A Ghost As A Bedfellow.
The good people among the hills of Morris County, N.J., have found excitement in the case of a young girl said to be “grievously vexed of the devil,” and whose condition is as unaccountable as it is deplorable. The girl is a daughter of Elijah Nichols, blacksmith of the Glendon Iron Company at Hurdstown. She predicted evil against her fifteenth birthday, which befell on the 13th October last, and since that date she has been bedridden and paralysed.
At times there appears under the counterpane of her bed a presence as of a rat, a rabbit, or a cat, swiftly moving from place to place and eluding detection. In vain is the bed stripped, or the patient removed to another place, the “presence” is only powerless to act when the mother sleeps with the child.
The physicians, no less than the clergy, and the common folk of all the countryside are baffled. Crowds come daily to see the mystery. On one recent occasion Mr Richards, Mayor of Dover, held his stiff hat above the “presence,” and the hat received a blow that crushed it.
Violent blows have been given to the hand, to a cane, and to other objects held out over the place where the “presence” was, and needless to say, attempts to grab the “presence” have failed. All the while the girl lies moaning as if in terror or pain, and her position in the bed would be plainly such as to show that the mysterious movements were not caused by her.
The girl has been known to abstain from food for the space of fifteen days, and for some weeks past she has only received a little milk daily, yet her face is fair, and when the visitation is not nigh her sleep is apparently healthful.
Her parents are plain and honest people, who view this as an affliction not to be turned to account for notoriety or money. The neighbours, unable to account for it in any other way, have solemnly decreed witchcraft against an old woman living among them, and charms are in active demand. – Montreal Gazette.
Burnley Advertiser, 30th June 1877.