The door from the servants’ offices opens into the wide Georgian hall, from which sweeps up a monstrous wooden staircase. Half-way up the stair is a landing which marks the limit of activity of the manifestation. In the rooms beyond that and on the landing itself the presence is terribly powerful, but it seems that beyond that limit the terror cannot go. The actual room where the presence is at its strongest is a chamber at the end of the first floor. The room walls are outside walls on three sides, the remaining partition wall is the one in which is the door to the main corridor that runs through the house. In the centre of the floor is a deep cavity. This has been a priest’s hiding hole or secret treasure closet, and from signs in the woodwork it is manifest that the trapdoor was once concealed beneath a big four-poster bed. The windows are barred with high shutters that let in no light. The rays of my electric lantern disclose the mats of cobwebs that hang from the rusted cross bars, and it is evident that no human hand has disturbed the shutters for years. A trial shows me that some of the bolts are indeed rusted home with age-old neglect. I unpacked my handbag, in which I carry the few simple necessities I need on these occasions, and wrapping myself up in my travelling rug composed myself to read by the light of my travelling candles until the hour of ten was reached. At ten o’clock I closed my book, put out my candle, and composed myself to watch for the manifestation, which I _knew_ by inner consciousness would be forthcoming. It was a dark and moonless night and not a flicker or ray of external light penetrated the dark stretches of the haunted room. No wind stirred the trees or moaned in the chimney-tops and the qualities of absolute dark and absolute quiet were all that could be desired. Slowly out of the darkness seemed to come pinpoints of bluish light--mere specks of phosphorescence scintillant in the still air. The specks thickened and multiplied till they floated like a maze of dancing midgets; then too came the dark power of oppression, that sense of the dread and the uncanny that seems to grip the very heart and the base of the skull in a numbing grip of fear. Cold grew the room, colder and colder--that sense of freezing that experienced psychics associate with the dread phenomena of malevolent apparitions. It is a coldness of the soul as well as of the body, a dull biting cold that suggests the limitless freezing eternities of interstellar space. The blue specks spun their dance and slowly became more luminous. They collected in little nebulæ of light like cigarette ends of intense blue radiance. Every particle of the air was filled with this luminosity, so that the room seemed to be filled with a dull moonlight. Slowly the nebulæ changed from their spinning movement to a slow weaving motion. Strands and floating webs of phosphorescence drifted like smoke wreaths about the room.