Ghosts in the House

by A. C. Benson

  He spent a morning in making his farewells; he tried to speak to his friends as usual, but they noticed long afterwards that he had used a special tenderness and wistfulness in all he said; he sate long in his own room, with a great love in his heart for the beautiful and holy peace of the place, and for all the happiness he had known there; and then he prayed very long and earnestly in the chapel, kneeling in his stall; and his heart was somewhat lightened.

  Then he set off; but before he mounted his horse he looked very lovingly at the old front of the College, and his servant saw that his eyes were full of tears and that his lips moved; and so Gilbert rode along to the West.

  His journey was very different from the same journey taken six years before; he spoke with none, and rode busily, like one who is anxious to see some sad errand through. He found the old Vicar still more infirm and somewhat blind; but the Vicar said that he was very happy to see him, as he himself was near the end of life, and that he could hope for but few years, – adding that it was far different for Gilbert, who, he supposed, would very soon be a Dean with a Cathedral of his own, and would forget his humble friend the old Vicar. But Gilbert put the wit aside, and talked earnestly with the Vicar about the end of life and what might be hereafter. But the old Vicar said solemnly that he knew not, and indeed cared little. But that he would go into the dark like a child holding a loving hand, and would have no need of fear.

  That night Gilbert lay in his bed awake, and very strange thoughts passed through his mind, which he strove to quiet by prayers; and so fell asleep; till at last in the dim dawn he awoke. Then after a moment’s thought he took a paper and wrote on it, saying that he was gone out and knew not when he would return; but he prayed the Vicar that when he should find the paper, he should at once fall to prayer for him, for there was a sore conflict before him to fight out, both in soul and body, and what would be the issue he knew not. ‘And if,’ the end of the writing ran, ‘I must depart hence, then pray that my passage may be easy, and that I may find the valley bright.’ And he laid the paper upon the table. Then he dressed himself, and went out alone into the valley, walking swiftly and intently – so intently that when he passed the farm he marked not that the old farmer was sitting in an arbour in the garden, who called shrilly to him; but Gilbert heard not, and the old farmer was too weak to follow; so Gilbert went down to the Hill of Trouble.

  It lay, as it had lain six years before, very still and beautiful in the breathless sunshine. The water was in the creek, a streak of sapphire blue; the birds called in the crags, and the bushes and lawns glistened fresh with dew.

  But Gilbert, very pale and with his heart beating fast, came to the wall and surmounted it, and went swiftly up the Hill, till he found himself near the stones; then he looked once round upon the hills and the sea, and then with a word of prayer he stepped within the circle.

  This time he had not long to wait. As he entered the circle he saw the old man enter from the opposite side and come to meet him, with a strange light of triumph in his eyes. Then Gilbert looked him in the face with a rising horror, and said, ‘Sir, I have come again; and I doubt the truth of your vision no longer; I have done my work, and I have twice seen the fulfilment – now therefore tell me of my end – that I may be certified how long I have to live. For the shadow of the doubt I cannot bear.’

  And the old man looked at him with something of compassion and said, ‘You are young, and you fear the passage hence, knowing not what may be on the other side of the door; but you need not fear. Even I, who have small ground of hope, am ashamed that I feared it so much. But what will you give me if I grant your boon?’

  Then Gilbert said, ‘I have nothing to give.’

  Then the old man said, ‘Think once more.’ Then was there a silence; and Gilbert said;

  ‘Man, I know not what or who thou art; but I think that thou art a lost soul; one thing I can give thee … I will myself intercede for thee before the Throne.’

  Then the old man looked at him for a moment, and said, ‘I have waited long … and have received no comfort till now;’ and then he said, ‘Wilt thou promise?’

  And Gilbert said, ‘In the name of God, Amen.’

  Then the old man stretched out his hand and said, ‘Art thou ready? for the time is come; and thou art called now;’ and he touched Gilbert on the breast.

  Gilbert looked into the old man’s eyes, and seemed to see there an unfathomable sadness, such as he had never seen; but at the touch a pain so fierce and agonising passed through him, that he sank upon the ground and covered his face with his hands.

  Just at this time the old priest found the paper; and he divined the truth. So he called his servant and bade him saddle his horse in haste; and then he fell to prayer.

  Then he rode down the valley; and though he feared the place, yet he rode to the Hill of Trouble; and though his sight was dim and his limbs feeble, it seemed to him that some one walked beside the horse and guided him; and as he prayed he knew that all was over, and that Gilbert had peace.

  He came soon to the place; and there he found Gilbert lying on the turf; and his sight was so dim that it seemed to him as though some one slipped away from Gilbert’s side. He put Gilbert on his horse, and held the poor helpless body thereon, but there was so gentle a smile on the face of the dead that he could not fear.

  The body of Gilbert lies in the little churchyard; his great book keeps his memory bright; and on the top of the Hill of Trouble stands a little chapel, built out of the stones of the circle; and on the wall, painted at the old priest’s charge, is a picture of the Lord Christ, with wounded hands and side, preaching to the disobedient spirits in prison; and they hear him and are glad.

  HAUNTED HOUSES

  R.H. Benson

  Human evidence, with all its shortcomings, is the sole means by which the vast majority of men are brought into relations with the vast majority of facts; personal experience counts as an almost infinitesimal factor in that gradually accumulating mass of beliefs which each individual collects around him in his journey through life; and these beliefs include not merely religious matters, but scientific, geographical, historical and social. I believe that the earth goes round the sun, that Charles I had his head cut off, that there is such a continent as Australia, simply because credible people tell me so; neither can I ever hope to verify by my senses – (and even there my senses might mislead me) – more than a tiny and quite negligible fraction of the huge universe of statements which I accept as true. Of course I do not accept every statement made to me: I weigh the credibility of my informant, and the likelihood of his information; and these two elements stand, so to speak, in certain proportions one to the other. If an imaginative child tells me he has seen a horse, I believe him; if he tells me he has seen a dragon I do not: but if five hundred children, without previous conspiracy, tell me so, I conclude that, at the very least, they have seen something exceedingly unusual.

  Now the weight of human evidence for the phenomena of what are called ‘haunted houses’ is simply overwhelming. It may freely be granted that these phenomena are, in a sense, quite abnormal: they do not, that is to say, readily adjust themselves to that practical materialistic philosophy which regards tables and chairs as more ‘real’ than (let us say) emotions. Of course emotions, according to every test except that of the grossest physical verification, are, as we all know, far more ‘real’ than anything material; they are more effective, they are of a higher order of being, they change men’s destinies, and their fruits are, it would seem, even to the materialist, practically eternal. Yet, for all that, in a confused kind of way we regard them as passing and ephemeral disturbances, since we cannot smell them, nor burn them in a fire; and we regard a chair as more solid, since we can sit in it. Yet, however hard it may be to fit the phenomena of haunted houses into this heavy philosophy by which most of us practically live, it must be remembered that the extent, the duration and the intensity of human evidences concerning them make it absolutely necessary to regar
d such phenomena – however we may explain them away – as part of the experience of the world. Stories of this kind are not peculiar to this country or that, to this stage of civilisation or the other. Plautus wrote a comedy on the subject; Shakespeare a tragedy. The Australian aboriginal, the English rustic, the New York business-man, the French noble – men, women, children, sage and fool, the hysterical and the sober, the sleeper and the wakeful, dogs and horses, the ancient Egyptian and the modern Parisian – these, and others of every class, age and temperament, go to make up the vast cloud of witnesses who maintain the same tale. If the whole affair can be dismissed as unconvincing, it must be to the evacuation of all human evidence whatever. If I may not believe in haunted houses, still less may I believe in the South Pole or the effects of radium: I have never spoken with any one who has seen the South Pole – (and I am not likely to) – neither have I ever watched radium at work, nor talked with any one who has. But I have spoken with more than a score of witnesses who have experienced the phenomena of haunted houses.

  Next, their range and variableness are extraordinary enough to put out of the question altogether the idea that one is, so to speak, imitative of the other – the idea that tales are repeated, and that imagination does the rest. Certainly there are some elements in common – revealing, it would seem, a curious range of laws that would appear to underlie them all. But even these laws are not what one would expect, if, that is, one seeks to explain them on a materialistic or subjective basis. It is not, for example, by any means universal that the sensation of fear is experienced by those who are personal witnesses of such things. In three or four of such stories as have come to me first-hand, no fear was felt at all until all was over. Again, contrary to popular belief, it is scarcely ever an imaginative or highly-strung person who experiences the most startling phenomena. A couple of middle-aged priests, a young sporting Englishman, an ex-professional boxer, two middle-aged teachers – these are they who have related to me the most convincing and the most impressive histories that I have ever heard.

  Let us have one or two examples.

  On a certain visit to America not long ago I received information of a haunted presbytery not far from New York, and the following week I went to see it. My friend and I arrived after dark, and were welcomed by the smiling Irish priest. The church and the adjoining buildings stand in a frequented street; they are of no particular external interest. Next to the church, and communicating with it, is a thin red-brick building, of two storeys high, and of only two rooms in depth; this is the original presbytery, used now in its lower story as a sacristy, and in its upper as a lumber-room. Adjoining it again, on the side away from the church, is the inhabited presbytery – a large comfortable building – inhabited to the entire exclusion of the other, since, in the other, life had become impossible. All that I am now going to relate was related to me, simply and unsensationally, by the present parish-priest as we sat in his room and afterwards wandered, under his guidance, through the four or five rooms of the deserted house. I may add that he gave me every facility for spending a night in the haunted rooms, but that, owing to a change of plans, I was unable, ultimately, to accept his invitation.

  Two very curious sets of facts were related to me. The first concerned the rather tragic events that had taken place in the old presbytery: a priest had fallen from one of the windows and had been taken up dead; a sacristan had been found dead at the foot of one of the staircases. Yet, strangely enough, none of the sights eventually seen in the house seemed to have any connection whatever with these happenings. The second set of facts was as follows (I can only remember at this distance of time a few of the incidents, and not even these in their right order):

  Two young assistant priests, arriving together, and being informed of the current reputation of the old house, laughed the whole affair to scorn, and insisted on sleeping upstairs in the disused rooms. A partition, not so high as the ceiling, separated one from the other. On the following morning they requested that their beds might be moved to the new presbytery, since for no consideration in the world would they sleep in the old house again. They had passed, they said, an appalling night of terror: there were continual movements about them and in the air; there were knockings and low voices talking. One of the two, a day or two later, brought to the house, in the daytime, his own confessor, a monk, and sent him upstairs alone. After an interval the monk returned, completely self-controlled, and related how on coming into the front room he had seen immediately Father A.B., the late rector of the mission, seated by the window and saying his office; this figure presently vanished. It is interesting to note that Father A.B. was not the priest who had fallen from the window, but had died quietly in his bed.

  On another occasion the present rector, my informant, was in the church, while two girls were arranging the altar-flowers in the lower storey of the old house. They ran in presently, saying that they could stay there no longer; the noises and the voices were too alarming. The rector immediately went upstairs, taking with him his sacristan as a witness, and, in the front room, asked that, if any disembodied soul needed any help that he could give by his prayers, a signal might instantly be given. There followed, sharp upon his words, three loud knocks from the direction of the window. On another occasion, a nun, standing one Sunday morning at one of the side windows of the new presbytery, in such a position that she could see down into the ground-floor of the old house, saw, by the broad day-light, the figure of Father C.D. standing by the half-open door that led into the church as if listening to the music of the mass that was being sung within. Again, another nun in the garden behind the old house had watched for some minutes the figure of a man she did not know, whose face she could perfectly see, looking out from an upper window. When he disappeared she came immediately in to make inquiries, and found that there had been no such man in the place. Lastly, the present rector himself described to me how in his own bedroom, adjoining the old ‘haunted’ upper storey, he had been kept awake one night by continual rushing noises above his head, as if a violent wind blew in great gusts, though nothing moved. He finally addressed the Energy and adjured it to let him sleep; and immediately all was still.

  These things, then, were told me, unemotionally, by this priest, and corroborated, so far as was possible, by his man-servant. And there we stood, in the rooms of the old house, deserted, in spite of its conveniences, simply because of these phenomena. And finally, contrary to all expectation, no phenomena of any kind were related whose connection could be traced to either of the two known tragedies that actually had taken place in the house.

  Again, two or three years ago I spent, with friends, three nights, in all, in what is perhaps the most remarkably haunted house in England. It is a great old house, panelled in many of the rooms, stone-floored, romantic, convenient and even rather magnificent. Yet a quarter of a mile away, in the same park, stands a large new house, whose building and inhabiting were rendered necessary by the impossibility of remaining any longer in the old one. The property has been for centuries in the possession of the same family; yet they have left their original home, have stripped it of portraits and furniture and migrated to the new house that is of no interest at all, simply because life in the old house had become intolerable.

  It would occupy too much space to tell even half of the phenomena that are related to the old house. The manifestations centre chiefly round the male members of the family, especially the present owner; but there is an abundance of corroborative evidence from all sides. One such piece of evidence is supplied by an ordinary, reasonable man of my acquaintance, who, coming to the place for a visit, left again the next morning in a real panic of terror brought on by the mere sound of footsteps going past his door to an unoccupied room that adjoined. Another is supplied by a maid-servant who, knowing nothing of the reputation of the house, was seized one night and half strangled by an apparition whose original she recognised in a portrait next day; for one of the characteristics of this haunting is that the sens
e of touch, as well as the senses of sight and hearing, is continually and violently affected. The central Energy, whatever it may be, manifests itself usually in an apparition with a face of extraordinary malignity; and it is this Energy, it is related, that attacks sleepers in bed, that has more than once tripped or thrown down the master of the house, and on one occasion has lifted him from a sofa, in the presence of witnesses, and dropped him to the floor … Well, however fantastically unlikely this may seem, there stands the new house – a tolerably solid piece of evidence that something at least unusual has continuously and effectively manifested itself to its inhabitants. For myself, I may say, that nothing altogether inexplicable by physical theories showed itself to me at all during the three nights of my investigation.

  Again, there is a ‘haunted’ church a few miles out of Liverpool. It is a poor little building, not in the least romantic and, at the outside, not more than a hundred years old. Here, there is the apparition of a woman in black who has been seen several times by children, and there are loud trampling footsteps that have been heard to go up the gallery stairs, so loudly as to make the preacher stop his sermon till the noisy intruder should be seated, while all that sat in the gallery and in the congregation turned to see him come out at the top. Only there was no one. Finally, it was related to me by the smiling old priest himself, in the presence and with the corroboration of his housekeeper, how one morning, after a renewal of disturbances, he went into the kitchen to order his meals, and there, referring to the trouble, said humorously, ‘Well, at any rate they haven’t begun to throw the crockery about yet!’ As he finished the sentence the two together saw how a cup, hanging by its handle on a hook in the dresser, rose off its support, fell to the sideboard beneath and thence on to the stone floor, without breaking.