Ghosts I Have Seen, and Other Psychic ExperiencesTweedale, Violet
Religion
Ghosts I Have Seen, and Other Psychic Experiences
Tweedale, Violet
Ghosts; Parapsychology
Towards morning I had a vision. I was a woman who had committed the
crime of murder; and I went in hourly terror of discovery and arrest, as
the police were actively in search of the criminal. Up to the present I
had succeeded in evading them, and no shadow of suspicion had yet fallen
upon me, but I lived in constant haunting dread that sooner or later
some chance clue would direct their attention to me, and I should be
arrested and brought up for trial.
I had no clue in the vision as to how the murder had been committed. My
victim was a man, and a sensation, vague and cloudy, suggested that a
quick poison was the mode of destruction I used, but I never gathered
why I murdered him, or what relation, if any, he was to me.
The vision was confined to my miserable sensations of fear of detection,
and the trouble was that I seemed utterly powerless to keep away from
the scene of my crime, a large mansion in the West End of London.
Not only did I haunt the outside of the house, but I had several times
contrived to penetrate into the interior without being discovered, the
house having stood empty since the crime.
It was a dark, foggy night when I determined again to effect an
entrance, and I listened intently in the street before darting up to the
front door and fitting my key in the lock. There was not a sound, and I
found myself in the interior with the door softly closed behind me.
I carried a candle, which I was about to light, when I saw that the
large hall was not in its usual darkness. A dim light burned in a
pendant globe, and looking round I perceived abundant evidences that the
house was again occupied. Several pairs of men's gloves were neatly
folded on the hall table, and a man's silk hat was neatly covered with a
cloth. There was not the faintest sound to be heard in the house, and
the hour was between eleven and midnight.
Very softly I crept up the wide staircase. My heart was beating
tumultuously, and I was in an agony of apprehension. On the first
corridor I entered the room where I had concealed the body of the man I
had murdered. I had dragged it there and hidden it in a great dress
wardrobe. I opened the wardrobe door and found the interior had been
filled with women's clothes, they were swathed in linen sheets. Amongst
them I began to search with both hands, but, of course, found no signs
of the body, which had long since been removed. However, in some
unaccountable way the action of searching seemed to comfort me, and soon
I turned to retrace my steps and gain the street once more.
At that second I heard some one approaching, and quick as thought I
slipped into the wardrobe and pulled the door close. Some one entered
the room and then left it again. In a few more moments the house was
again silent as the grave, and I began to creep downstairs very softly.
When halfway down, at a bend which brought me in full view of the hall
and the front door in the background, I stopped short at a sound.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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