A brief precis of 'cases' may show how these elements of noise, on
one side, and apparitions, on the other, are commonly blended. In a
detached villa, just outside 'the town of C.,' Mrs. W. remarks a
figure of a tall dark-haired man peeping round the corner of a
folding door. She does not mention the circumstance. Two months
later she sees the same sorrowful face in the drawing-room. This
time she tells her husband. Later in the same month, when playing
cricket with her children, she sees the face 'peeping round from the
kitchen door'. Rather later she heard a deep voice say in a
sorrowful tone, 'I can't find it'; something slaps her on the back.
Her step-daughter who had not heard of the phantasm, sees the same
pale dark-moustached face, 'peeping round the folding doors'. She
is then told Mrs W.'s story. Her little brother, later, sees the
figure simultaneously with herself. She also hears the voice say,
'I can't find it,' at the same moment as Mrs. W. hears it. A year
later, she sees the figure at the porch, _in a tall hat_! Neither
lady had enjoyed any other hallucination. Nothing is known of the
melancholy spectre, probably the ghost of a literary person,
searching, always searching, for a manuscript poem by some total
stranger who had worried him into his grave, and not left him at
peace even there. This is a very solemn and touching story, and
appeals tenderly and sadly to all persons of letters who suffer from
the unasked for manuscripts of the general public.
2. Some ladies and servants in a house in Hyde Park Place, see at
intervals a phantom housemaid: she is also seen by a Mr. Bird.
There is no story about a housemaid, and there are no noises. This
is _not_ an interesting tale.
3. A Hindoo native woman is seen to enter a locked bath-room, where
she is not found on inquiry. A woman had been murdered there some
years before. The percipient, General Sir Arthur Becher, had seen
other uncanny visions. A little boy, wakened out of sleep, said he
saw an ayah. Perhaps he did.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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