There were six persons in the room while these things
were going on, and so far as I could see, there was no human agency at
work. I had not the slightest belief in anything appertaining to the
super-natural. I left just before one o'clock, having been in the
house thirty minutes.'
As the policeman says, there was nothing 'super-natural,' but there was an
appearance of something rather supernormal. On the afternoon of Saturday
White sent the girl Rose away, and a number of people watched in his house
till after midnight. Though the sceptical reporter thought that objects
were placed where they might easily be upset, none were upset. The ghost
was laid. 'Excited expectation' was so false to its function as to beget
no phenomena.
The newspaper reports contain no theory that will account for White's
breaking his furniture and crockery, nor for Rose's securing her own
dismissal from a house where she was kindly received by wilfully
destroying the property of her hostess. An amateur published a theory
of silken threads attached to light articles, and thick cords to heavy
articles, whereof no trace was found by witnesses who examined the
volatile objects. An elaborate machinery of pulleys fixed in the ceiling,
the presence of a trickster in a locked pantry, apparent errors in the
account of the flight of the objects, and a number of accomplices, were
all involved in this local explanation, the explainer admitting that he
could not imagine _why_ the tricks were played. Six or eight pounds' worth
of goods were destroyed, nor is it singular that poor Mrs. White wept over
her shattered penates.
The destruction began, of course, in the _absence_ of White. The girl Rose
gave to the newspaper the same account as the other witnesses, but, as
White thought _she_ was the agent, so she suspected White, though she
admitted that he was not at home when the trouble arose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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