Gazing at it with a fascination as hideous as the thing itself, I took in every feature--the long, loose limbs, the thin body, the huge hands and feet, the little repulsive head, the white fulsome, pig-like face, and the protruding, sapphire eyes. For some seconds--to me an eternity--we watched one another in breathless silence--the Elemental (for as such I at length recognised it) being the first to take the initiative. The unfathomable stare in its eyes gradually deepened into a horrible and very unmistakable expression of malignant joy in which all the most undesirable of human vices seemed blended: its monstrous hands rose like wings on either side of its head, the fingers twitching convulsively in greedy anticipation of clutching me; its legs slowly crouched as if about to spring--and then--just as the crucial moment arrived and the acme of my terrors was reached--the spell was broken--the leaden weights fell from off my feet--my limbs became endowed with a thousandfold their natural elasticity--and--turning round--I fled. So ended my first and only experience with a Guilsborough ghost. I have taken very good care since then to give that burial-ground a very wide berth after nightfall. But now comes the most extraordinary part of it. I had heard off-and-on that a certain house in the village (since pulled down) was supposed to be haunted; that one bedroom in particular had struck those occupying it as containing an invisible “presence” both inimical and horrible. I never, however, associated this mysterious something with the Elemental I had seen, till, in the course of a conversation with an old and highly respected inhabitant of the village a few days since (August 10, 1908), I learned that he had had a psychical adventure of a somewhat extraordinary nature in his boyhood. Upon pressing him, he told me that he had lived in the haunted house as a child, and on running upstairs to his bedroom one morning had seen a long, thin human form with a tiny head and animal’s face crouching on the bed and staring at him. Terrified out of his wits by this unexpected and startling spectacle, he had remained glued to the spot for some seconds, until a slight movement on the part of the Elemental broke the spell, and he was able to “bolt” precipitately from the apartment: this was the only time he saw it. Here then surely was the key to the nature of the haunting--an Elemental or Poltergeist, assuredly the same that had appeared to me some fifty years later at the gate of the old burial-ground. My informant, by the way, had not heard of my experience; I had told it to no one: hence this visual occult manifestation of mine in Guilsborough stands corroborated. But why this haunting? Why this form of apparition?