“Rapped” in Mystery.
Door-knocking antics of spook.
The old Cathedral city of Peterborough is being “worked” just now by the most irresponsible of spooks. It is the playful habit of this weird humorist to spend his (or her) leisure moments in knocking at house doors. In Manor House Street there lived an old lady, with a young servant and a lady lodger. One night there came a rapping as of someone gently tapping – tapping at the backyard door. The whole household peered into the cold and foggy night – and saw not a soul! (much less a body). Again on the following day the eerie knockings were heard many times. The first suspicion was a prosaic one, and concerned the youth of Peterborough. But they all proved alibis.
Then it became the wont of the mischievous spook to visit the front door and rap loudly with the “ordinary black and fairly substantial knocker,” as a careful observer has described it. Scrooge’s astonishment when he beheld the face of Marley where the knocker should have been was as nothing compared to the amazement caused by the antics of this knocker. There was no ghost with which to parley. Thus the people of Manor House Street could not remark to the spectral one in Scrooge’s words: – “There is more of gravy than of grave about you” – even if they had thought the explanation of it all was a defective digestive apparatus.
They do not answer door knocks now at Manor House Street. The old lady and the young servant have not had any sleep for days. The lady lodger has flown. The manner of her going was tragic. One night she sat writing. She was just absorbed in a particularly eloquent passage, when Rat! Tat! Tat! went the front door knocker. She flew; and has not returned.
Dundee Evening Telegraph, 16th November 1906.