Suddenly, however, when the performance was at its height, there was an abrupt pause—two priests, with knit brows and glittering eyes, glided up to a girl, and, placing a hand on each of her arms, led her despairingly away, the crowd showing their approval of the act by shaking their fists in the poor wretch’s face. Seized with a terrible fear lest my companion should likewise be taken, I hurried her away, and as we hastened along I heard the most fearful screams of agony. On and on we went, until we came to an open space in the town, void of people, and surrounded by dark, forbidding-looking houses. I halted, and was deliberating which direction to take, when my companion clutched me by the elbow. I turned round, and saw, a few yards behind us, three priests, who, fixing their eyes malevolently on us, darted forward. Catching my companion by the hand, I was preparing to drag her into one of the houses opposite, when my foot slipped, and the next moment I saw her struggling in the hands of her relentless captors. There was a long, despairing cry—and I awoke. I have had this same dream, detail by detail, five times, and I know the faces of all the principals in it now as well as I know my own.
Curiously enough, I have dreamed of the same place, but at a different period. I have found myself walking along the quaint streets with a girl, whom I instinctively knew was my wife, past crowds of laughing, frolicing people dressed in the costume of the French Revolutionary period. We have come to the open space with the dark, forbidding houses, when I have slipped just as two savage-looking men in red caps have dashed out on us. My companion has attempted to escape; they have pursued her, and with the wails of her death-agony in my ears I have awakened. Can it be that these dreams are reminiscences of a former existence, of scenes with which I was once familiar? Or have they been vividly portrayed to me by an Elemental? I fancy the latter to be the more likely.
Occasionally I have a peculiarly phantastic dream, in which I find myself in the depths of a dark forest, standing by a rocky pool, the sides of which are covered with all kinds of beautiful lichens. As I am gazing meditatively at the water, a slight noise from behind makes me look round, when I perceive the tall figure of a man in grey hunting costume, à la Robin Hood, with a bow in one of his hands and a quiver of arrows by his side. His face is grey, and his eyes long and dark and glittering. He points to the root of a tree, where I perceive a huge green wooden wheel, that suddenly commences to roll. In an instant the forest is alive with grey archers, who fire a volley of arrows at the wheel, and endeavour to stop it. An arm is thrown round me, I am swung off the ground, and when I alight on the earth again it is to find myself on a flight of winding stone steps, in what I suppose is a very lofty tower. The walls on either side of me are of rough-hewn stone, and on peering through a small grated window, I can see, many feet beneath me, the silvery surface of a broad river and a wide expanse of emerald grass. I ascend up, up, up, until I arrive in a large room, brilliantly illuminated with sunbeams. Hanging on a wall is a picture representing a woman gazing at a grey door, which is slowly opening. On the door something is written, which I feel is the keynote to Life and Death, and I am endeavouring to interpret it when a hand falls on my shoulder. I look round, and standing beside me is the grey huntsman. I awake with his subtle, baffling smile vividly before me. A moment more and I might have been initiated into the great mystery I have long been endeavouring to solve.
I have little faith in dreams of marriages and deaths. They so seldom portend what they were once supposed to do. In my opinion, they are the suggestions of mischievous Elementals.
In concluding this chapter, I will describe a dream I had comparatively recently. I fancied it was late at night, and that I was on the Thames Embankment. The only person in sight was a well-dressed man in a frock-coat and silk hat, who was leaning over the parapet. Feeling certain from his attitude that he was contemplating suicide, I yielded to impulse, and, walking up to him, said, “You seem to be very unhappy! Can I do anything for you?” Raising his head, he looked at me, when to my astonishment I at once recognised the grey huntsman I had seen in the dream which I have previously narrated. Complexion, hair, eyes, mouth, were the same—the expression alone differed. On this occasion he was sad. “You need not be afraid,” he said. “I cannot put an end to my existence. I wish I could.” “Why can’t you?” I enquired with interest. And I have never forgotten the emphasis of his reply. “Because,” he responded, “I am an Evil Force, a Vice Elemental.”
Some months after this, when I was travelling one night from Victoria to Gipsy Hill, I had as my sole companion a well-dressed man in a soft Panama hat, who appeared to be occupied in a novel. I did not pay the slightest attention to him till the train stopped at Wandsworth Common, when he proceeded to get out. As he glided by me on his way to the door, he stooped down and, smiling sardonically, passed out into the darkness of the night. It was the man of my dreams, the huntsman and the would-be suicide!
PART II: PHENOMENA WITNESSED BY OTHER PEOPLE
CHAPTER III.
“ELEMENTALS.”
The reticence people in general show towards having their names and houses mentioned in print has led me to substitute fictitious names in most of the cases referred to in this chapter.
In one of my former works I alluded to a phantasm with a pig’s head I saw standing outside an old burial ground in Guilsborough, Northampton. Some years after the occurrence I was discussing the occult with my father-in-law, Henry Williams, M.D. (late of Chapel Place, Cavendish Square), and was very much surprised when he told me that he, too, had witnessed the same or a similar phenomena in Guilsborough. I append the statement he made with regard to it:—
“Guilsborough,
“Northampton,
“January 23, 1909.
“I well remember many years ago, when a boy, running upstairs into the top room of a certain house in Guilsborough and seeing a tall, thin figure of a man with an animal’s head crouching on the bed. I was so frightened when I saw it that I ran out of the room as fast as I could.
“Henry W. Williams, M.D.”
My father-in-law had certainly made no mention of what he had seen to me before he heard my experience, neither had I the slightest idea that such a phantasm had been encountered in the village by any one but myself. Close to the house where he saw the phenomena I believe an ancient sacrificial stone was once found, whilst in the same neighbourhood there are the remains of a barrow and numerous other evidences of the Stone Age; hence the pig-faced phantasm may have been either a Vice Elemental attracted to Guilsborough by the human blood once spilt on the sacrificial stone, or by certain crimes committed in and around the village in modern times, or by the thoughts of some peculiarly bestial-minded person, or people, buried in the now disused cemetery; or, again, the phantasm may have been the actual earth-bound spirit of some very vicious person, whose appearance would be in accordance with the life he or she led when on earth. Which of the two it is I cannot, of course, say: that is—for the present, at least—beyond human knowledge.
I have recorded another haunting of a similar nature.
Writing to me from Devizes on May 15th, 1910, Mr. “I. Walton” says:—
“Dear Sir,
“I have just been reading your book, ‘Haunted Houses of London.’ It recalls to my mind a hideous apparition which I witnessed about ten days ago, and which made such an impression on my mind that I send you particulars of it.
“I was on a visit to my two sons, who live at No. 37, M—— Square, Chelsea. On the first night of my visit I slept in a room on the third floor facing the Square. I have no knowledge of the science you profess, and no personal faith in supernatural apparition, but the spectacle I witnessed was so extraordinary that, by the light of your thrilling narratives, it looks as though I may have been sleeping in a room that has been the scene of a tragedy.
“The room was not utterly dark, and some light penetrated from the lamps in the Square, but as I lay with my f
ace to the wall, all in front of me was dark.
“I fell asleep, and remained so for an hour or more, when I suddenly awoke with a great jerk, and found confronting me the most awful apparition you can imagine. It was a dwarfed, tubby figure with a face like a pig, perfectly naked, in a strong bright light. The whole figure resembled in appearance the scalded body of a pig of average size, but the legs and arms were those of a human being brutalised, male or female I could not say. In ten or fifteen seconds it vanished, leaving me in a profuse perspiration and trembling, from which I did not recover for some time. But I slept off the rest of the night.
“When the landlady came to call me (she slept on the third floor back) she pointed out that a picture on the connecting door had fallen down between my bed and the next room. Doubtless it was the fall of the picture that waked me up with a start. But what about the apparition? I can only assign it to some occult cause.
“I remain, dear Sir,
“Yours faithfully,
“‘I. Walton.’”
In this instance it is, of course, very difficult to tell whether the phenomena is Subjective or Objective. Presuming it to be Objective, which I am inclined to believe it was, then it was either the earth-bound spirit of some particularly vicious person who was in some way connected with the house, or else it was a Vice Elemental attracted to the house either by the foul thoughts of some occupant or by some murder formerly committed there.
Writing to me again on June 13th, 1910, Mr. “I. Walton” says:—
“Dear Sir,
“I am quite willing that you should find a place for my experience in your forthcoming book. I think I omitted one detail of the spectre: it had bright yellow hair worn in ringlets extending barely as far as the shoulders.
“Yours faithfully,
“‘I. Walton.’”
Another case in which there is little or no doubt of the apparition being a Vice Elemental was related to me by Mrs. Bruce, whose husband was recently stationed in India. Her narrative is as follows:—
“We once lived in a bungalow that had been built on the site of a house whose inhabitants had been barbarously murdered by the Sepoys during the Indian Mutiny, and we had not occupied it many days before we were disturbed by hearing a curious, crooning noise coming from various parts of the building. The moment we entered a room, whence the noise seemed to proceed, there was silence, while the instant our backs were turned it recommenced. We never saw anything, however, until one day when my husband, hearing the sounds, hurriedly entered the room in which he fancied he could locate them. He then saw the blurred outlines of something—he could only describe as semi-human—suddenly rise from one of the corners and dart past him. The disturbances were so worrying that we eventually left the house.”
In this case the amount of blood spilt on the site of the bungalow would in itself be a sufficient cause for the hauntings, and my only surprise is that it did not attract many more Elementals of this species.
Miss Frances Sinclair had an uncanny experience whilst travelling by rail between Chester and London last autumn.
On entering a tunnel, at about six in the evening, Miss Sinclair was quite positive there was no one in the compartment saving herself and her dog. Judge then her astonishment and dismay, when she suddenly saw, seated opposite her, the huddled-up figure of what she took to be a man with his throat cut! He had two protruding fishy eyes, which met hers in a glassy stare. He was dressed in mustard-coloured clothes, and had a black bag by his side. Miss Sinclair was at once seized with a violent impulse to destroy herself, and whilst her dog was burying its nose in the folds of her dress and exhibiting every indication of terror, Miss Sinclair was doing all she could to prevent herself jumping out of the carriage. Just when she thought she must succumb and was on the verge of opening the door, the tunnel ended, the phantasm vanished, and her longing for self-destruction abruptly ceased. She had never before, she assures me, experienced any such sensations.
Here, of course, it is impossible to say whether what she witnessed was Subjective or Objective, but assuming the latter, then I am inclined to think that the apparition, judging by its appearance and the desires it generated, was a Vice Elemental, and not a Phantasm of the Dead. It need not necessarily have been attached to the compartment in which she happened to see it, but may have haunted the tunnel itself, manifesting itself in various ways.
An author, whom I will designate Mr. Reed, told me a few weeks ago, that he and his brother, on going upstairs one evening, had seen the figure of a man with a cone-shaped head suddenly stalk past them, and, bounding up the stairs, vanish in the gloom. Though naturally very surprised, neither Mr. Reed nor his brother were in the least degree frightened. On the contrary, they were greatly interested, as the phantasm answered so well to their ideas of a bogey! As both brothers saw it, and neither of them were in the least degree nervous, I am inclined to think that this phantom was a Vagrarian, and that its presence in the house was due either to some prehistoric relic that lay buried near at hand, or to the loneliness and isolation of the place.
Mrs. H. Dodd had a strange experience with an Elemental. “Waking up one night many years ago,” she tells me, “I saw a tall figure standing by my bedside. It appeared to have a light inside it, and gave the same impression that a hand does when held in front of a candle. I could see the red of the flesh and dark-blue lines of the ribs—dash;the whole was luminous. What the face was like I do not know, as I never got so far, being much too frightened to look. It bent over me, and I hid my head in the bedclothes with fright. When I told my parents about it at breakfast, to my surprise no one laughed at me; why, I do not know, unless the house was haunted and they knew it. My brother said he had seen a tall figure disappear into the wall of his room in the night.”
As Mrs. Dodd adds that a near relative of hers died about that time, it is, of course, possible that the phantasm was that of the latter, although from the possibilities of grotesqueness suggested by what she saw of the ghost, as well as from the fact that the house was newly built in a neighbourhood peculiarly favourable to Elementals, I am inclined to assign it to that class of apparitions.
Some months ago I received from the Baroness Von A—— the following account of a haunting experienced by her family:—
“Dear Mr. O’Donnell” (she writes),
“I should be much obliged if you would tell me the meaning of the things witnessed by my grandmother, Lady W——, widow of General Sir B. W——. I must first tell you that she was always a most truthful, sensible and unimaginative woman, that I am quite sure she would not have invented or added to anything she told so often. The story is thus:—
“During the fifties or sixties, she and my grandfather, then Colonel W——, went to stay with some very old friends of theirs, Colonel and Mrs. V——, at their place in the country: I forget the name, but think it was near Worcester. Neither of my grand-parents had ever heard of anything supernatural in connection with the V——’s house, yet my grandmother told me she felt a sense of the most acute discomfort the minute she entered her friends’ house. This, however, passed off until, having occasion to go upstairs to her room after dinner to fetch her needlework, she felt it again on crossing the hall. Scarcely had she started to mount the stairs than she distinctly heard footsteps behind her. She stopped, so did they; so, thinking it a trick of imagination, she went on, when the footsteps went on, too. They could not possibly be the echo of hers, as she heard the sound of her own, and the others were quite different, lighter and shorter. They followed her to the door of her bedroom, the door of which she quickly shut and bolted, as she was feeling very frightened, but all the time she felt the footsteps were waiting for her outside. At last she made up her mind to go down again, but scarcely had she emerged from her room and started to go down the corridor, when the footsteps recommenced. Thoroughly frightened, she ran to the drawing-room, ne
ver stopping till she was in the midst of her friends, but hearing all the while the light steps flying after her. They stopped only when she entered the drawing-room. On Mrs. V—— remarking on her pale face, my grandmother told her what had happened. Mrs. V—— then announced that the footsteps were a common occurrence, that nearly every one in the house had heard them, and that a thorough investigation had been made without result—there was no explanation. My grandmother heard the footsteps on several other occasions.
“The other manifestations occurred during her stay in the same house. It was some days after the last occurrence, that my grandfather had occasion to go up to town with Colonel V——, leaving my grandmother alone. Quite contrary to her usual habit, when bedtime came she felt unaccountably nervous, and therefore asked a friend, Miss R——, who was also a guest at the V——’s, to stay with her for the night. They went to bed and to sleep, but not for long. They were both awakened by the clock on the landing outside striking twelve, when they both sat up in bed simultaneously, owing to their hearing the most unaccountable knocking over their heads, although, otherwise, the house was absolutely silent. They listened, and heard it again and again, and my grandmother said it sounded to them both as if nails were being driven into a coffin. The knocking continued for some time, until, unable to bear it any longer, Miss R—— jumped out of bed and said, ‘Well! I’m going to see what it is; it is evidently coming from the room on the floor above, just over us, and I must find out.’ My grandmother volunteered to go with her, and they crept up to the second storey, the knocking getting louder each step they took. On arriving at the door whence the sounds—which were very distinct now—proceeded, they found the door was locked, and as they turned the handle for the second time the knocking ceased, to be replaced by the most gruesome and hellish laughter. Too frightened to go on with their investigations, they fled downstairs, the laughter continuing as they ran. Immediately they entered their room the knocking recommenced, and went on for a considerable time, and when it stopped, being both too frightened to sleep, they lit a lamp and talked till the morning. When the housemaid brought them their tea, she remarked on their worn looks, and on being told the reason, said, ‘Oh, dear! That’s Mr. Harry’s room, and it’s always kept locked when he is away. If only nothing has happened to him!’
The Elliott O’Donnell Supernatural Megapack Page 44