This went on over Christmas and into the new year. Then to the rumblings there were added shrieks, and the manner of these shrieks was always the same. At the front of the house there stood a tree, a short distance from the dining-room window. The branches of this tree almost swept the windows of a bed-room on the floor above, and this was the bed-room in or near which strange things were afterwards seen. It was a spare bed-room, and like the others in the main house, on the same level as, but not communicating with, the men’s rooms in the added building at the back.
The shrieks, no matter what part of the house they were heard from, always seemed to grow fainter or louder — to approach and recede, in fact, as though proceeding from a person being chased round the house. They always ceased at the tree, ending in a mingled volley of screams, moans, sobs, and broken words, of redoubled loudness. These noises occurred with great frequency, and were of such distinctness and of so human a sound, as to have caused, after it had been ascertained that they could have proceeded from no living creature, very great alarm among the female servants.
Toward the end of February, 1857, two lady visitors, Mrs. M —— and Miss C —— , arrived at Binstead and were assigned the spare bed-room. The room was provided with a large grate, and in view of the coldness of the season a good fire was made immediately upon their arrival. This fire, having thoroughly warmed the room, was allowed to burn low as the time arrived for retiring.
At about two o’clock in the morning Mrs. M —— was awakened by the consciousness of a bright light filling the room. She looked toward the grate, and there she saw the figure of a woman with a frilled cap, carrying in her arms a baby. She stooped over the grate, and seemed to be stirring the ashes.
Mrs. M —— had heard nothing of the ghostly reputation of the house, and only felt astonished at the presence of an unknown woman in her bed-room at such a time in the morning, although she could not understand whence came the bright light which illuminated the room. Turning to Miss C —— she woke her, and the two sat up to look at the figure. They had scarcely done so when it stood upright and turned toward them.
The face was the face of a young woman, and bore a sad and pleading look. There was a little check shawl crossed upon the bosom. Miss C —— , who had been told that the house was haunted, had barely time to observe these things when the conviction seized her that she saw a spectre, and with a scream she hid beneath the bed-clothes, pulling them at the same time tightly over the head of her friend. When Mrs. M —— ventured to look again the light had gone, the figure had disappeared, and the few dying embers in the grate dimly lit up the ordinary furniture of the room.
A month or two after this Mrs. Pennée began to make preparations for a journey to England to visit her relatives. In course of these preparations she found it convenient to sleep temporarily in the spare room. One evening her little daughter went to bed much out of sorts, and her crying and restlessness gave evidence of her being in some way ailing in health. Mrs. Pennée, therefore, had the little bed wheeled into the spare bed-room, beside her own, in order that she might give the little one her personal care and attention. The child seemed quite unable to sleep, and when, at about midnight, Mrs. Pennée rose to prepare for her a dose of medicine, she found her wide awake.
Mrs. Pennée could not at first find the matches. While she was feeling for them, the little girl, wide awake and observant, cried out:
“Mamma, there’s some one with a light on the-staircase. See how bright it is under the door!”
The mother turned about, and there, plainly enough, saw a most brilliant light shining through the crack at the bottom of the door. “It’s papa, dear,” she said, and opened the door.
She was face to face with the spectre. A young woman with a frilled cap; over her bosom a check shawl, and in her left arm a baby. She stood in the midst of a soft, pleasant light, a light for which there was no flame to account. Her eyes fell on those of Mrs. Pennée with a look of despairing, agonised entreaty, pitiful to see. Then she moved slowly off across the staircase toward the opposite wall, and vanished, apparently into it. It was the wall of the bed-room occupied by Harry Newbury, in the servants’ quarters.
The effect upon the nerves of Mrs. Pennée and the little girl was not one of fright. They described their feelings afterwards as being no different from those which they might have experienced after the most ordinary incident of every-day life. Had the mysterious visitor been one of their own domestics their agitation could not have been less.
Soon afterwards Mr. Pennée did really come upstairs. Told of the apparition, he made every possible examination, without result. The wall, the passage, the stairs, the door, the staircase — all were just as usual. It could have have been nothing but what the servants now boldly asserted to be the cause of all the disturbances at Binstead — the apparition of Mary Newbury.
Mrs. Pennée went to England as she had arranged. During her absence the disturbances went on as before, The nightly shrieks became almost a regular thing, and the spectre was seen more than once. But more especially it was said that Harry Newbury was visited night after night by the ghost of his erring mother, for now it was known that the steady young labourer who had lived with his grandfather at a hut a couple of miles from Charlottetown was no other than he who, as a child, had been taken home to her parents by the surviving sister of Mary Newbury.
Mrs. Pennée returned to Binstead in the following year. She heard what was said about the visits of the spectre to Harry Newbury, and questioned him closely. He in other things always open and communicative, could scarcely be induced to break silence on this point. Yes, he admitted reluctantly, he had seen the woman who walked with a baby. Had she come into his room? Yes, she had, and she stood at the foot of his bed. Was this often? Well — more reluctantly than ever — yes, perhaps it was, pretty often. What did she say? Couldn’t tell — not at all — would feel obliged at not being asked any more. But had he any notion who the woman was? Couldn’t say.
But it was noticed that Harry Newbury always carefully locked his door at night The hinted offer of a fellow labourer to sleep with him was resented almost savagely. And the man in the next room positively affirmed having heard on one particular night, voices and sobs in Harry’s room.
Some few months after this the Pennées left Binstead altogether, and Harry Newbury very soon left too, saying he should never return to the place again. He was never seen afterwards.
But the hauntings went on. In 1877, twenty years after Mrs. M —— and Miss C —— had seen the apparition, Mrs. Pennée happened to be upon a visit to the Roman Catholic Bishop of Quebec, when the parish priest brought her a letter which he had received from the then tenant of Binstead, asking him to come and bless the house, with the view of ridding it of the ghost of a woman carrying a child, which the inmates had seen several times.
As late as 1888 Mrs. Pennée revisited Binstead. She found that the room in which the spectre was always seen was empty and entirely unused. The tree from under which the screams had always been heard to reach their highest pitch had been cut down, and the wife of the tenant entreated her visitors not to speak of the subject, and took every means to prevent their inquiring of the servants. Notwithstanding which, one man was heard to say that the woman with the child had lately been seen, once at a window and once at the front door.
THE TRANSLATION OF MAURICE TULLING
VERY numerous are the cases of trance in which the subjects, after a return of bodily consciousness, have described their sensations as those of leaving the body behind and floating away into ethereal space. Mr. Holloway, who was well-known as an engraver in the first half of the century, had a brother, who described in the clearest manner an involuntary experience of his own. Lying in bed one night and unable to sleep, he fixed his attention entirely upon a very bright star which he could see through the window. Gradually his whole mind became absorbed in the contemplation, and, on a sudden, he felt his inner self released from his body, with a sensatio
n as though floating upward toward the star above him. The night was gone, and all was light around him. But suddenly there came the anxious thought that his wife would find an apparently lifeless form beside her, and, seized with that fear, he returned, and, with what seemed a great struggle, re-entered the body once more; and then again it was the night around him, and the bright star was shining in at the window. While the spirit was free he always maintained he felt himself to be now in light and now in the dark, according as his thoughts were with the star or with his wife on earth, But his fear for his wife was so distressing that he always after took the precaution to keep his bedroom window darkened at night.
That there have been Indian fakeers who could voluntarily effect some such translation of their own spirits as this, is a fairly well-known fact. Instances of their allowing their bodies, after certain preparations, to be secured in boxes and securely buried for long periods — many months at a time — are not uncommon, reanimation taking place after the release of the body and the application of certain treatment.
There would seem to be some affinity to these proceedings in a case briefly recorded by Dr. Johann Heinrich Jung (usually called Jung Stilling), the friend of Goethe and Lavater, and the author of the “Theorie der Geisterkunde” and the “Scenen aus dem Geisterreiche.”
There resided in a comfortable house not far from Philadelphia, United States, in 1740, a man of somewhat singular habits. He had an independency, and lived entirely alone, seeing little of his neighbours. He had the reputation of piety, and was a regular church-goer, while his unostentatious kindness and benevolence in the neighbourhood was a well-known fact. Even his name was for long a mystery until he received letters with an Indian postmark, when it soon was noised abroad that they were addressed to Mr. Maurice Agra Tulling; from which, and from collateral circumstances, it was immediately assumed that he was born in India, at Agra, and named after his birth-place; that he was perhaps a half-caste; very possibly a Brahmin, or Buddhist, or fire worshipper, or fifty uncanny things, more particularly because the women who periodically assisted his old housekeeper in cleaning the house reported the presence therein of a variety of fearful images and extraordinary weapons and instruments, the use of which they couldn’t guess at — unless it was witchcraft. Some of which inferences might possibly have been true, and equally possibly might not. Singular stories also got about as to his sometimes shutting himself up for days and often weeks together, without food or drink, and altogether Mr. Tulling was the object of no little curiosity, and some certain fear to the inhabitants of Philadelphia and the outlying houses.
Among these neighbours was a Mrs. Hackett. Her husband was captain of a merchantman, and, at the time, had been between eighteen months and two years gone on a voyage to the West Coast of Africa and to England, during the latter half of which time she had received no letters from him. She became exceedingly uneasy in consequence of this, and expressed to her friends serious fears of a fatal disaster. Hackett, in all his previous voyages, had always been a punctual correspondent, and, if the original plan of the voyage were being carried out, he should long before this time have arrived home.
Mrs. Hackett was a person of some energy of character, and her position, tortured as she was by anxiety, and at the same time helpless to do anything to relieve it, became almost unbearable. She was not a superstitious woman by any means, but she was reduced to such a state of despair as to willingly clutch at any suggestion, however insane, which might bring her news of her husband. So that when one or two of her ignorant neighbours, impressed by the tales they had heard and had told about the mysterious powers of Mr. Tulling, recommended her to consult him, she, after some hesitation, determined to do so.
Upon her arrival at the house, and in response to her request to the housekeeper to see him, Mr. Tulling himself appeared, evidently not a little surprised at receiving a visit from anybody, more especially from a woman neighbour. He was a spare man of a little over the middle height, well formed and erect, and his short, irregular, white beard offered a strong contrast to his sun-tanned skin.
Mrs. Hackett, with some embarrassment, told him her difficulties. She hinted that she had been told that he had travelled, and probably knew all about the places to which her husband had gone, and would perhaps be able, in consequence of this knowledge, or may be by some other means, to tell her something which might ease her mind.
Mr. Tulling heard her through, and sat in silence, steadfastly regarding her face for some little time after she had spoken. Then he said:
“I don’t know — I will do what I can. If you will excuse me for a little time perhaps I may be able to bring you some news. Will you sit down and wait?”
She did so, and her mysterious neighbour passed through a door into an inner room. This door had in its upper panels two elliptical windows, which were, however, hidden by short red curtains.
In the outer room Mrs. Hackett sat waiting. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour. Another quarter of an hour, and a clock in another part of the house struck three. Another half-hour. Mrs. Hackett began to get impatient. Had he gone away and forgotten her?
Still she waited, and four o’clock struck. She had been an hour and a half in this room without hearing a sound but that of the clock. She felt uneasy. Was he making a fool of her? What was he doing so quietly in the next room, Perhaps the man was mad, and she was in a dangerous position. Perhaps his eye was intently fixed upon her every movement from some cunning hole or cranny. She would take a peep into the inner room, cost what it might.
She rose, and stepped lightly to the door. The curtains were upon her own side. She moved one a little aside at the corner, and peeped through the panel window into the room.
The light there was dull and faint, the one small window being obscured by a drawn blind, but clearly on a sofa there lay Mr. Tulling, stretched out motionless and rigid, as if a corpse. His eyes had the glassy stare of a dead man’s, and his features were pale and fixed.
Mrs. Hackett let go the curtain and turned away considerably frightened: What should she do? Call the housekeeper? Not yet. Perhaps, after all, he might not be dead. It might be only a part of some fearful witchcraft or another. She would wait a little longer, and if she heard nothing then she would call the housekeeper.
Again she waited — five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour. Horrible Hindoo images, with distorted faces and many heads and arms, grinned at her from the recesses of the room; inscriptions in strange characters stared from screens and cabinets. It was late winter, and it began to get dusk. Half an hour.
A slight rustle in the inner room, and her heart stood still. Then the door opened, and Tulling appeared pale, and slightly languid, as though from unquiet sleep. Mrs. Hackett gasped and shrank from him. Tulling smiled slightly.
“You may comfort yourself, Mrs. Hackett, I think,” he said, in a quiet equable voice; “your husband is quite safe — is at this moment, in fact, in a coffee-house in London. He has had several adventures since he left you. There is war between Spain and the Old country, and his ship was taken by a Spanish war vessel nine months ago. But one of Admiral Vernon’s ships took the Spaniard in its turn, and after taking your husband with her for some time, just lately returned to England to refit, and has landed him there. He sent one letter from the man-of-war, but that must have miscarried. He is now on the point of taking ship for home, and will probably arrive as soon as could any letter he might write.”
Mrs. Hackett’s agitation prevented her replying to or thanking her strange informant for some time; but, some shadow of doubt crossing her face, Tulling resumed:
“You may quite rely on the truth of what I have told you. It seems strange, no doubt, but I have means of becoming acquainted with such things which I cannot explain. But I hope you will set your mind entirely at rest. Believe me, on my honour, what I have told you are the actual facts.”
Confused and amazed, Mrs. Hackett thanked him as well as she could, and made the best o
f her way home. The element of superstitious belief which is present in every human nature, backed by Tulling’s evident earnestness and sincerity, prompted her to some confidence in what she had been told, but it was a confidence which she would scarcely confess to herself; and there was a vague fear that she might have been assisting at, or connected with, some unholy rite of witchcraft — witchcraft being a thing believed in and punished by the Pennsylvanians of those days.
Whether she passed the next month or two in a much easier frame of mind than she had enjoyed before her visit to Mr. Tulling she would probably have been puzzled to say; but as the weeks succeeded one another her excitement and suspense increased.
At last her watching and waiting came to an end, for her husband came.
Where had he been? Why had he been so long? Where was his ship? Why hadn’t he written? were her questions when the first greetings and tears were over.
The ship had been taken, he said, by the Santa Croce, Spanish frigate, on its way from the Guinea coast. But the Santa Croce soon had its turn, and got in the way of an English line-of-battle ship, who towed her away to Portsmouth, after cruising about a bit, he and his liberated crew in the meantime navigating the captive Spaniard. The only letter he had been able to send had been one from the Santa Croce, after his liberation, by a merchantman under convoy, which had been spoken and boarded for other purposes.
She had never received this letter, she said; and they agreed it must have miscarried.
Hackett concluded his story. He had landed at Portsmouth, and had gone to London to place his owners’ agents in possession of the history of the voyage, and had almost immediately after embarked for home. The wife said nothing at first about Tulling and his statements, marvellously fulfilled as they had been; wishing to find, if possible, for herself, where his information came from. And this she shortly found.
Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison Page 153