“Harrowing as the sight was to my feelings, it was a mere nothing to what I suffered when I beheld him advance, slowly and almost imperceptibly, towards the spot where I lay, and fixing his dark, piercing gaze upon me for nearly a minute, hold me in a more painful and horrid inactivity than that in which the basilisk is said to hold its victim. “Although I knew from the expression in his eyes he wished me to speak, and much as I desired to hear from him some of the mysteries attached to the superphysical world, I could not articulate a sound (a phenomenon which I have since learned invariably happens to psychists at the crucial moment). “At length he retired towards the wainscot, and raising both his hands in the attitude of prayer, remained apparently wrapped in deep contemplation for nearly three minutes, and then suddenly disappeared--sinking into the floor at the bottom of the wainscotting. As you may well suppose, I did not close my eyes again that night, but as soon as it was light I proceeded to my landlord’s room, roused him, and demanded to settle my account, for I determined in my own mind never to re-enter the house which was visited in so superhuman a manner. “With astonishment in his countenance, he received the amount of my rent, at the same time inquiring what had caused this sudden aversion to my apartment. “I answered evasively, and as I left him I thought I observed a kind of lurking consciousness of something wrong in his countenance, which led me to surmise he was fully aware of the mysterious visits of the apparition; and so it proved in the end, for, happening to meet him one day in the park, I inveigled him into confessing that it was reported in the neighbourhood that the house, and particularly the room in which I slept, was haunted by the troubled spirit of a young cavalier of King Charles the Second’s days, said to have been murdered there. ‘And,’ he added, ‘during the time he had kept the house, no less than nine people had left the apartment on account of the disturbances. He had concealed this from me,’ he concluded, ‘fearing I might add one more to the list of lodgers scared away by the supernatural vision.’” GLOSSARY ELEMENTAL. Otherwise known as Poltergeist. There are too many species of this genus of spirit for me to attempt a classification in this work. Broadly defined, an Elemental is a phantasm that has never inhabited any kind of earthly body whether animal or vegetable. It may be sub-human, as in the case of the Clock-ghost of Mulready; sub-animal, as in the case of the Guilsborough apparition; or sub-vegetable, as in the case of the ACTINOMYCES phenomenon near Bath.