Mrs H., on reaching Plymouth, applied to me to aid her in procuring lodgings, which she required to be on a respectable but economic scale. The only ones I knew of belonged to Symmonds, our carpenter, which were near the Theatre, and possessed many conveniences; but some person having reported that the house contained a lodger already, a perturbed and perambulating spirit, other occupants it had latterly wanted. Symmonds, therefore, offered them to Mrs Hunn for a nominal rent, if she would be the means of putting to silence this unfounded and ruinous rumour. The latter was happy to take them on such easy terms, and said with a smile, that “it was not the first time she had been concerned in the ‘Haunted House’ (Addison’s).
On the first evening of her entering these lodgings, after her children were in bed and the servant was dismissed, she resolved to sit up a few hours, to ascertain whether any sounds or noises were to be heard. What she anticipated in this attempt, I cannot say, but it would have been excusable in the wisest of either sex, if in the stillness of that time, and the loneliness of her situation (a book and a pair of candles her only companions,) the powers of the imagination received a stimulus to overthrow those of reason.
The carpenter’s shop, on the ground-floor, comprehended the width of the house, and was barred and bolted on the inside. As the workmen made their exit at night through a door which opened into the private passage leading to Mrs Hunn’s apartments, this door was usually left on the latch. About half an hour after Mrs H. sat down to her book (between eleven and twelve), she actually heard a low but quick noise in the room beneath, as if some one had taken up an oversized plane and chipped off the entire side of the carpenter’s bench.
This was the sounding note to the diabolical chorus to follow: the noise ceased, but soon recommenced, and rose up with an accompaniment of all the tools in the shop; – a loud and vigorous concert of machinery, from the violincello-movement of the saw, to the fife-squeaking rasp of the file, kept in tune by the time-beating thump of a heavy axe. It seemed as if all the deceased artificers of the district had assumed their places at the bench, and were executing a piece of carpentry for his infernal majesty.
Mrs Hunn no sooner received this auricular, than she determined to have ocular evidence of the fact. Few women in such a situation would have been troubled with their sex’s common feeling (or failing) – curiosity; and fewer would have possessed the courage, equally uncommon, to have attempted its satisfaction. Laying down her book, and taking up a candle, she opened the staircase-door and listened; the sounds were still audible, and proceeding from the same quarter. Taking off her shoes to prevent the slightest alarm, she lightly and cautiously descended the stairs, and placed her hand upon the latch of the shop-door. She assured me that at this moment she heard the sounds as distinctly as in her own apartment, and felt convinced they were produced by human agency.
In a second, the latch was lifted – the door thrust open, and her head and candle thrust in; – when, lo! all was still and stationary; not a tool was out of its place, and not a carpenter to be seen, spiritual or material. To be assured of the truth, she even entered the shop, walked round the benches, and examined the fastenings of the doors and windows; every thing appeared in order and security. She then returned to her room, doubting the reality of her recollections, when the sounds recommenced, and continued for about half an hour, till they ceased altogether; she then retired to rest.
The next morning, her impressions of the above were seemingly so monstrous, that she resolved to say nothing, till the events of another night either set aside or confirmed them. Between eleven and twelve the same noises occurred, and she repeated her experiment, which resulted in the same manner. The next day the landlord and myself were fully acquainted with the matter, and invited to partake in her conviction. I was willing to take her word, but the carpenter was not; he sat up with her the ensuing evening; heard the sounds, and when Mrs H. prevailed on him to descend the stairs with her, he was so frightened, that, instead of entering the shop, he ran out of the front-door.
Mrs H. was now given the apartments rent-free, and continued to reside in them throughout the summer; the noises occurred every night for about half an hour, till at length they grew so familiar, that she heard them with indifference. “Habit,” she said to me, “is second nature, Mr Bernard: if I didn’t hear the carpenters at work every night, I should begin to fear they were coming up-stairs!”
Those are the facts of this truly singular circumstance; they occurred in the knowledge of a hundred persons besides myself; my reader, upon this assurance, may account for them as he pleases; all I wish or care to establish, is the courageous character of Mrs Canning.
From chapter 8 of “Retrospections of the Stage, v. 2” by John Bernard (published 1830).
The original theatre in Plymouth was somewhere around New George Street.