A Circumstantial Ghost Story.
A most circumstantial ghost story, which may interest the Psychical Society, is disturbing the mind of New York. The editor of the New York World vouches for the good faith of his informant – a professional man of high repute. The house is a new one, and is let out in flats. The following are a few of the manifestations, as told by an eye-witness who went sceptical, but soon found that “something more than ordinary was up.”
First of all there was much knocking at the front door. It was watched, open and closed, before and behind, but the knocks still came, always in four strokes sounding like blows struck with billets of wood. Then came bell-ringings in all parts of the house. Tappings were heard on the glass of the windows, the coats of the boarders fell down from the hat-rack, each falling a yard apart. The plush cover of a round table standing in the hall gracefully floated on to the floor. A clothes-prop was hurled over the top of a portiere; the walking-sticks standing in the hall were flung up in different directions, and before the scared residents had recovered a leaf from an oak dining-table was hurled through the hall for twenty feet, striking the wall and coming to the ground with a fearful crash. Another table took a series of somersaults.
Such violent “goings-on” had such a bad effect upon some of the family that they began to think of retiring, when a fearful shriek echoed throughout the whole dwelling, piercing, and evidently coming from no human throat, followed by “soft, insinuating” whistles. In the evening “it” tried a few notes in arpeggio, and was successful in keeping time and tune with the piano. The tone of the whistle was sometimes that of a fog-horn; at other times sounding like the “blowing in the neck of a bottle.”
All this is said to be a “plain, truthful statement of facts,” substantiated by five witnesses. Bevies of policemen have searched in vain, and a curious English detective has been baffled.
Irvine Express, 17th November 1882.