With regard to the supernatural happenings in connection with the event.
The house that my father had occupied before setting out for the East was
semi-detached, the first house in a row, which at that time was not
completed. It was situated in a distinctly lonely spot. On the one side of
it, and to the rear, were gardens, bounded by fields, and people rarely
visited the place after nightfall.
On the night preceding my father's death, my mother was sitting in the
dining-room, which overlooked the back garden, reading. It was a windy but
fine night, and, save for the rustling of the leaves, and an occasional
creaking of the shutters, absolutely still. Suddenly, from apparently just
under the window, there rang out a series of the most harrowing screams.
Immeasurably startled, and fearing, at first, that it was some woman being
murdered in the garden, my mother summoned the servants, and they all
listened. The sounds went on, every moment increasing in vehemence, and
there was an intensity and eeriness about them that speedily convinced the
hearers that they could be due to no earthly agency. After lasting several
minutes they finally died away in a long, protracted wail, full of such
agony and despair, that my mother and her companions were distressed
beyond words.
As soon as they could summon up the courage they went out and scoured the
gardens, but though they looked everywhere, and there was little cover for
anyone to hide, they could discover nothing that could in any way account
for the noises. A dreadful fear then seized my mother. She believed that
she had heard the Banshee which my father had often spoken about to her,
and she was little surprised, when, in a few days time, the news reached
her that my father was dead. He had died about dawn, the day after my
mother and the servants had heard the screaming. I sent an account of the
incident, together with other phenomena that happened about the same time,
signed by two of the people who experienced them, to the Society for
Psychical Research, who published it in their journal in the autumn of
1899.
I have vivid recollections of my mother telling me about it when I was a
little boy, and I remember that every time I heard the shutters in the
room where we sat rattle, and the wind moan and sigh in the chimney, I
fully expected to hear terrible shrieks ring out, and to see some white
and ghastly face pressed against the window-panes, peering in at me. After
these recitations I was terrified at the darkness, and endured, when
alone in my bedroom, agonies of mind that no grown-up person, perhaps,
could ever realise. The house and garden, so very bright and cheerful, and
in every way ordinary, in the daytime, when the sun was out, seemed to be
entirely metamorphosed directly it was dusk. Shadows assuredly stranger
than any other shadows--for as far as I could see they had no material
counterpart--used to congregate on the stairs, and darken the paths and
lawn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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