rich French family occupied the house; and at the coming of age of their daughter they gave a fancy-dress ball. Among the guests was an Italian, who, being a rejected suitor of the daughter’s, had not been invited. He appeared in some grotesque and alarming costume, and when the dance was at its height suddenly overturned a large oil lamp.

“In a moment the whole floor was ablaze; and before anyone could stop him, he had seized the daughter of the house and hurled her into the midst of the flaming mass. Both he and the girl were burned to death, and the house, although it was thoroughly restored, has never let since.”

Having concluded his story, Mr. C.—— said he would like to go with me to the house, and accordingly we set out together.

Though my experience had been only a dream, the coincidence connected with it, which only needed my identification of the scene to be complete, was startling enough, and I grew more and more excited as we neared our destination. When we arrived, Mr. C.—— insisted upon my going first; and once inside, recognising every feature in the house, I led him first to the room in which I had seen the supper-table laid, and then upstairs to the ball-room, where, to my unspeakable surprise, lying in the middle of the floor, I found my hat.

.......

What a strangely fascinating city was old San Francisco—that is to say, San Francisco before the last great fire and earthquake! Consisting of street upon street, terrace upon terrace of quaintly irregular buildings, to me its atmosphere—as no other atmosphere ever has been—was impregnated with the superphysical. I stayed for a few days in a vast hotel in 117th Street, in which I was the only visitor. I shrewdly suspect it was haunted, although I cannot truthfully say that I ever saw a ghost there, and when I retired to bed up flight after flight of stairs, and past dimly-lighted passages teeming with doors—doors with nothing, nothing material at least, behind them—the only sounds I heard were the hollow echoes of my own footsteps as I went on ascending higher, higher, and higher.

Hearing, however, that I was interested in ghosts, the landlord of the hotel introduced me one day to a Mr. Sweeney, who kept a drug store in Market Street.

“The only experience I ever had with the Supernatural,” Mr. Sweeney began, in answer to my interrogations, “took place in this very room. Exactly twelve years ago I engaged the services of a young man called Edward Marsdon. He was very amiable and capable, but highly-strung and hypernormally sensitive. He had been with me about six months, when he came into the parlour one evening with a face like a corpse. ‘I’ve poisoned someone,’ he gasped. ‘Poisoned someone?’ I ejaculated. ‘Good God, what do you mean?’ ‘What I say,’ he replied. ‘A young fellow came into the store about an hour ago and handed me a prescription. It was signed by Dr. Knelligan, of 111th Street. I made it up, as I thought, all right, and gave it him. A few minutes ago, I found I had put in salts of lemon instead of paregoric.’ ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Certain!’ he said, ‘as the bottle of salts of lemon is on the table in the laboratory with the stopper out. I must have used it in mistake. The young man will die, if, indeed, he is not dead already, and I am ruined for life.’ ‘We both are,’ I said tersely. ‘Ring up Dr. Knelligan at once, and ask him for the young man’s address. When you get it, drive round at once and see if you are in time.’ It was of no use scolding him for carelessness—he was upset enough already, and a ‘blowing up’ just then might, I thought, result in another tragedy. The only thing to be done was to hope for the best. He rang up Knelligan, got the address, drove round to it, and discovered that the young man had just left. The landlady had no idea where he had gone. To Marsdon this was the last straw. He came back in a state of utter collapse, trembling all over as if he had ague, and, after telling me what happened, he went upstairs and slammed his door. About a quarter of an hour later, my wife, the servant, and I all heard Marsdon, so we thought, come downstairs and go out. The servant then went up to his room to make the bed, and hearing her scream out, I ran upstairs, to find her standing in the middle of the floor, wringing her hands, whilst Marsdon was sitting in a chair—dead! He had been dead some minutes. That, Mr. O’Donnell, was the beginning of the strange occurrences here. If it was not Marsdon whom we all heard go out, who could it have been? There was no one in the house but we three, and the body in the chair upstairs, so that it must have been Marsdon’s ghost. Well, from that day on, we had no peace.

“Footsteps, which we all recognised as Marsdon’s, for he had a most peculiar lumping kind of walk, trod up and down the stairs all hours of the day and night, and frequently when I was in the laboratory mixing medicines I was strongly conscious of some presence standing close beside me and watching everything I did. One day my wife saw him. She was going out, and wanting some money, she called to me. As I did not answer, she went in search of me, and finding me, as she thought, standing on the hearthrug of the parlour with my back to her, she touched me on the shoulder. The next moment she discovered her mistake. The person whom she had mistaken for me turned round, and she found herself confronted with the white, scared countenance of Edward Marsdon. She started back with a loud shriek, and Marsdon walked out of the room, and apparently right through the servant who came running in to see what was the matter. My wife asked the maid if she had seen anything, and the latter said, ‘No, only a dark shadow seemed to fall right across me, and just for a second or so I felt miserably depressed.’ A week or so afterwards he was again seen; this time by my wife and the maid. They met him on the stairs. He appeared to be under the influence of some very painful emotion, and he passed them at a great rate, and so near that they felt his clothes—apparently quite material—brush against them. He disappeared in the laboratory, and on their entering it immediately afterwards, there was no one there. Something of this nature—either auditory or visual, or both—now happened pretty well daily, until one morning a young man came to the store to see me. ‘I am the young man,’ he said, ‘to whom your assistant gave that unfortunate mixture. I have just returned to San Francisco, and have heard all about it. The medicine was perfectly all right. I drank it directly I left here, and it did me the world of good. There was not even the suspicion of poison in it. Marsdon was labouring under some extraordinary delusion. If only he had told my landlady about it when he called and found I had gone, she could have given him the glass I had drank out of, which doubtless contained some dregs of the stuff—at any rate, a sufficient quantity for analysis. I am told there are rumours afloat that his apparition has been seen several times since he died; not that I believe in such things as ghosts.’

“‘Whether you believe in them or not,’ I said quietly, ‘it is a fact Edward Marsdon has both been seen and heard.’ ‘Then I hope,’ he said, ‘my visit here to-day will put matters all right, and that his poor, wandering spirit, learning that I am alive and well, will find rest, and trouble you no more.’ He then bid me good-morning and walked towards the door. ‘My God!’ he suddenly cried, coming to an abrupt halt, ‘there he is!’ I looked, and as sure as I am sitting here, Mr. O’Donnell, there was Edward Marsdon, just as I had known him in life, standing on the pavement with his face glued to the window, peering in at us. The expression in his eyes was one of infinite joy and astonishment.

“I took a step or two towards him with the intention of speaking, when he immediately vanished, and from that day to this the hauntings have entirely ceased.”