His elder brother dying, the family estate passed to the latter’s eldest son, a child of two, and Darby determining to succeed to the property, invited the widow to stay with him. She did so--she was a weakly creature--and he got rid of her by putting her to sleep in a damp bed. The children were next disposed of, the younger by being burnt (as I had witnessed) and the elder, aged two, by being smothered to death by a black cat. Darby is said to have deliberately made the cat sit upon the infant’s mouth as it lay asleep. But these rapid deaths, as might have been expected, aroused suspicions. The nurse, who had been an unwilling party to the burning of the baby, turned King’s Evidence, and a warrant for his arrest was issued. As is often the case, however, the officers of the law were a bit too late. When they arrived at the house, the quarry had flown, nor could his whereabouts be discovered for many years; not, indeed, till fifty years after the crimes, when his skeleton was found at the bottom of a disused well he had himself sunk in one of the back kitchens. Under the skeleton lay an iron box containing many valuables, rings, &c., which he had been doubtless striving to hide when death in some unaccountable form or another overtook him. What became of the cat, history does not say. The place had always borne a reputation for being haunted--it was on that account my parents had got it at so low a rental--and the ghosts seen there (undoubtedly those of Darby and his cat) corresponded in every detail with the phenomena that had so terrified me. I am aware that many deny the existence of souls in animals--let them do so--but do not let them be too dogmatical, for where Life ends all is mystery. Still there is an alternative theory to account for the appearance of animal phantoms, which is, I think, quite within the realms of possibility: the black cat I saw, if not the spirit of the one made such hideous use of by the old man, was undoubtedly an elemental--a spirit representative of a popular crime, a vice--Darby’s evil genius--that ever hovered at his heels in his lifetime and is more loth than ever to leave him now that his physical body is dead and his soul earthbound. HARLEY HOUSE, PORTISHEAD THE BLACK ANTENNÆ Technical form of apparitions: Poltergeists (or Elementals) Source of authenticity: First-hand evidence Cause of hauntings: Unknown The following account of a haunted house is taken from the diary of a gentleman--since deceased. The narrator was the owner of the house, and, being a professional man, asked me to give fictitious names, lest the publication of the story should be detrimental both to his practice and to the letting of the place: