stated yesterday that she thought the whole thing was a matter of spite against the owner of the house. For the past week she heard vigorous knocking at her door. She went out once or twice, but could see no one in the immediate vicinity. She stood this patiently until the last couple of nights, when the “ghosts,” to whom she refers as human tricksters, made a peculiar noise on the roof of the house and apparently dangled a chain down the chimney. On one occasion she went out and looked up on the roof, but it being slanted, she thinks a party could avoid being seen by lying down on the opposite side behind the chimney.
Last night the noise became worse, so Mrs. Chenier has asked the policeman on the beat to keep a watch for the ghosts. The request will be complied with, and, if no cause for the noise can be discovered from the outside, the bobby will search inside. The house is a small one and the constable is confident of corralling the “spirits” in some way or another if they continue their pranks.
King’s County News, Hampton, New Brunswick., January 3, 1895
At one corner of my house is a tall, wide tower, rising high above the trees which surround it. In one of the upper rooms of this tower I work and think, and here in the evening and early part of the night, I used to be quite alone except for the ghosts.
Before I had come to this house, I knew that the tower was haunted but I did not mind that. As the ghosts had never done anyone any harm, I thought I should really be glad of their company which must certainly be different from the company of ordinary people. So, when I had arranged an upper room in the tower so that I might pleasantly work and think therein, I expected the ghosts to come to me, and should have been very much disappointed if they had not.
I did not exactly understand these ghosts, of which I had heard nothing definite except that they haunted the tower and I did not know in what way they would manifest themselves to me. It was not long, however, after I had begun to occupy the room before the ghosts came to me. One evening a little before Christmas, after everybody in the house but myself had gone to bed, and all was quiet outside and inside, I heard a knock and was on the point of saying “Come in!” when the knock was repeated and I found that it did not come from the door but from the wall. I smiled.
You cannot come in that way, I thought, unless there are secret doors in these walls, and even then you must open them for yourself.
I went on with my writing, but I soon looked up again, for I thought I heard a chair gently pushed back against the wall in a corner behind me, and almost immediately I heard a noise as if some little boy had dropped a number of marbles, or perhaps pennies, but there was no chair in the corner at which I looked, and there were no pennies nor marbles on the floor.
Night after night I heard my ghosts — for I had come to consider them as mine, which I had bought with the house — and although I could not see them there were so many ways in which they let me know they existed that I felt for them a sort of companionship. When in the quiet hours of early night I heard their gentle knocks I knew they would have been glad to come in, and I did not feel lonely.
Now and then I thought I heard the voices of the ghosts, sometimes outside, under my window, and sometimes behind me in the distant corner of the room. Their tones were low and plaintive, and I could not distinguish words or phrases, but it often seemed as if they were really speaking to me, and that I ought to try to understand and answer them. But I soon discovered that these voice-like sounds were caused by the vagrant breezes going up and down the tall chimney of the tower, making aeolian tones, not of music, but of vague and indistinct speech.
The winter passed, and at last there came a time when I saw one of the ghosts. It was in the dusk of an evening, early in spring, and just outside of an open window, that it appeared to me. It was as plain to my sight as if it had been painted in delicate half-tones against a somber background of tender foliage and evening sky.
It was clad from head to foot in softest gray, such as phantoms of the night are said to love, and over its shoulders and down its upright form were thrown the fleecy folds of a mantle so mistily gray that it seemed to blend into the dusky figure it partly shrouded. The moment I saw it I knew it saw me. Out of its cloudy grayness there shone two eyes, black, clear and sparkling, fixed upon me with questioning intensity. I sat gazing with checked breath at this ghost of the tower.
Suddenly I leaned forward — just a little — to get a better view of the apparition, when, like a bustling bubble, it was gone, and there was nothing before me but the background of foliage and evening sky.
Frequently after that I saw the ghost or it may have been one of the others, for it was difficult, with these gray visions, with which one must not speak or toward which it was hazardous to move even a hand, to become so well acquainted that I should know one from another. But there they were; not only did I hear them; not only, night after night, did my ears assure me of their existence, but in the shadows of the trees, as the summer came on, and on the lonelier stretches of the lawn I saw them and I knew that in good truth my home was haunted.
Late one afternoon, while walking in my grounds, I saw before me one of the specters of my tower. It moved slowly over the lawn, scarcely seeming to touch the tips of the grass, and with no more sound than a cloud would make when settling on a hilltop. Suddenly it turned its bright watchful eyes upon me, and then with a start that seemed to send a thrill even through the gray mantle which lightly touched its shoulders it rose before my very eyes until it was nearly as high as the top of my tower.
Wings it had not nor did it float in the air; it ran like a streak of gray electricity along the lightning rod, only instead of flashing down in, as electricity would pass from the sky, it ran upward. I did not see this swiftly moving spirit reach the topmost point of the rod, for at a point where the thick wire approached the eaves it vanished.
By this time I had come to the conclusion, not altogether pleasant to my mind, that my ghosts were taking advantage of my forbearance, with their mystic knocks and signals in the night and their visits in the daylight and that there must be too many of them in my tower. I must admit that they annoyed me very little and I was not in the least afraid of them, but there were others who came into my tower and slept in some of its rooms and to the minds of visitors and timorous maids there was something uncanny and terrifying in these midnight knocks and scratches.
So, having concluded from what I had seen that day that it was the very uppermost part of the tower which had become the resort of these gray sprites, and from which they came to disturb our quiet and repose, I determined to interfere with their passage from the earth to my tower top. If, like an electric current, they used the lightning rod as a means of transit, I made a plan which would compel them to use it in the conventional and proper way. The rod was placed that the lightning might come down it, not that it might go up, so I set myself to put the rod in a condition that it would permit the ghosts to descend as the lightning did, but which would prevent them from going up.
Accordingly I thoroughly greased the rod for a considerable distance above the ground.
“No,” said I to myself, “you may all come down, one after the other whenever you like. You will descend very quickly when you reach the greased part of the rod, but you will not go up it again. You are getting very bold, and if you continue your mad revels in my tower you will frighten people and give my house a bad name. You may become dryads if you like and shut yourself up in the hearts of the tall and solemn oaks. There you may haunt the blue jays and the woodpeckers, but they will not tell tales of ghostly visits, which may keep my friends away and make my servants give me warning.”
After that there were no more gray flashes up my lighting rod, though
